Notes towards the queer Asian city: Singapore and Hong Kong

Introduction

The last decade has witnessed the emergence and consolidation of new and established gay cities in Asia, in particular, the sexualisation of the Singapore city-state, the commerce-led boom of queer Bangkok, the rise of middle-class gay consumer cultures in Manila and Hong Kong, and the proliferation of underground gay and lesbian scenes in Shanghai and Beijing. Rivaling their Western counterparts such as San Francisco and Amsterdam, these cities have created new queer Asian urban imaginaries that are cognitive, somatic and symbolic, formed through a mix of spatial and social practices, including architecture, business, policy, leisure, politics, culture and everyday life.

From as early as 2003, Singapore was already promoted in mainstream global print media such as Time magazine through headlines such as ‘It’s In to be Out’ (Price, 2003). More recently, in 2014, Hong Kong was billed across the Yahoo search engine as the ‘Top New Hotspot for the LGBT community’ (Anonymous, 2014). Unlike Bangkok (which decriminalised sodomy in 1956) and Tokyo (where homosexuality has been legal since 1880), Hong Kong has only recently decriminalised homosexuality in 1991. Singapore still considers homosexuality a criminal offence punishable through two years’ imprisonment. In these cities, queer cultures thrive yet LGBTs still fight homophobia and discrimination, and in the case of Singapore, for legal recognition. Clearly the emergence of these cities as queer cities cannot be attributed to the success of emancipation where, as in the West, the sexual liberation model has resulted in the recognition of sexual rights and identities as well as the proliferation of spaces for activism, consumption and cohabitation. How can we imagine such cities? What are the sexual politics of these spaces?

While queer Asian cities evince differential modernities and models of sexual emancipation, scholars have, more often than not, discussed the formation of ‘queer Asia’ as a transnational imaginary of shared images and desires. In this paper, we unpack the materiality of ‘queer Asia’ by examining the spatial politics of these cities. Providing a critical overview of two exemplary cities – Hong Kong and Singapore, we reveal the imbrication between economics, governance, activism, culture and urban change. Deploying an inter-disciplinary approach including critical creative industrial studies, queer geography and cultural studies, this paper examines the intersections across the practices of gay clusters, urban renewal and social movement. It asks: if queer Asian sexual cultures are characterised by disjunctive modernities, how do such modernities shape their spatial geographies and produce the material specificities of each city?

Framing the queer Asian city

Research on urban gay centres such as San Francisco, New York and London focus on the paradigms of ethnicity (Sinfield, 1996), ghetto (Levine, 1979), gentrification (Castells, 1983: 138–170), urban renaissance (Lauria and Knopp, 1985), new homonormativity (Bell and Binnie, 2004) and creativity (Florida, 2002). These paradigms imagine and materialise an urban homosexuality (Aldrich, 2004) where the city is a site for homosexual life par excellence, a space of same-sex cultures, and exhibits its homosexual topography through venues, gay organisations and events that geographically extend its LGBT communities. Mapping the rise of commercial gay neighbourhoods by combining the history of the gay subculture and its post-closet geography of community villages, these studies on queer urbanism not only chart a teleological model of sexual minority rights, group recognition and mainstream assimilation; they also mobilise homosexuality as the authentic signifier of a great city (Abraham, 2008).

This chronology has caused a backlash from queers who disidentify with or even become actively hostile to the ‘gay lifestyle’ that is supposed to signal urbanity but in actuality champions the consumer habits of wealthy gay men. Herring’s (2010) acerbic declaration – ‘I hate New York’ – at the beginning of his book Another Country sums up the feeling of this backlash and forms the basis of his study of ‘queer anti-urbanism’. Herring’s book represents an emergent body of work that critiques the ‘metronormative’ tendency of queer studies in the West. In these critiques, the importance of transnational perspectives is always mentioned but rarely actually taken up. For example, Herring notes the ‘danger of neglecting transnational movements as well as the urbanities of other nations-states’ (Herring, 2010: 28) but instead of placing his American case studies in transnational dialogue, he simply makes a disclaimer of the non-applicability of his study to other regions and restricts the significance of his study to understanding the complexity of sexualities within the West, a challenge he attributes to Halberstam, one of the earliest critics of queer metronormativity. Leung has argued that Halberstam (2005) (who studies small town queer lives through the case of Brandon Teena) implicitly associates non-urban (small town or rural) communities in the West with non-Western regions, thus overlooking the possibility of alternative queer urbanity in non-Western cities (Leung, 2008: 15).

As urban scholarship is beginning to acknowledge the need for genuinely transnational engagement, which must not treat non-Western cases as merely regional case studies but theoretical frameworks that can impact how we understand cities everywhere, including those in the West, the same is true for studies – or critiques – of queer urbanism. In queer Asian cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong, where homosexuality is either still illegal or its societies are still deeply engrained in traditional Confucian norms that reify heterosexual and family values, the evolutionary model of the gay district is unable to account for how queer spaces proliferate, provide solidarity for marginalised communities, and challenge the status quo of the nation-state. The following develops an emergent framework by accounting for the specificities of Asian urbanism and their influences on queer spaces in Asia.

Scholarship on Asian urbanism engages the notion of ‘Asian city’ not simply as a geographical designation but a conceptual framework to analyse the complex and inter-referential character of urbanism that is typical in contemporary Asia. Two dominant approaches have traditionally accounted for the development of Asian cities. The first tends to emphasise how global capitalism has transformed urban life while the second tends to nativise the agency of the subaltern. These hegemonic frameworks are evident, for example, in discussion on the discourse and practice of preservation that constructs the Asian city as ‘heritage’ and the Western city as ‘global’. In The Disappearing ‘Asian’ City: Protecting Asia’s Urban Heritage in a Globalizing World, Logan (2002) challenges these norms by highlighting complex cultural layerings that cannot be solely attributed to indigenous, colonial or postcolonial influences, and stresses the ambivalent relationship between economic and cultural globalisation as well as the mutually imbricated process of city development and heritage concerns. Addressing these complexities has formed the focus of recent attempts to develop a research framework for the Asian city.

In The Emergent Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities and Urbanisms, Bharne (2013) suggests that Asian cities are simultaneously modernising and preserving traditions, globalising and localising, colonial and postcolonial, developmental and postindustrial. By proposing that Asian urbanities (the experiential characteristics of urban life) are concomitant to Asian urbanisms (the physical characteristics of urban life), his conceptual framework takes into account urban materialities as well as the experiences they produce. In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiment and the Art of Being Global, Roy and Ong (2011) examine how everyday initiatives engage the practices of worlding that sometimes successfully and sometimes fail to negotiate urban transformations. By focusing on the new alliances spawned by neoliberalism that cut across class, ideological, national lines, they identify three new phenomena that typify the Asian city: inter-Asian referencing and the abandonment of Western cities as models; the notion of an ‘emulatable’ city with a modular character that can be replicated in other urban contexts; and, new solidarities that are direct results of ‘the symbiosis between neoliberal calculations and social activism’ (Roy and Ong, 2011: 21). Similarly, in The New Asian City, Watson (2011) examines the ‘Asian city’ as a specific urban imaginary that arose as a result of the transformation of former colonies into newly industrialised countries. She suggests cities such as Singapore, Taipei and Seoul are characterised by a ‘fundamental rearrangement of urban and national space in the colonial period’, and proposes that the ‘new Asian city’ is represented by ‘a [postcolonial] struggle over space rather than culture and identity’ (Watson, 2011: 8).

These studies map a distinct urban imaginary by developing a research framework that attends to the convergent and conflictual forces of tradition, colonialism, postcolonial developmentalism, global neoliberalism as well as the everyday practices of worlding that have produced the spaces and experiences of urbanism. Unlike the modernising impulse that underpins the chronology of Western queer urbanism and its attendant oppositional logic of anti-queer urbanism, key to these concepts of the Asian city is the model of disjunctive modernity. Where Western modernity is shaped by the Enlightenment logic that arose from industrial capitalism, disjunctive modernity is a process of understanding how the presencing of a modern city is materialised through a range of interlocking and contiguous forces, such as those aforementioned above. This disjunctive logic, one that also challenges the emancipatory logic of a post-Stonewall rights and liberation model, is evident in the theorisation of Bangkok as an exemplary contemporary gay Asian capital.

Peter Jackson’s work on queer Bangkok exemplifies the disjunctive model for such a non-teleological space. Similar to the kathoeys who embody the temporal logic of pre-gay and post-queer (Jackson, 2001), the gay city has also emerged not through the progressive logic of sexual recognition and evolutionary model of the gay district, but the market forces of capitalism and Thai neoliberalism (Jackson, 2003, 2011). Through its proliferation of bars and scenes, and as a destination for gay tourism, the market has fuelled the rise of Bangkok as a gay capital. The idea of a gay scene, he notes, requires not only a commercial base, but that such sites of economic activity have enabled gays and lesbians to imagine a life lived outside of the constraints of the heteronormative family life (usually in rural villages) and conservative state bureaucracy. Rather than face the gentrifying erasure of de-gaying (such as that of Sydney’s Oxford Street; Markwell, 2002), the market space has become a site for queer activism and autonomy. This non-teleological model of sexual progress and identity – what we term a disjunctive model of sexuality – provides a starting point for a research framework towards the queer Asian city.

Unlike the progressive logic of sexual rights that characterise queer urban studies, the disjunctive model of sexuality does not follow the chronology of sexual emancipation, the mainstreaming of gay districts and its nation-state appropriation of gay capital for the creative city. Rather, it follows the model of disjunctive globalisation where global flows are irregular and move unevenly across the world in multiple directions (Appadurai, 1996). Queer Asian scholars have appropriated this model to identify a new geographical imaginary across Asia and its Asian diasporas that have emerged as a result of the multidirectional flows of queer globalisation (see, e.g. Leung, 2001; McLelland, 2003). Expanding this scholarship, the disjunctive model of sexuality makes references to queer city spaces and practices that have arisen through the sedimented fusion of tradition, colonialism, postcolonial developmentalism and globalisation; for emergent queer communities in countries with no sexual rights or little sexual recognition, this model accounts for how top-down strategies of governance (e.g. creative city planning, cultural policy, commerce and market) are poached and twisted to create new spaces and practices from below. Rather than an oppositional rejection of state policies, key to this strategy is the force of neoliberalism and the unpredictable ways it opens up new arrangements and alliances for queer communities. Ong’s (2006) work on neoliberalism in Asia provides a rationale to explain how such a force is not only appropriated by the state to engineer new economies, but how new subjects – compliant, complicit and resistant – are also formed in the process. Robinson and Parnell extend this account of neoliberalism to the study of urban projects, and propose that a perspective from ‘urban neoliberalism’ can address these new modes of urbanism (Robinson and Parnell, 2011: 522–523).

In developing a research framework towards the queer Asian city, a disjunctive model of sexuality that takes into account the force of urban neoliberalism provides a useful starting point for how queer Asian spaces have emerged through its material practices that imbricate the politics of sex, sexual identities and sexual relations. It incorporates a materialist study that considers the dynamics of material production and reproduction as shaping cities (Knopp, 1995) as well as a geographical practice in which ‘the material is always understood as discursive and the discursive always material’ (Knopp, 2007: 52). To this end, the framework proposed here is not an attempt to homogenise the diversity of ‘Asia’ as a whole; rather the aim is to develop an analytical framework for making sense of the dynamics and details of specific locales. At the same time, however, the framework proposed here is also to expand queer urban theory and critique generally, as well as introduce an alternative framework for understanding queer urban experiences everywhere. The following case studies on Singapore and Hong Kong further elaborate the disjunctive model of sexuality and their attendant practices of urban neoliberalism that have shaped new forms of queer urbanism.

Singapore: Illiberal sexuality, contested topography

Singapore, unlike Bangkok, is not known as a city for romance or sex (it lacks the ambience and symbolic capital). As a city, it is not renowned as a space of sexual encounter, undoing the myth that cites connect people through sharing personal and bodily intimacy, and draw them into sexual relationships. Unlike Bangkok where homosexuality is legalised, Singapore is a city that criminalises homosexuality; yet rival to Bangkok, Singapore has emerged as one of the new gay capitals of Asia.

In Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures (Yue and Zubillaga-Pow, 2012), Yue (2012) discusses how queer cultures in Singapore have emerged through infrastructural developments brought about by the government-led creative economy. She maps how the transition to a creative economy in the last 15 years has produced cultural policies that exploit sexuality as an enabler for economic activity, and shows how these policies have created cultural institutions (e.g. film, theatre, nightlife) which have inadvertently allowed representations of homosexuality to thrive; in particular, how such media, cultural and nightlife practices have also engineered new sexual subjects who actively participate in the democraticisation of sexuality. Rather than the evolutionary model of sexual recognition and post-closet assimilationist spaces identified in Western queer urbanism, these spaces and their attendant practices have emerged without sexual rights.

Existing scholarship on queer spaces in Singapore has focused on the historical development of the gay scene, and how resistive gay practices are created in heteronormative spaces. The following brief critical overview reveals how queer public cultures have emerged through an urban neoliberalism engineered by postcolonial modernity and the global creative economy.

The gay scene began in Singapore with the post-war transsexual sex trade of Bugis Street in the 1950s and 1960s, and the emergence of gay bars (such as Le Bistro, Treetops, Pebble Bar and Niche) along Orchard Road in the 1970s and 1980s (Heng, 1998). These spaces construct different local sexual identities. The former was an international exotic icon of the Far East to which sailors, colonial administrators and military men on recreational leave would flock; oriental sex tourism help produce the figure of the ‘ah gua’, a Hokkien term to describe effeminate gay men, which then became the local pejorative term for gay men. The latter was introduced when postcolonial development brought about the rise of modern shopping complexes along the iconic Orchard Road. Western-style bars opened in these buildings including hotels, and these venues, which were not gay, attracted both local gay men and gay tourists, and became a space for homosexuals to come together. These spaces were ‘fragile’, subjected to the whims of the proprietors, most of whom were straight and deemed their dancing clubs as also straight; venue management policies, together with the continued criminalisation of homosexuality, shaped the making of a scene that ‘still held trappings of the closet’ (Heng, 1998: 82).

These social spaces transformed in the following decades with the newly acquired confidence that came with the economic success of the postcolonial nation-state. Venues, from straight bars (with gay clientele) to gay bars (for different language speaking community groups), saunas and cruising hot spots, thrived. Between the 1970s and 1990s, there were at least 15 bars, 16 discos and 10 saunas, all initially concentrated around a 1-km zone, at the shopping centres along Orchard Road, and later by the Boat Quay/Chinatown riverfront precinct (Tan, 2005a, 2003b, 2012). With the riverfront urban redevelopment into a tourist and creative precinct from the late 1990s, the spatial concentration of gay venues is now cloistered around the Chinatown area of Tanjong Pagar (known locally as Singapore’s Castro Street), and there are currently about seven bars, seven discos and eight saunas. Many of these venues flourished as a result of government rent subsidies in the prime riverfront real estate in a bid to create a nighttime economy. Working-class karaoke bars, such as the long-running Cows and Coolies, instituted and made visible a Chinese-speaking lesbian subculture.

The gay scene in Bangkok influenced the style of venues in Singapore (Au, 2011). Bangkok in the 1990s was a regular tourist destination for Singaporean gay men; it was cheap to get to with the introduction of discount airfares, had a diversity of venues and provided safe anonymity. For some, it was also the place of their first same-sex encounter. For many, it introduced and sanctioned the desire for other Asian men. Singapore bars and saunas, such as Babylon, Why Not and Spartacus would replicate the names, style and layout of these venues. Some of these even shared the same management. This influence resonates with Roy and Ong’s (2011) suggestion discussed earlier that Asian city models have abandoned Western models in favour of inter-Asia referencing. This influence also deflects Aldrich’s (2004) claim that the rise of Singapore as a gay capital has followed the export model from the West.

These mappings of the gay scene in Singapore demonstrate the reclaiming of space for a marginal group; such a practice is characterised by the rise of a gay consumer space that provided lifestyle options for local queers and gay tourists alike. Using the lexicon developed by queer geographers and subcultural scholars, such a scene is transient, evident in the quick turnaround of some of these venues, and fulfills only the pre-conditions of a spatial concentration required of a gay district. Unlike the four stage chronological model (pre-condition, emergence, extensification and gentrification) of the West (Ruting, 2008), the Chinatown precinct, with its high rent and commercial use, is never going to experience the gay residential boom of the West; however, its spatial practices show a mix of short-lived venues as well as an extensification and diversification of gay consumer lifestyle cultures. As spatial practices produce sexuality through regulation, these spaces also evince the regulatory logics that shape the sexualisation of cities, including laws prohibiting same-sex practices, urban planning and licensing regulation. Such a regime is conditioned by the heteronomativity of social spaces.

In a country with a central ideology shaped around Confucian and family values, the law functions as a ‘cartographic technology’ for panoptic surveillance and how gays negotiate the expression of their homosexuality (Lim, 2004: 1771). From sensationalist print media reports on sodomy, negative portrayals of homosexuality in schools, the heteronormative social order is engineered through criminalising homosexuality and casting it in the private sphere. One of the more prominent ways LGBTs negotiate their overt expression of sexuality is through the resistive spatial practice of public parties. Beginning in 2001, these parties, appropriately called the Nation Party – a protest party held on Singapore’s National Day – quickly became a hotspot in the regional gay circuit party calendar. A total of 1500 people attended the first party (Nation 01) held at a resort on Sentosa Island, and by 2005, the party attracted more than 8000 resident locals and tourists alike, and earned at least S$6 m for the tourist industry.

Heteronormativity is also evident in the creative city’s gay agenda. Oswin (2012) examines how the gay city has emerged through the creative city agenda that privileges the import of foreign talent, and shows how this logic is engineered through the ‘straight time’ of reproductive futurity. She examines queer not through the reclamation of spaces by marginal groups but queer theory’s critique of reproductive time. Singapore’s success as a creative city, she argues, has come about through its reliance on two kinds of import labour: the professional class (known as foreign talent) and the migrant class (known as foreign workers). Where foreign talent (even those who are openly ‘out’) are allowed to migrate with their families and invited to take up citizenship, foreign workers are excluded from family reunion and permanent residency. Like gays and lesbians who are only good for production and not reproduction, the heteronormativity of the creative economy relies on a straight temporality that mainstreams progressive sexual rights (homonormative migration of talents and their incorporation into the reproductive nation-state) by excluding the sexual rights of the lower-classed other. Her analysis reveals how the tolerance of gays and lesbians in the creative economy is only granted as long as they are economically beneficial. Key to Oswin’s approach is the framework of critical geography. Combining postcolonial, feminist and queer studies, this framework departs from queer geographers who tend to only examine LGBTs as sociological groups, and queer spaces as concrete and material spaces, and focus on the reterritorialisation of space and the assimilation of minority groups into cultural mainstream. Like Lim (2004), she focuses on the workings of heteronormativity rather than heterosexuality, moves beyond the interrogation of the homo/hetero binary and the identity politics of sexuality, to challenge the ideal of inclusion, and considers space as unfixed, contested and regulatory (see also Oswin, 2008).

While these two fields use varied methods and conceptual approaches, together they map what can be considered the disjunctive model of sexuality that has led to the rise of the gay city Singapore. Common to all scholarship are two features: first, homosexuality’s illegal status in a city without sexual citizenship and rights; second, a proliferation of diverse venues that have flourished as part of the queer urban entrepreneurialism developed through the neoliberal creative economy. These two features disrupt the economic and social evolution of the gay district although the rise of gay consumer cultures may have emerged to replicate its models from the West (i.e. clone circuit parties, saunas, etc.). However, the non-teleological narrative presented in these accounts demonstrates the approach of disjunctive modernity rather than Western sexual modernity. This approach uses a different starting point – rather than sexual liberation, it uses forces such as postcolonial urbanism, creative economic developmentalism and inter-Asian cultural and media flows – to account for the multiple and contradictory forces that have made present the nascent spaces. These spaces evince diverse sexual desires and practices; they are minoritarian in their resolute resistance to heteronormativity, and complicit with majoritarian forces of neoliberal homonormativity through their differential inclusion of LGBT groups and agendas. In sum, to imagine Singapore as a queer Asian city is to map the moral geography of a topologically and relationally contested space of illegality and legality, discipline and punishment, resistance and complicity. The following concludes this section by demonstrating how this topography is now amplified to function as what Roy and Ong (2011) have termed the emulatable city that is indeed replicated in other non-Western and Western contexts.

Hong Lim Park is a 0.94 ha heritage-listed public park in downtown Singapore. It is situated around the precincts of Boat Quay, the Singapore River and Chinatown. Abutting it are high-end hotels with views to the park and the city. The area began as a gathering place for coolies who migrated from China in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was rumoured that homosexual sex between Chinese coolies would take place in this vicinity (Tan, 2005b). In the 1970s, Hong Lim Park, with its public toilets and public benches, was known in the gay subculture as a beat, and by the 1980s, became well known for its extensive cruising (Heng, 1998: 83). In the Spartacus Gay Guide listing for that period, it was known as ‘Honolulu’ or ‘Hollywood’ and promoted as the first internationally known gay cruising spot in Singapore (Tan, 2005b). To curb its notoriety in the 1990s, a neighbourhood police post was built in the north corner of the park. In 2000, a Speaker’s Corner was installed. In a country that prohibits any public gathering of more than five people, the park became the only symbolic and material site of democratic expression. Since 2009, it has become the venue for the annual Pink Dot ‘freedom to love’ celebration. The event was named thus to refer to the pink identity card carried by all Singaporean citizens, with the dot connoting the size of the tiny city-state. A total of 1000 people attended the first Pink Dot. With the theme ‘We Are Family’, it attracted 26,000 people in 2014. Hailed as the largest civil society gathering in the country, it attracted sponsors such as Google, BP and Goldman Sachs. In previous years, the iconic Pink Dot photo (an aerial photo taken at dusk to capture all attendees gathering in the park, making a round shape like a dot, and flashing the pink torches provided by the organisers towards the sky) that circulated across print and social media was taken by the organisers, including well-known gay filmmaker Boo Junfeng in 2013. In 2014 however, the government-owned newspaper, The Straits Time, stepped in with its own in-house photographer to take the same iconic photo from the same high-floored hotel room used by Boo and his predecessors. With more superior technical equipment and more resources to rent the best hotel room that provided the most optimum aerial view, the state-sponsored photo became the official photo for the event. A Google search that month returned more than 1000 newspaper reports and links. The success of the Pink Dot events has prompted other cities to emulate its model. Since 2009, Pink Dot events have been organised in Hong Kong, Montreal, New York, Okinawa, Utah, Anchorage, London, Malaysia and Taiwan.

Rather than celebrate the success of Pink Dot and Hong Lim Park as a queer space, the short history above shows a contested topology that exposes the politics of urban neoliberalism. This can be discerned through the concept of queer mobility as a process of both freedom and containment. Three moments of queer mobility are present in the historical account. First, migration: When Chinese coolies first arrived in Singapore, they (like contemporary foreign workers) were not allowed to bring their wives, unlike the colonial administrators and their families who settled there. Here, the mobility of migration is also tied to the regulation of heterosexuality (and its therein desexualised Chinese masculinity). Second, gay tourism: the production of the space as a beat (and the subculture of gay cruising) through gay tourism is also only materialised through urban and home affairs policies on planning and security park management (park beautification, pots behind the benches) and building, planning and neighbourhood policies that saw the setting up of the police post. With the recognition of the beat is also the more entrenched disciplining of police. Third, sexual assimilation: Pink Dot’s celebration of mainstream homosexuality (championed through the homonormative ideals of family values and family inclusion) also surfaces as a site of exclusion for other LGBTs othered by its normalising logic. In 2014, community groups considered unpalatable by the organisers – groups organised by sex workers, transgenders and transsexuals – were denied access to the community tent and banned from setting up stalls. Leaflets for circulation also needed to be vetted by the organisers who oversaw the removal of overt political sloganeering (Chan, 2014). Occasional mainstream sexual inclusion, such as through the event, has also come about as a result of the exclusion of queer others.

If queer city Singapore has arisen through queer mobility (i.e. through gay tourism and its universal culture of bars and parties as a result of its creative economy), queer mobility, as the dual process of freedom and containment, is best illustrated by the logic that surrounds the illiberal pragmatics of sexuality, what is characterised earlier as the ambivalence between the rationality and irrationality, legality and illegality of sexuality (see also Yue, 2012). This is the urbanity of a city that can tolerate the 2014 Pink Dot’s celebration of the same-sex family at the same time that it can also, in the same month, ban three children’s books with themes of same-sex family from its public libraries.

Hong Kong: Activism, consumption, (lack of) sex and the life of objects

A total of 8900 people marched in Hong Kong’s Pride parade in 2014. With all post-Pride festivities cancelled, the event came and went with relatively less fanfare than usual. Yet, this parade’s significance may ironically be one of the greatest in the city. It coincided with what has come to be known as the ‘Umbrella Movement’: the student protest for universal suffrage that blossomed into a widespread social movement. At the time of writing, sit-ins and protest actions are continuing in key commercial areas in the city. The cancellation of Pride festivities was meant as a sign of respect for the larger social movement. The parade’s route passed through an occupied area in Causeway Bay and ended in a solidarity rally at Tamar Park, one of the main headquarters of the protests. Many in the parade held rainbow umbrellas in support of the larger protest, while student leaders joined Pride activists at the concluding rally, further cementing the intimate relation between the LGBT rights movement and the broader fight for democratic reforms. This integration also allows queer activism to become the ‘diversity conscience’ of the democratic movement: for example, the Pride slogan ‘Stand Up For Diversity’ serves to remind the democracy movement that it must attend to gender and sexual – and by extension ethnic, class, ability and other – differences if it were to maintain its broad-based support.

The alignment of Hong Kong’s queer activism with the broader social movement signals not only ideological but also aesthetic confluences. The visible and colorful style of the LGBT movement may be attributed to global influences but it owes as much (if not more) to Hong Kong’s local social movement aesthetics. From the successive large-scale protest campaigns throughout the 2000s that have been characterised as ‘happy resistance, gentle liberation’ (Lin, 2010) to the umbrella protest participants’ much-touted orderliness and civility (Grundy, 2014), Hong Kong’s protest movement has taken on a distinctive self-expression. It combines contentious occupation of public space and a vigilantly guarded protocol of non-violence with unabashed expressions of sentiment and creativity. Two of the more visually spectacular examples from recent years include: the 2010 protest against the construction of a section of the Hong Kong–Guangzhou express rail where protestors collectively performed the ‘prostrating walk’ (kneeling down in the style of Tibetan pilgrims once every 26 steps) all over the city; and the 2012 protest against the proposed implementation of ‘national education’ in schools where high school students went on hunger strike in front of the government headquarters against the backdrop of a star-studded solidarity concert. Recent LGBT campaigns fit into a similar mold. Whether it is the 18-month-long multi-media blitz of the ‘Big Love’ campaign in support of anti-discrimination laws in 2013 (BigLove Alliance, 2014) or the large-scale outdoor Pink Dot event staged in Tamar Park in July 2014 (Pink Alliance, 2014), they display what has become a ‘trademark’ style of protest: a passionate yet disciplined theatricality that maximises public visibility.

The Pink Dot Hong Kong event was modelled after its predecessor in Singapore and signals an instance of inter-Asian referencing (Roy and Ong, 2010) that is supplementing, if not replacing, global gay models such as Pride and IDAHO (International Day Against Homophobia). Also echoing the Singapore event’s championing of homonormative ‘family values’, the Hong Kong event touts its ‘non-political’ nature, co-sponsors with the mainstream organisation Boys and Girls Association of Hong Kong, and adopts the slogan ‘We Are Family’ with the explicit intention of attracting straight allies and LGBT subjects who do not usually participate in political events. Yet, notwithstanding such inter-cities modelling, there is also clear contrast between the two cities’ divergent paths of queer resistance. Compared with Singapore, Hong Kong’s legal situation for LGBT rights is far less draconian: consensual homosexuality was decriminalised in 1991; equal age of consent was established in 2005; name change for transgender residents on ID cards and passports (if not birth certificate) is allowed; and a 2013 ruling allows a trans woman to marry her boyfriend legally. The demand for sexual orientation to be included in anti-discrimination laws has not yet been successful but it has generated several high-profile public campaigns and is still ongoing. The Hong Kong government’s attitude towards queer rights seems to be one of gradual accommodation and delaying (rather than repressive) tactics. These tactics are not unlike how the government has continued to deal with other grassroots social and political demands since the city’s postcolonial transition. As evident by the rising intensity of protest movements in the city, not only have such tactics not placated activists, they have driven them into closer alliance with each other and towards ever more visible public actions of resistance. This result can be explained in parts by Ortmann’s analysis of the two cities’ dynamics of governance and opposition in general during the past two decades, which he summarises as follows:

While Hong Kong’s leaders opted most for co-option and the opposition relied mostly on non-institutionalized tactics, such as protests, sit-ins, or strikes, Singapore’s rulers have been much more willing to resort to repression when necessary and opposition has been largely resigned to remaining within the institutional framework. (Ortmann, 2010: 179)

It thus seems likely that the ‘illiberal pragmatics’ of how sexual rights are advanced in Singapore will take a different form in Hong Kong because there is more freedom and opportunity for queer activism to deploy non-institutionalised tactics as well as to deepen its ties with other social movements. Furthermore, as we will discuss in the next section, there is also less opportunity for queer subjects to make pragmatic compromises with the state because of the Hong Kong government’s comparative indifference towards capitalising on either the pink dollar for economic benefits or the gay index for cultural capital.

Conclusion

Neither Singapore nor Hong Kong follows the developmental trajectory of the ‘gay city’ paradigm. Instead, both cities exemplify the ‘disjunctive logics’ whereby legislation, economic and cultural policies, activism and social movement, and the myriad quotidian practices of queer subjects do not align neatly but rather contradict or complicate one other. The resultant queer spaces in these cities typify the convergent and conflictual character that has come to be associated with the ‘Asian city’ generally.

Common to these quotidian and spectacular, commercial and activist, and official and unofficial spaces is their precarity. In the West, neoliberalism is characterised by its precarious labour, especially work in the creative industries (Ross, 2009), which has also impacted gay neighbourhoods through gentrification and displacement. In queer Asian city spaces however, precarity is as much a consequence of rapidly changing market forces as well as the fickleness of the political climate for sexual minorities. Rather than following the logic of homonationalism, which secures the rights of certain LGBT populations in the name of Western exceptionalism and at the expense of racialised others (Puar, 2007), queer Asian cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore are governed through an illiberal sexuality where an ambivalent logic of liberalism and non-liberalism co-exist concurrently and contradictorily. While precincts are more ephemeral and less consolidated in such precarity, LGBT communities, governments and the general heteronormative public have all benefited – albeit unequally – from these spaces, such as: the injection of pink tourist dollars; the diversity of queer commerce; and, the infusion of LGBT pride consciousness into mainstream social justice movements. These practices present opportunities and difficulties that are as much about class as they are about sexual politics and justice.

The case studies and the approach proposed here have two significances for queer urban studies. First, the concept of disjunctive queer modernity provides a new starting point to account for the emergence of non-Western gay cites that do not follow the linear model of emancipation, rights, assimilation and equality. Disjunctive queer modernity is not an anti-linear model of resisting Western modernity; it is about working within the confluence of the local – which include local and global forces, past and present, and including the Westernising queer impulses of homonormative capitalism and human rights, in order to carve out a different narrative for how minority sexual subjects are made present in and through the politics of spatial embodiment, and how queer urban forms – forms that sometimes also share the aesthetics as those in the West – are also materialised through the same Western-styled circuits of the official, commercial and informal. Second, the methods identified here, including those from network theory, queer sound and cultural policy, extend existing critical tools in the field, and have the potential to widen the frames of knowledge-production about the politics of queer urbanity and everyday life. These methods, and approach, are applicable not only to gay cities in Asia but also other urban contexts in a postcolonial world.