Finding my Song

By Benjamin Chua

February 1998

[This article originally appeared in Yawning Bread and is reproduced with permission.]

The closing of one year and the opening of the next have traditionally been times set aside for reflection. These are times when one sits down to inscribe some thoughts from that particular period of one's life before those thoughts change irrevocably, change so subtly and invisibly that one is bereft of the slightest consciousness of the change. At these times, as always, there is the struggle to find an idiom that is exclusively one's own — so often, it proves easier to descend into cliché. But the child that then emerges at the end of the labouring process is not dear to one. One feels for it, doubtless, but it is the pride of the surrogate mother, rather than a maternal affection that can claim a part in the genesis. Writing, one realizes, is a responsible process, in which we claim and reclaim our words and thoughts and actions.

My story begins with Michael, a best friend from Secondary school days and a fellow Catholic. About a year into our National Service, Michael made that all-important, earth-shattering announcement: he was gay. It's not a big deal, and it shouldn't be. But for someone who had spent the three years of his life prior to that point predicating his identity on his Catholicity (the term is used with supreme irony in this context), it seemed that one's world was falling apart. The questions that seethed and boiled in my mind were perhaps not new, and are questions that most conscientious Catholics in Singapore face when they learn that a friend or family member is gay: what was my duty as a Catholic toward Michael? Should I spurn him and basically put our friendship on the line in order to 'save him from himself'? Should I counsel him to a life of celibacy — would he listen to me? How on earth was I supposed to live out Jesus' injunction to "love your neighbour as yourself"?

In a sense, the last question was even more important than I was willing to admit to myself. But this insight only emerged later. In terms of the friendship, this was a time of much turbulence — conversations would degenerate into deadly games in which we listened to each other not so much with the intention of hearing each other, but in which we tried to trap the other party via rhetoric, by pointing out logical loopholes in the other's arguments. With so much intransigence on both parts — we came to see the other's views as inimical to our own sense of self — no headway was made, and the friendship came close to floundering on the reefs of dogma and doctrine.

It is greatly to Michael's credit that he never gave up on me (although I would have given up on him at several points), and after silences that would last two or three weeks after the most recent acrimonious debate, would call again. At times, he seemed to me the devil incarnate, but that's always been an easy way out: demonise the Other, refuse to recognize the common humanity that we all share. This vilification has made possible the worst tragedies of the human race: the Crusades, Puritan witch burning, the Jewish Holocaust, apartheid rule in South Africa. The first step toward a true purification of society and self, it seems to me, lies in having the courage to live in uncertainty and doubt. Any other way arises out of a fundamental insecurity of self.

A year passed, and then another, in this fashion. Gradually, I began to work out my own position on homosexuality after much thought and prayer and a seeking out of other gay persons who were extremely patient. It was a slow weaning away from the pathological Christianity that seems to me to be so endemic in Singapore. Commenting on pathological religion, John McNeill writes that it springs forth from an overemphasis on authority. "Pathological religion has much in common with the dysfunctional family. It relies on fear of punishment to obtain obedience; it uses guilt as a subtle lever for manipulation and control. It fears freedom and cultivates blind, unquestioning obedience. Even normal doubts are punished and repressed because they are seen as threatening."

The issue which most greatly troubled me at this time was the Catholic Church's teaching that homosexuals are to be loved and accepted, but the sexual act between homosexuals to be condemned, summed up in the easy aphorism that God 'hates the sin, but loves the sinner'. It had always seemed like such a convenient shorthand. But now, when one was actually confronted with the 'sinner' in the person of one's best friend, it seemed patronizing to tell one's friend that he was absolutely wrong, and that one was absolutely right. Was that what Jesus thought when he fraternized with tax collectors and prostitutes? That they were all sinners and that he was the Son of God with a Divine Mission? It didn't make sense — one cannot maintain that illusion of self-righteousness and be genuinely holy in the best sense of the word. And it didn't help that, as with the Singaporean media, homosexuality was a taboo subject in the church — it wasn't preached about from the pulpit, it wasn't discussed in youth groups. Silence, and more silence, and all the ignorance that proceeds from twenty-one years of silence.

To roughly sketch out my mental pilgrimage of the time: what made sex between men wrong? The loss of 'seed' — Onan's crime — and the lack of fruitfulness in their coupling. But what of infertile couples? Why does the Church minister the sacrament of marriage to these couples, then? One then moved to an awareness of the historical specificity of the Church's position — that whereas sex within marriage had always been valued solely for its procreative purpose, in this past century, it has become newly valued for its ability to enhance emotional intimacy. Two strands, then. Why then, should homosexual couples be denied this capacity for physical intimacy and the emotional intimacy that it can give rise to? Why should things be different for straight and gay couples when it is so plainly apparent that the premises as to why male genital relations are so fissured and riddled with inconsistency?

I came to an intellectual awareness of homosexuality, therefore, as an amoral condition, and a gift from God, although it still didn't 'feel' that way: old habits of thought die hard, I suppose. By this time, I was in my second year in NUS, still thinking, still praying, still trying to keep the floodgates open. Around this time, I sat down to honestly reflect on my own condition. My friendship with Michael was back to normal — quite possibly greatly strengthened from having weathered a major crisis. But I had always thought about homosexuality as 'his problem', not mine. But now that I had removed some of the mental barriers that had been erected around the subject, it was only a matter of time before my mind went wandering the but-previously-surreptitiously-trodden paths.

Some extracts from a diary entry dated 26 Oct 96: "I recall the Westerns that they used to screen on TV (where have they gone?). Somehow, I was always drawn — even from that early point — to the semi-nudity of the Red Indians. In ways that I could not articulate then, I grieved in my own childhood fashion for the Red Indians as they were inevitably massacred by the Cowboys. It was sexual desire mixed in with sympathy for the underdog. In a way, it was to lead to my indirectly killing Popo (my foster grandmother). I remember that we had gone for dinner, a wedding dinner, with Papa and Mummy, at Mandarin Hotel, near Klasse Yuyi.

"I wanted some Red Indian toy, and I got what I wanted — but at such a high price. (My grandmother had indulged my whims, gone with me to Klasse Yuyi midway through the dinner and slipped on the escalator there. The hipbone she fractured subsequently turned cancerous, although in her great love, she never once blamed me for her condition)...

"Other memories — of the bodybuilding magazine I was given as a joke in Primary school, and how I snipped pictures out of it and pasted them in my pencil case, that my eye might linger upon them. Of crushes upon the Vice-Head Prefect in Secondary school...those were dark days. (Dark because I never even had a name for this amorphous, shifting desire within me).

"One myth that had (and perhaps still has) a powerful effect on me was Astrid Lindgren's The Brothers Lionheart. In it, a small, scrawny, ugly boy is sheltered and loved by his older brother — handsome, capable, well beloved by everybody. The elder brother (Jonathan) sacrifices his life to save the younger one from a fire, but he has always told him of a paradise beyond this mortal coil, and one day, the younger brother commits suicide to join his brother there. They have all sorts of adventures in that land, but at story's end, the elder brother close to a second death, the younger one carries him on his back and leaps off a mountain face in the belief that they will be brought to yet another paradise..."

And so, there was the movement inward, the movement to claim my own sexual feelings. I had always thought myself an asexual creature up until now. Unattracted by girls, I assumed that I was unattracted by guys, and this repression, I think, led to a secretly-indulged fetish for professional wrestling — and I would always feel tremendously guilty later after these indulgences. July 1997, however, saw me leaving for Sydney on an exchange programme, and I dimly sensed prior to my departure that this would be a turning point, that the issue would come to a head in the latter part of the year. My reading material on the flight there: Johann S. Lee's Peculiar Chris.

And the issue did surface. On my twenty-second birthday, I placed a webpersonal, my first, and the events that followed gained a momentum of their own. My birthday had been on a Thursday in August. On the Sunday of that week, I had my first sexual encounter, here recounted from a diary entry dated 12 August.

"It has been a revolutionary Sunday, in all senses of the word — today, I slept with a man — mmh, even now, my body tingles with the remembered memory of flesh pressed upon flesh, the delightful smoothness of skin on skin, the heaviness...

"The day started out somewhat strangely — the usual difficulty of rising at the time one had mentally predetermined the night before, then, over breakfast, a conversation with a fellow hostelite over Mother Mary's role and significance, which meandered over into a discussion of Jesus' humanity and divinity: was he extraordinary from childhood (as witnessed in the Mystery of the Finding at the Temple), or did Mary play a vital part in shaping him? Mass at St Peter Julian's, with the sermon about how humanity has always been fascinated, even obsessed with the idea of life, and a deeply felt and sung closing hymn 'Here I Am, Lord'.

"Then I took my fateful steps in the direction of the Chinese cinemas, just around the corner further up. My heart skipped a beat twice — when I first reached there to find an oldish-looking man perusing the posters for the X-rated films showing within — 'Sex and Zen', or something akin to that. I felt so silly when I approached him, a smile on my face, a "Hello, are you Huynh?" on the tip of my tongue. Thank goodness I had only gotten past the "Hello" when he fled, probably as embarrassed as I was. Then, there was a very handsome man who strode past with that air of searching for something or someone, but...no, it wasn't him either. I eventually settled down to reading Rushdie's Midnight's Children, when — there he was — Huynh.

"I have to confess I was a bit disappointed. Huynh was a shorter version of Mr. Wee, a JC History teacher. Still, I resolved to make the best of the situation — brunch at a nearby foodcourt was followed by a round of pastry-purchasing, drinks at a cafe opposite the Greater Union cinemas on George Street...bought a pair of running shoes, then we went to Huynh's Visa office, for him to clear his backlog of e-mail enquiries; I continued with my readings of Rushdie. All that done, we headed for Mortdale (a suburb in Sydney).

"Huynh's house — a delightful little house, one room of which he rents from one Steve Irving — we listened to the Babyface and Stevie Wonder duet he had bought, watched a bit of a gay porno flick (utterly unbelievable stuff), then it happened...seated on the carpeted floor in front of the heater, Huynh beckoned to me to sit beside him, then remarked on my long fingers. Our palms kissed as he measured his fingers against mine, then locked — our first contact in all that day, really — and he drew me into himself, first beside him, then in front of him, and — oh, how wonderful to be held in loving arms, to let my ear brush his warm cheek.

"And then onto his bed: hands everywhere, teasing, searching, holding, hugging, stroking, stimulating, rubbing, feeling, caressing — he was so beautiful in bed, transformed and transfigured from the dour electrical engineer in an almost Clark Kentian manner. Such glorious, luxuriant warmth, to lie entwined with someone. I received no kisses, though, because of his flu...and for a time, he dozed and snored while I rested my head on his breast, gazing up at that blue-outlined face, so soft and beautiful in the dark: so real and unreal all at the same time."

There were other friends, even a single working mother approaching her 50s, Heather, who encouraged me to become comfortable with my sexuality, and not to throw it away, as some segments of my Church would have me do. To truly treasure it as a gift from God, rather than some package off a supermarket shelf which I can return if dissatisfied with its contents. The story isn't complete, for one grows from strength to strength in this coming out — perhaps it might be more appropriately called going in. For one goes inside to find the strength and love that we need for this thing we call Life.