A Whole New World (Part 1)

Don't you just love to travel?

When you travel, you are exploring a totally different kind of environment. One that is so foreign and fascinating compared to staid old Singapore.

But do you know what it's like to travel inside yourself?

When I finally discovered that I wasn’t straight, it was as though somebody suddenly flicked a switch in my brain. Awareness came flooding in. All the little signs in the past, all those hints to self that I denied. I was discovering the real me for the first time. Before realising our sexuality, many of us would try to suppress thoughts of same-sex attraction whenever they inevitably came out. This time, I let my mind wander and explore freely. Everything seemed to make sense now.

But then again, there were also alot of things that didn’t make sense to me… and I thought, “Okay, so I’m gay. Now what?“

It is hard to be surrounded by your own friends and feel achingly distant from them. As though you never really knew them. That was true in way, you could never understand the girls’ boy-craziness. Even though you might understand a guy’s attraction to girls (like bees to honey), it is still different. Somehow. From that attraction to girls you feel. And to make things worse… I didn’t have any gay friends in school.

And hell, it sucks to be gay by yourself.

Like I said, when you finally come out to yourself, alot of bottled and pent-up feelings are finally released within you. And when that happens, there is a need to verbalise what you are feeling. Sure you say, I could do that to the straight friends I’m out to. But no matter how hard they try to emphatise, they could never reach that level of understanding that another gay person will have… for the very fact that they aren’t one. And don’t you wish once in a while, that people understood you? All of us yearn for and need friendships that aren’t casual or fair weather in its nature. But when you’re a homosexual and are going through all that emotional turmoil that accompanies realisation and self-acceptance, all the more you need that someone special to listen to you. You needed someone who cared, and genuinely understood.

But more importantly, you needed validation and assurance that you are not alone. That somebody has already gone through what you’ve gone through. And that this emotional turmoil is just a common phase. You needed someone to identify with. But when you’re a minority… how are you going to find others like yourself?

I don’t know how the wise ladies in this forum could have survived in the ’80s and ’90s, when the Internet wasn’t as available as now. Because for me, I would be at a complete loss as to how to find others like me if I didn’t have the Internet. I couldn’t exactly go around asking, ‘Eh, you gay not? Want to be my friend?’

From the Internet, I discovered that the only safe place for me to meet other GLBT was the Pelangi Pride Center. But I was really apprenhensive about going to the PPC because 1) I will be meeting complete total strangers 2) I don’t know how to get there on my own 3) I will be forced to step out of my comfort zone of familiar school and family, and into that big unknown adult world.

But I went anyway. And this was because I had finally come to a point in my life whereby, f-ck this, I better find some gay people to talk to or else I am going to die. Seriously. That was how isolated I felt in a heterosexual environment.

The Pelangi Pride Centre (a GLBT library) was a god send.

Wait, let me repeat that again. The PPC was a god-send!!! It was a glimmer of hope on my tiny computer screen, which blossomed into an experience so real and so affirming. There were people like me. And they were all so normal. It was nothing like what they show of gay culture on TV. Of drag queens and effiminate men which spoke with a high-pitched lisp and had broken wrists. The lesbian community was more diverse than I thought. It wasn’t just all butch-y girls and their femme girlfriends. There were literally ALL KINDS OF WOMEN. And I’m glad to say that most don’t fall into a label that I could neatly pigeon-hole them into. In fact, I used to think that all lesbians were young women. (How ignorant right?), and that it was just a phase that you grew out of. When I saw more of the lesbian community (through Women’s Nite, a social gathering for queer women), that old stereotype of mine was completely blown to bits. Yes. You can possibly be a lesbian for life. It has happened to others.

I met many wonderful people at PPC. I even met a straight volunteer librarian who impressed me for the fact that she, although straight, could emphatise with the marginalisation of GLBT. But there was one thing that bothered me about the gay community in Singapore. And this is just my personal point of view…