Rainbow belt: Singapore’s gay Chinatown as a Lefebvrian space

Introduction

Present-day Chinatown in Singapore houses boutique hotels, shops, restaurants, and offices in its variety of middle-class businesses. Tourists go there to sightsee, while locals flock there during the night markets held before every Chinese New Year. Since the mid-1990s, however, businesses that cater primarily to a gay male clientele started appearing, turning this ethnic quarter into the country’s de facto gay district. These gay businesses generally blend in with their non-gay neighbours with their nondescript façades. Despite this shadowy nature, what began in most anecdotes with a karaoke bar, a dance club, and a gay bathhouse grew into a thriving ‘rainbow belt’ of karaoke lounges, nightclubs, restaurants, bars, hair salons, bathhouses, and clothing and accessories stores. This ‘gay Chinatown’ appears so lucrative that even nominally heterosexual businesses from without focus some of their marketing efforts on gay and lesbian clients to capture this so-called ‘pink dollar’. Popular night clubs such as Avalon and Zirca designate one night per week, usually the slower Sunday ones, as ‘gay night’.

Chinatown presents a social conundrum. The state designated it for conservation in 1986 as a stronghold of Chinese cultural heritage. Why then, of all places, did the gay businesses grow there and not elsewhere? Why did they not flourish in the premier shopping district at Orchard Road, or the other two state-restored ethnic quarters at Little India and Kampong Glam? When homosexuality remains officially criminalised, ¹ why do state officials not deploy the wide array of apparatuses at their disposal to weed out these businesses?

Here, I apply Lefebvrian spatial concepts to fieldwork data to highlight the heterosexuality inherent in Singapore’s urban spaces. State officials deploy such cultural projects as Chinatown’s conservation to reinforce their political visions of proper sexual citizenship, and to socially marginalise queer Singaporeans. Not wanting to execute the actual preservation themselves, they privatised the renovation and subsequent maintenance of Chinatown. However, in what Yue (2007a) calls ‘illiberal pragmatism’, this neoliberalism interfaces poorly with social conservatism to produce ideological interstices that, I argue, queers exploit to shed their stigma and move back into mainstream society.

With the above in mind, I make three assertions in this essay. Firstly, I argue that these ideological interstices, combined with Chinatown’s locational advantages, attracted early gay and lesbian entrepreneurs to the enclave. Secondly, I maintain that while the hetero-patriarchal state knows of gay Chinatown, it lets the businesses operate to keep them as a social safety valve. Lastly, I assert that gay Chinatown presents a self-contradictory space. By attracting largely male and moneyed customers, it repulses both women and the poor. By masquerading as non-gay, it also reflects the larger social disapproval of explicit expressions of queer identities. This need to maintain a straight façade limits the social advancements that they can make, and effectively renders gay Chinatown into a homonationalising space (Kulick, 2009; Puar, 2007). Concurrently, it also empowers by offering spaces where gay men and lesbians can socialise in relative safety and across ethnic and class lines. These interactions support both Singapore’s nascent LGBT rights movement and the formation of local queer identities.

Literature review

I situate this study within two sets of literature. The first pertains to gay spaces. There is a rich and expansive body of research on such aspects of queer geography as authenticity (Andersson, 2009), domesticity (Gorman-Murray, 2011), emotions (Brown, 2008), heteronormativity (Oswin, 2010, 2012), lesbian spaces (Podmore, 2006), the social construction of sexualities (Seidman 2002, 2003), spatial planning (Doan, 2011), rurality (Gorman-Murray et al., 2012), and urban spatial politics (Collins, 2004, 2006). In many democratic countries, sexuality informs judgements on whether individuals can participate in public life in a responsible and desirable manner (Evans, 1993). Euro-American societies spatially naturalise heterosexuality by simultaneously saturating work, leisure, and consumption spaces with images and behaviours that encourage people to adopt ‘benign’ and ‘normal’ heterosexual identities and performances (Nast, 1998). Indeed, everyday spaces are more heteronormative than heterosexual, in that only certain heterosexualities are publicly acceptable (typically the racialised and middle-classed ones of conjugally united reproductive couples). These heterosexualities form the norm against which all other sexualities (hetero or otherwise) are queered (Oswin, 2010). Transgressors of the sexual and spatial order are disciplined with social and legal codes of conduct. Such policing ranges from the formal sex zones that policy-makers set up to contain the sexed, unruly bodies of prostitutes (Hubbard, 2001), to the informal (but potentially deadly) homophobic abuse that queers risk attracting if they publicly display homosexual affection, friendship, or desire. Similar behaviour by heterosexual couples often go unremarked and unpunished, so this policing highlights the aggressive hetero-patriarchy supporting civil society that poses a high barrier to entry to queers (Namaste, 1996; Valentine, 1993).

Despite the oppressive spatial experiences reported above, the heteronormativity that infuses spaces can be subverted. Pride parades, pro-gay rallies, and circuit parties (Lim, 2004; Westhaver, 2006) empower queers with a sense of communitas that they are denied in the spaces without. In particular, openly gay business clusters found in Manchester (Binnie and Skeggs, 2004), Taipei (Lo, 2010), and elsewhere testify with their economic vitality against the stereotype of the disease-stricken, always-consuming queer (Binnie, 2004). This urbanisation of neoliberalism often corresponds with the emergence of new middle-classes, and increasing demands by better educated and more vocal queers for greater socio-legal liberalisation of their sexualities. Entrepreneurs respond by opening singles’ bars, sex/circuit parties, bathhouses, and other ‘erotic oases’ (Delph, 1978) that now cater to a variety of desires, practices, and bodies. In turn, these economic/sexual agents and spaces greatly alter the once-highly heteronormative spaces of these cities.

The second set of literature concerns gay gentrification. In the 1970s, scholars noticed how gay men gentrify certain previously dilapidated districts. Initially regarding the phenomenon as a result of investors exploiting a site’s rent gap (i.e. the difference between the site’s actual value and its potential value at ‘best use’; Smith, 1987), they were severely criticised. The exceeding difficulty in measuring ‘best use’ limits the theory’s empirical applications (Bourassa, 1990). Case studies shed more light on the process. For instance, Castells (1983: 161) casts gay gentrifiers as ‘moral refugees’ who congregated in San Francisco’s Castro Valley to overcome homophobia and social alienation. Knopp (1997) maintains instead that gay men gentrified Marigny in New Orleans to accumulate wealth through the restoration and sale of properties, rather than over issues surrounding sexuality. Yet, favourable conditions do not always guarantee gentrification. Despite its high rent gap, Vancouver’s downtown eastside rebuffs developers with its abject poverty (Ley, 1996). Indeed, already-gentrified areas may even de-gentrify. The cosmopolitanisation of Manchester’s ‘gay village’ attracts straight women to consumer its difference, but may in turn repel queers who want to avoid this unwanted fetishisation (Binnie and Skeggs, 2004).

Gay prosperity also sustains the concept of the ‘pink dollar’. This myth claims that gay men and lesbians, with their higher disposable incomes from having no children, make both prime targets for niche marketing, and a significant voting bloc for effecting liberal social changes (Gluckman and Reed, 1997). Cities chasing after global capital perpetuate this idea of powerful gay money, as they must include ‘gay villages’ in their list of attractions or risk losing out (Bell and Binnie, 2004). More importantly, the commodification of the closet enables, rather than inhibits, the proliferation of such capitalist gay entertainment venues as bathhouses and bars. When gay men visit these venues, they want to remain shielded from the public’s critical gaze (Brown, 2000). Yet, not only does little evidence exists to support the socially liberalising claim of pink dollars (Gluckman and Reed, 1997), the idea itself also ‘pinkwashes’ severe economic inequalities arising from differences in gender, nationality, and race. Poverty afflicts LGB people in the US – especially lesbians (who, as women, earn less than men), Blacks, and rural-dwellers – as likely as it does their straight counterparts (Albelda et al., 2009). As wealthy queers strive towards ‘good’ citizenship through privatised consumption of gentrified areas, they can fuel ‘the new homonormativity’ (Duggan, 2002) by ousting the poor who previously used these areas for shelter and recreation (Manalansan, 2005).

The recent rise of Singapore as an economic powerhouse speaks to the ‘pink dollar’ literature. Scholars now focus on Singapore’s efforts to rebrand itself as a creative/global city (Goh, 2005; Ho, 2006). Eager to retain its economic edge by attracting more global capital and professional labour, the state tried to shed its authoritarian image by making gay-themed movies (Yue, 2007b), and hiring openly gay civil servants (Tan, 2009). That homosexuality remains illegal exposes the state’s ‘illiberal pragmatism’ (Yue, 2007a), and Janus-faced hypocrisy: queers are welcomed for their productivity, but their refusal to partake in reproductive marital life will always queer them as partial citizens (Oswin, 2012).

Even so, it remains debatable whether this queer complicity with neoliberal capitalism is always necessarily bad. Conventional queer studies treat assimilation into mainstream society as selling out (Duggan, 2002; Puar, 2007; Warner, 1993). Such a view, while valuable for its powerful deconstruction of the norm, stems from a Euro-American intellectual, political, and cultural bias (Yau, 2010). For instance, it overlooks how family-formation creates meanings in the lives of queers (Decena, 2008; Engebretsen, 2013), and, in the case of this paper, the prestige of being a successful businessperson. When sexuality entangles capitalism, the effects should therefore be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Lefebvrian space

Scholars long observe the inextricable relationship that exists between spatiality, sociality, and sexuality:

Cities and sexualities both shape and are shaped by the dynamics of human social life. They reflect the ways in which social life is organised, the ways in which it is represented, perceived and understood, and the ways in which various groups cope with and react to these conditions. (Knopp, 1995: 149)

Reflecting the above relationship, Lefebvre (1991) offers three inter-related concepts of ‘representation of place’, ‘representational space’, and ‘spatial practice’ that must be analysed together for maximum potency (Merrifield, 1993). By ‘representation of place’, Lefebvre refers to the infusion of dominant ideological, linguistic, and symbolic conceptions of space into the spatial practices and people’s lived experiences. The ability to determine and represent spatial (un)desirability hinges on the symbolic power the dominant group can wield to effect discourses of ‘proper’ space (Loveman, 2005), and the resistance dissenters pose to the group’s hegemony.

Here, Gramsci (1992) intervenes cogently with his idea of hegemony. He argues that rather than outright coercion, elites retain power longer by normalising elite concepts and achieving ‘ideological hegemony’. However, full hegemony can never be attained, as other groups will always challenge those seeking power. Such resistance ranges from overt political action, to the symbolic appropriation and subversion of the dominant group’s material culture (Hall and Jefferson, 1976). While dominant groups try to contain the subalterns by infusing the landscape with structural binaries that legitimise them as ‘normal’ and their opponents as not, the end result may well be a compromised state of co-existence.

In Singapore, the leaders of the governing People’s Action Party (PAP) form the dominant group. These elites favour hetero-patriarchal and extended families as the bedrock of society and the economy, and encourage their formation through state policies that prioritise heterosexually married couples for housing grants while designating the domestic sphere as a woman’s domain (Oswin, 2010; Teo, 2011). To the extent that gay men and lesbians do not form the state’s idealised family, they are treated as anathema. In the 1980s and 1990s, the courts legally defined penetrative penile-vaginal sex as the only ‘proper’ sex Singaporeans could have, shut down gay bars, and conducted sting operations that humiliated a gay man into killing himself (Heng, 2001; Leong, 1997). Politicians also legalised anal sex for heterosexuals in 2007, but retained the act’s criminality even for consenting gay men. Presently, homosex remains punishable with jail sentences of up to two years.

The second of Lefebvre’s spatial concepts, that is, representational space, refers to the directly lived space of everyday life (Lefebvre, 1991). Soja (1999: 272–273) interprets such spaces as ‘spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparatus.’ While the banality of everyday life renders representational space taken-for-granted and invisible, this space allows the best observations of the effects of power relationships (Duncan, 1996). For example, city governments designate sex zones with the expressed purpose of keeping the problematic bodies of sex workers in bounded, legible spaces. However incomprehensible or even disgusting representational spaces can be to the members of a society, they can still carry powerful meanings because of their symbolic and liberating potential (Hubbard, 2001).

Lastly, ‘spatial practices’ refer to how people orient themselves geographically through their perceptions of space, such as the ways they move around places and where they want to go or avoid (Lefebvre, 1991). To Soja (1999: 265), these spatially observable practices are ‘the directly experienced world of empirically measurable and mappable phenomena.’ Their performance shows how dominant discourses influence the formation of habitus, but the observable behaviour of queers need not be their absolute desires and lived experiences (Lim, 2004). Indeed, their spatial practices may reinforce heteronormativity as well as subvert it. Queers may cope against the threat of homophobic violence by avoiding certain areas at certain times, dressing ‘straight’, not kissing their partners in public (Valentine, 1993), carrying personal attack alarms, or walking in the streets only in the company of others (Comstock, 1991; Moran, 1996). Analysed together, the above three concepts expose the paradox that lies at the heart of Singapore’s gay Chinatown.

The restoration of Chinatown

Any critical analysis of Chinatown is incomplete without situating it as part of Singapore’s colonial heritage. The term ‘Chinatown’, both as a spatial identity and as an idea, was ascribed by and belonged to Europeans (Anderson, 1992). In Singapore, the inscription of Chineseness in a specific place has its roots in the country’s colonial past. After Raffles founded the colony in 1819, he marked out separate quarters for the different ethnic communities. As a representation of space, this layout reflected both a divide-and-rule policy (Abraham, 1983), and a regional belief that enclaves facilitated the development of occupational niches associated with particular ethnic groups (Reid, 1993). Chinatown expanded rapidly from the early influx of Chinese migrants. As a representational space, it already housed one third of the municipal population by the turn of the twentieth century, despite its spatial extension of about 2 km² (Yeoh and Kong, 1994). Singapore’s subsequent development into a regional centre of the sex trade (Warren, 2003) altered its residents’ spatial practices. Beyond cheap housing, Chinatown also offered gaudy temples, brothels, gambling houses, and opium dens. With this clutter of morally questionable recreational venues, the district fell into disrepute as a virulent cesspool of diseases and moral depravity. The heterosexual norm of the colony’s British middle-class managers queered Chinatown from the very start.

These negative images persisted even after Singapore’s independence in 1965. To implement its plan to transform Chinatown into a modern city informed by rationality and efficiency, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) especially targeted the hitherto ubiquitous ‘five-foot ways’ (Figure 1) for demolition. These distinctive terraced shophouses and tenement blocks were so-called, as colonial regulations dictated that their verandas extend five feet from the frontage (Buckley, 1984). By the 1970s, Singaporeans began raising concerns about conserving the district for its historical and cultural values. Eager to use Chinatown as a physical bulwark against the perceived cultural ‘Westoxification’ that accompanied Singapore’s rapid modernisation (Kong and Yeoh, 2003), the URA ironically focused again on the five-foot ways. Instead of physical and moral depravity, Chinatown now represents the early Chinese migrants’ enterprise and ability to endure physical hardships.

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Figure 1.

Restored five-foot ways along Tanjong Pagar Road in 2008.

By the 1990s, Chinatown’s restoration was already underway. Reflecting the state’s neoliberalism, the URA only planned the project. Private investors executed the actual restoration. As encouragement, the URA lifted rent control, and assisted owners to relocate their old, single tenants (Urban Redevelopment Authority, 1988–1989, 1990). While insisting that the restoration projects must retain the historical continuity and the architectural distinctiveness of the place (Urban Redevelopment Authority, 1988), it also realised that the conserved buildings must generate profits to secure their maintenance. Giving the free market largely free rein over actual building-usage, it precipitated an illiberal pragmatic turn (Yue, 2007a) by enabling legal but morally contentious businesses to operate there.

Chinatown as a gay space

In their conservation project, state elites present a highly selective and ossified version of Chineseness designed to reinforce their vision of ‘proper’ cultural behaviour. Despite the historical embeddedness of homosexuality in Chinese history (Hinsch, 1990), they demonise it as a foreign cultural import that they must suppress. How then did gay businesses manage to flourish in such a supposed stronghold of Chinese heritage? Why did their owners not go to the other conservation areas at Kampong Glam (an ethnic quarter for Malay/Muslims) and Little India (a South Asian enclave)?

To find out, I conducted participant-observation and interviews in the summer of 2005. This research indicates that even before gay Chinatown appeared, Singapore already had commercial queer venues. For instance, Bugis Street gained international notoriety from the 1950s onwards as the place where mainly Caucasian sailors and tourists sought out transwoman prostitutes. The area’s redevelopment in the mid-1980s scattered these sex workers. In the 1960s, the very first gay bar Le Bistro opened along Scotts Road. It was frequented by foreigners and the local men who desired them (Tan, 2012).

For the interviews, I talked to 12 gay business owners and customers. Reflecting the gendered nature of gay Chinatown, 10 of my respondents were male. I got to know my interviewees during previous fieldwork. These interviews reveal the beginnings of gay Chinatown in at least the 1983 opening of Niche. By allowing same-sex dancing, this disco heralded the queering of Chinatown’s representation of space, representational space, and spatial practices. In 1989, it was closed down in the moral panic that followed Singapore’s first case of HIV/AIDS-related death (Heng, 2001). In 1993, the police also raided the popular gay disco Rascals, and executed sting operations elsewhere. Part of a larger anti-gay stance that was distinct from Chinatown’s conservation, these state actions inscribed the state’s vision of ‘proper’ heteronormative Chineseness onto the district. Gay and lesbian entrepreneurs were not deterred for long. Taboo, a still-operating gay dance club, opened in 1996. The now-defunct Spartacus opened a year later. While it operated officially as a health and fitness centre, it also functioned discreetly as Singapore’s first gay bathhouse. Its main door faced the busy South Bridge Road, but the owner locked it up. Instead, in a witty but telling reference to the kind of activities that took place in the premises, he put up a sign that directed would-be customers to ‘enter through the rear’. Local LGBT rights activist Alex Au said that when he opened his bathhouse Rairua in 2000:

there were already some existing gay business in Chinatown. And even by then, it was becoming known as the gay district. … So there were already along Tanjong Pagar Road, you all knew there was Taboo, but there was also Inner Circle. There was Babylon, the karaoke pub. There had been … a place called Cloud Nine. Then there was Why Not? (a disco that targeted teenagers) on Tras Street. There were a number of massage parlours like Luap Luap on Temple Street. Who else was operating? … There was something at Lucky Chinatown. I think it’s called Lucky 17. I think it’s still there. On the Tanjong Pagar side, there was pubs and bars and discos. On the Chinatown side … there were more daring commercial sex, well, so-called ‘massage’ places.

Here, we should regard the queer colonisation of Chinatown as evidence of the business acumen of gay men and lesbians. While it is by no means a conscious Gramscian counter-hegemonic effort, it still subverts the state’s original intent to shore up local Chinese culture.

Given this alternate history, I argue that Chinatown’s queering occurred partly due to the neoliberal state. It seems that many gay businesses opened in mid-1990s, when the state-propelled conservation project ended, and conservation companies offered competitive rents to attract tenants to their newly refurbished properties. As profit-seeking organisations, these companies professed a relative political apathy that enabled entrepreneurs to exploit the interstitial spaces opening between the state’s economically neoliberal but socially conservative representation of Chinatown’s spaces. Beyond affordable rent, Chinatown is also advantageously located. Ken, the owner of a clothing store, revealed that he chose Chinatown because ‘it’s so close to the CBD. That’s where white-collared gay men work’. The Central Business District also hosts gyms that these men frequent, as does the country’s premier shopping district at Orchard Road just 15 minutes away by car. As a relative latecomer – Ken opened his store around 2004 – the economies of scale generated by the already-present bars, dance clubs, and other gay businesses also attracted him to the area.

Beyond the economic factors, Chinatown’s explicit Chineseness added to the district’s attractiveness. I asked Alex why he did not choose the other restored ethnic enclaves at Kampong Glam (for Malay/Muslims) or Little India. He replied:

Kampong Glam, actually I did look at one [property] along Arab Street. The building wasn’t suitable and I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that it was within a stone’s throw away from Sultan Mosque [a major historical landmark]. Little India, forget it. You have to face the fact that Singaporeans are terribly racist. Most Chinese would not want to step into Little India on a Sunday.

A large number of South Asians work in Singapore as unskilled workers in construction sites and other manual jobs. During the weekends when they rest and head to Little India to socialise, that district becomes very crowded. With the number of manual labourers rapidly increasing over the past two decades, class-inflected xenophobia also became more commonplace. For instance, having surveyed Little India, Chang (2000: 357) writes:

Racist overtones were rife as respondents spoke about their fears for personal safety although there has been no documented evidence of burglary. The recurrent theme of the ‘Indian threat’ extended to complaints that workers blocked public access paths and contributed to crowded car parks and buses. One respondent even complained that she ‘can’t stand the smell of too many Indians’ and the migrant workers were making themselves ‘too much at home’ in Serangoon Road.

Not everyone avoids Serangoon Road, Little India’s main thoroughfare, because of racism. Some, like me, simply dislike crowds. Others, like my local-born Indian women friends, avoid it as the migrant workers would leer at them. Whatever the reasons for avoidance, representations of Little India as a space of rowdy ethnic and class Others meant that Alex could not open Rairua there. A lack of customers during the weekends, when gay men are most likely to visit bathhouses, would have killed the business.

Does Chinatown’s overt Chineseness then get inscribed onto the gay businesses there? Without further research into how sexuality intersects with ethnicity in post-colonial Singapore, I hesitantly suggest that the businesses register a generally Chinese gayness. While many Singaporeans conflate Chineseness with Singaporeanness (Barr and Skrbiš, 2008; Chua, 2009), this feeling stems more from the predominance of ethnic Chinese in Singapore’s population, rather than an overtly racist exclusion of ethnic minorities by the business owners. Malays and Indians may avoid a certain business because it feels too ‘Chinese’, but it makes little economic sense for owners to deliberately reject them. After all, money has no smell: Malay and Indian money is just as good as Chinese money.

Chinatown also presents several ironies. Where once the developmentalist state denies the sexuality of gay Singaporeans, the post-developmentalist neoliberal state now provides the space that commodifies homosexuality and sells it back to the once-curtailed citizens. Although the state intended Chinatown as protection against Western ‘decadence’, the queer infiltration into this Lefebvrian representational space subverts the state’s discursive representation of and intended spatial practices for the district. Chinatown now ironically harbours in its very heart what can be argued as one of the most ‘immoral’ of all Western liberal values. When URA officials planned Chinatown as an ‘oasis of difference’ (Kong and Yeoh, 2003: 140) in an otherwise-homogenous concrete city, they did not foresee that this ‘difference’ would extend to unruly sexualities. This did not mean that the state was unaware of the gay businesses. Indeed, the police visited Rairua within a month of its opening. Alex recalled the subsequent comic verbal tussle:

[The police] asked whether we have a license. I asked, ‘What sort of license would you like me to have?’ They said, ‘Don’t you think you ought to need to have a license?’ I said, ‘I am sure I don’t.’ They said, ‘All health centres should have a license.’ I told them, ‘Bullshit! Tell me what is the license that all health centres should have.’ They said, ‘We don’t know.’ I said, ‘How are you a police officer if you don’t know?’ After the second-in-command was made a fool by me, the leader of the group stepped forward and said, ‘There’s such a thing as a massage license, right?’ I said, ‘Yes, there is, but that’s provided we provide massage.’ And he said, ‘Do you provide massage?’ ‘No, I don’t provide massage. Therefore I don’t need a license.’ And he said, ‘Oh, then you are right.’

The fact that Chinatown still hosts bathhouses prompts me to ask why the police does not close the gay businesses. I speculate two possible reasons. Firstly, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew promised on national television that the state would not harass gay men and lesbians so long as they kept to themselves (Birch, 2003). In a Gramscian tactic of containing and co-existing with subalterns, the state has so far kept this promise. Secondly, I assert that gay Chinatown functions as a social safety valve where queers vent their frustrations from living in a strongly heteronormative Singapore. Shutting it down would drive queer sociality underground where it would become more difficult to monitor. When the gay businesses generate tax revenue for the state while keeping to themselves, it makes even less sense to agitate gay men and lesbians by removing this valve. In this way, gay Chinatown functions like the architectural closet: just as a bedroom needs such a space to keep clothes concealed but readily accessible, so does mainstream society require the metaphorical closet to hide unruly homosexuality to give heterosexuality its façade of dignified propriety (Urbach, 1996).

Lastly, I question whether the gay businesses improve social attitudes towards sexual minorities. Undoubtedly, gay Chinatown excludes. Unlike the US where bars function as the loci of socialisation outside the home and workplace, Singaporeans do much of their socialisation at kopi tiams, the eateries located below many public housing blocks. As such, Chinatown’s gay bars bear a distinctively middle-class flavour. They typically sell their drinks at S$10 (about US$8) or more.

This class-based repulsion became most apparent when I went with a friend to the now-defunct bar Mox. Mox catered to a well-heeled cosmopolitan crowd from across the spectrum of sexuality and gender expressions. Shortly after we sat down, my friend asked, ‘Can we go? This place is so atas.’ Literally meaning ‘up’, the Malay word atas refers figuratively to the upper classes, with all the pejorative connotations as one would also find in the English language. Later, I discovered that my friend only had primary education, so he never had a job that paid more than S$2000 (US$1600) a month. In fact, until recently, he did not even own a personal computer. He had to go to a neighbour’s house to access the Internet. More comfortable with Mandarin, he could not exploit the opportunities of upward socio-economic mobility provided by the English language.

Lesbians are also repulsed. My friend E took me to three lesbian bars, because I’d never been to one before. At one bar, the owner nearly denied us entry. E had to negotiate our way in. As we sat down to order drinks, I inquired after what happened.

When I asked E why it was important to establish women-only spaces, she replied:

Singapore is so patriarchal. Not only do lesbians get unwanted attention from straight men who thought they’re straight women, gay men can also be insensitive by passing misogynistic remarks. Some lesbians hate men as a result. Women need the space to rest, but there isn’t much.

I agree with E’s observation. Lesbian commercial spaces are rare because lesbians, as women, generally earn less than gay men. The dance clubs are patronised mainly by gay men. The bathhouses go even further by banning women altogether. Others told me that lesbians preferred to entertain at home anyway, although I could not ascertain the veracity of this last claim or the reasons for this alleged domesticity. Are lesbians brought up, as women, to prefer the comforts of the home environment? Or is it simply because it is cheaper to entertain there?

Gay Chinatown also excludes in other ways. Gay businesses negate the image of the sickly consumer that plagues gay men and lesbians with their economic productivity (Binnie, 2004), but gay Chinatown limits both this amelioration and LGBT activism. Unlike their US counterparts that openly advertise their gayness, gay businesses take pains to blend in with their non-gay neighbours. During fieldwork, I walked around to check which businesses openly declared themselves. I found only one travel agency, one bathhouse, and two bars. The others had non-descriptive façades, such as Rairua in Figure 2.

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Figure 2.

The now-defunct Rairua.

As a local-born Singaporean, I have lived almost all my life just four bus stops away. Yet, I did not know its location until I specifically went to look for it. Even with the address in hand, I had to walk up and down the veranda repeatedly before I determined Rairua as the second building from the left. I missed it initially, as Alex pasted its only signage faintly on the entrance’s frosted glass door. I asked him why he disguised his bathhouse this way. He replied that his customers ‘are not ready to be seen walking into such a place. You’d notice that those that hang the big rainbow flag attract basically tourists.’ Indeed, the two bars with the flag have a local reputation as ‘potato bars’ where local gay men go to meet Euro-American visitors. As Brown (2000) observes, the commodified closet enables, rather than inhibits, the expansion of capitalist entertainment venues for gay men.

This shadowy nature reflects the closetedness of the larger gay community. In 2007, I went with activists to gay bars to canvass for support for a campaign to legalise homosexuality. While we eventually got the target number of signatures, many bar patrons refused to sign. Upon further questioning, one patron answered, ‘I’m a civil servant. I don’t want to lose my job.’ This reply reflected a belief that supporting gay rights would invoke the state’s retaliation. Although this fear proved unfounded – no gay or lesbian civil servant reported losing his/her job in the campaign’s aftermath – its existence hinders LGBT rights activism. Heng (2004: 73–74) writes:

Criticism against Singapore’s gay activists does not only come from conservative forces outside the gay community. There are gay Singaporeans who are also against political activism. … Those rejecting activism argue that being confrontational (read Western) rather than consensual (read Asian) will only bring down the wrath of the state on the gay community and lead to the reimposition of restrictions on gay social and commercial activities. For these people, it is enough that the Singaporean gay community can enjoy a vibrant gay scene where many forms of recreation, which used to be only available in the West, are allowed, e.g. gay saunas, films and plays with gay themes, etc. They hold the view that these facilities are what count rather than abstract Western notions of gay rights. They are concerned that gay activists risk jeopardizing all these precious new gains by being political.

In essence, gay Chinatown presents a homonationalising space, that is, a space where gay men and lesbians enact homosexual acts, identities, and relationships that commensurate them with, even make them exemplary of, neoliberal democratic ethics and citizenships (Kulick, 2009; Puar, 2007). This space seeks to maintain gay men and lesbians as social subalterns by silencing their demands for national recognition in exchange for the right to access privatised consumption. Defanged, these domesticated queers align with the state’s vision of Singapore as a politically stable economic powerhouse. That the gay businesses themselves hardly announce their queer presence to the non-gay public – most have non-descript façades – further reinforces gay Chinatown’s clandestine nature and its homonational tendencies. While gay men and lesbians should publicly assert themselves more to gain more social acceptance for themselves by challenging, it seems that the practical needs of running businesses prevail instead.

Despite my negative analysis above, gay Chinatown is not necessarily always bad for queers. Its businesses offer relatively safe spaces that enable queers to socialise away from the surveillance of their families and the state. These interactions support the formation of both local gay and lesbian identities, and the country’s nascent LGBT rights movement. A significant part of this formation occurs in gay bathhouses (Au, 2011). When Singapore became independent, local gay men saw each other as rivals for the affections and access to material wealth that richer white men provided. As personal incomes and self-confidence improved, spatial practices within bathhouses changed as well. To the gay men cruising therein, other gay men were no longer rivals, but temporary sex partners, long-term lovers, and perhaps even allies in the struggle for the legalisation of homosexuality. Since the social interactions that critically undergird this community-building occur not just in bathhouses, but anywhere that queers gather, I contend that the whole of gay Chinatown provides this social function.

Conclusion

This essay analyses Singapore’s gay Chinatown through the lens of Lefebvrian spatiality. A trio of related ideas, this spatiality enables scholars to critically examine any given space through its discourses (representation of space), physical construction (representational space), and spatial practices. Even before the rise of gay Chinatown in the mid-1990s, however, Chinatown was already always queered. The British who founded colonial Singapore also provided the ethnicised and middle-classed heterosexual norm that marginalised all other sexualities (Oswin, 2010). Already disreputable from the messy layout of residences, temples, and shops that cluttered its representational space, Chinatown’s representations of space worsened when the district developed into a regional centre of prostitution.

The destruction and subsequent conservation of Chinatown’s iconic tenement blocks after Singapore’s independence reflected a shift in the state’s ideology from that of high modernism to neoliberally informed social conservatism. This shift necessarily changed the spatial practices of those who frequent the district, as Chinatown changed from a site primarily of residence to one of commerce. While some people still live in present-day Chinatown, most go there to work and shop. Exploiting the illiberal pragmatic inconsistencies produced by the state’s urban planning policies, gay and lesbian entrepreneurs set up businesses in the mid-1990s that became today’s gay Chinatown.

This latest queering of Chinatown produces self-conflicting results. On the one hand, gay Chinatown excludes women and the poor, in that it remains a largely male space of middle-class consumption. The homonational tendencies of gay and lesbian Singaporeans mean that gay Chinatown will remain shadowy at least for the immediate future. On the other hand, however, it provides a much-needed space of queer socialisation. Previously, insufficient local venues of gay consumption meant that gay men and lesbians travelled overseas (notably Bangkok) to express their sexualities. Now, they can take a metro ride to Chinatown to do that. Concomitant with rising personal incomes and increasing self-confidence, this shift in spatial practices reconfigured how local gay men regarded each other: where they once competed against each other for the affection and wealth of richer White men, they are now potential lovers and allies in the struggle for national recognition.

Clearly, this article only scratches at the surface of the study of how Singaporeans spatially express their sexualities in general. Chinatown also hosts bars and clubs for straight men and women, so how do the gay businesses interact with them? A more in-depth study should include the embodiment of agents’ sexual desires and their attending subjectivities, the exposition of which goes far beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, I hope that this paper can spearhead further inquiries into Singapore’s sexual ecology, and that others can fill in the gaps in my research.