Stomper T caught two men performing a lewd act on each other in a cubicle when he visited one of the toilets in Esplanade Mall yesterday (Feb 17).
According to T, it was around 10pm and the place was deserted.
He told Stomp in a phone interview that he first saw shadows and thought someone was in the toilet cubicle. When he saw two pairs of shoes, he assumed that it was a couple.
T then took a video and only realised that it was in fact two men when he played the clip afterwards.
Said the Stomper:
“I was having a stomachache and rushed to the nearby toilet. While trying to shit, I realised something was wrong somewhere and decided to investigate what was actually happening.
“The sounds of ‘holoq holoq’ were very close and easily heard coming from the cubicle next to me. I didn’t even managed to get my shit out in the slightest bit due to these strange sounds.
“I went out and took a video of the incident. I saw two people lurking inside the cubicle and playing with themselves. I believe they were masturbating each other.
“One of them was shocked to see me and suddenly ducked down to find cover.”
Eight Latin American Countries (LAC 8) countered an African Group’s hostile resolution on the United Nations Human Rights Council Annual Report (specifically targeted at the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Independent (SOGI) Expert Mandate) and submitted an amendment in supporting and preserving the mandate.
84 countries voted in favour of the LAC 8 amendment leading to the failure of the hostile resolution and dissipation of the immediate threat against the establishment of the SOGI Independent Expert. 77 countries voted against the amendment and Singapore is one of them.
The following is a press release on the topic by Outright Action International.
—
21 November 2016 (New York) — The United Nations mandate of the Independent Expert on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) has been safeguarded despite hostile contestation at the 71st Session of the 3rd Committee of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York City.
LGBTIQ activists and organizations around the world quickly mobilized to voice their concerns on the implications of the hostile resolution to national governments as well as at the United Nations headquarters in New York. A joint statement endorsed by 850 organizations from 157 countries around the world, highlighted the need for states to respect the authority of the Human Rights Council and to vote in favour of upholding the SOGI Independent Expert mandate.
‘A lot can be accomplished when forces join hands. We are encouraged by this voting result and in the confirmation that States believe in the mechanisms of the Human Rights Council. It is vital that the integrity of the Human Rights Council remains intact and is not further undermined in the Third Committee,’ stated Jessica Stern, Executive Director, OutRight Action International, the only US based LGBTIQ organization with consultative status at the United Nations.’
The SOGI Independent Expert position on the ‘Protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation, and gender identity (SOGI),’ was mandated by the passing of a historic resolution A/HRC/RES/32/2 on June 30 of this year, and is held by Vitit Muntarbhorn, a human rights expert from Thailand. A campaign of 628 nongovernmental organizations from 151 countries advocated for the adoption of the resolution and for the establishment of the position.
In early November, Botswana, on behalf of the African Group, presented a hostile resolution on the Human Rights Council Annual Report, specifically targeting the SOGI Independent Expert Mandate. The resolution contested the legality of the creation of the mandate, essentially arguing that SOGI are not universally recognized as human rights and are not codified in international law. The resolution called for an indefinite postponement of the mandate until consensus could be reached on the definition of SOGI and the legal basis to which the mandate was created, the African Group statement read,
‘We are alarmed that the Council is delving into matters which fall essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of States counter to the commitment in the United Nations Charter to respect the sovereignty of States and the principle of non-intervention. More importantly, it arises owing to the ominous usage of the two notions: sexual orientation and gender identity. We wish to state that those two notions are not and should not be linked to existing international human rights instruments.’
In response to the African Group resolution, submitted by Botswana, Monica Tabengwa, Botswana human rights activist and director of Pan Africa ILGA commented,
‘We are deeply disappointed that Botswana led this fallacious move by the Africa Group to remove gains at the HRC to include SOGI protections within the existing human rights framework. Let us remind everyone that the SOGI mandate is about real people and their right to secure lives, to be free of violence and discrimination and that these lives can’t be postponed or deferred indefinitely. We deserve more from our governments.’
The SOGI Independent Expert was created after adoption of a resolution in the Human Rights Council in June 2016, initiated by seven Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Uruguay. They, plus El Salvador (LAC 8), countered the African Group’s attempt to postpone the mandate by introducing an amendment to the resolution deleting the hostile paragraph.
An explanatory note provided by the eight Latin American countries on their submitted amendment in support of preserving the SOGI mandate and the integrity of the HRC reads,
‘The seriousness of the consequences (…) lies in the fact that never before has a country or group of countries attempted to challenge a special procedures mandate by the Human Rights Council with an appointed and fully functioning mandate holder. (…) If the General Assembly reopens the Council’s annual report and use a selective approach to which resolution it seeks to block or defer indefinitely it would fundamentally undermine the authority granted to the Council by the General Assembly, thus having far reaching implications well beyond the specific resolution under consideration.’
While all 193 countries in the UN General Assembly had the right to vote, only 178 exercised their vote, resulting in the passing of the LAC 8 amendment, leading to the failure of the hostile resolution and dissipation of the immediate threat against the establishment of the SOGI Independent Expert. In total, 84 countries voted in favor of the LAC 8 amendment, 77 voted against the amendment, and 17 countries abstained from voting.
LGBTIQ civil society in the Asia and the Pacific region have vocalized their support for the SOGI Independent Expert, hoping that a representative from the region would help progress protections for people of diverse sexual orientation and gender identity. In response to the voting, Ryan Silverio, Regional Coordinator for the ASEAN SOGIE Caucus said,
‘Today we are reminded of the fundamental mission of the Council, and the UN’s commitment to promote human rights and equality for all. We are encouraged by the open dialogue with ASEAN member states in the lead up of the vote, and are particularly thankful to Thailand for showing leadership to protecting this mandate,’
The failure of the proposed hostile resolution is significant not only because it reinstates the authority of the Human Rights Council, but it also allows forward movement on the work of the SOGI Independent Expert- a crucial stride in the UN’s commitment towards protecting the universality of human rights, especially for vulnerable communities. It reinforces the notion that people cannot be left behind and states must protect all people from discrimination and violence without exception.
‘The SOGI Independent Expert position is vital in bringing to light the horrific acts of violence and discrimination many people face because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. These abuses happen everywhere; no region or country is immune to them. Having concrete documentation showing the consequences of homophobia and transphobia on the lives of people and recommendations on how to address these challenges from an HRC Special Procedure mandate holder will help states take responsibility to protect LGBTIQ persons. It will be much harder to ignore the facts,’ commented Micah Grzywnowicz, trans activist and international advocacy advisor at RFSL, the Swedish Federation for LGBTIQ Rights.’
While the hostile resolution did not pass today, civil society has warned that future attempts to stop the progress of the SOGI Independent Expert are not out of the question.
The Expert will be tasked with assessing implementation of existing international human rights law, identifying best practices and gaps, raising awareness of violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, engaging in dialogue and consultation with States and other stakeholders, and facilitating provision of advisory services, technical assistance, capacity-building and cooperation to help address violence and discrimination on these grounds.
‘As always, the fight continues to ensure that States don’t cherry pick which human rights to protect. We must continue to be vigilant and to mobilize to ensure that universality and non-discrimination triumphs at all levels. We must also ensure that we are working together to create change which will benefit all LGBTIQ people. Safeguarding human rights principles remains prime to peace and security for all people everywhere, anytime,’ said Steve Letsike, Director of Access Chapter 2, a South African LGBTIQ human rights organization.’
By the way, the gay or lgbt issue in Singapore is a concern NOT only of the Muslim community. It is also a matter of concern among Christians, Catholics and other groups.
In fact, way before Muslims in Singapore made their concerns more public, the Christians and Catholics have been more vocal on the issue. So, as a Muslim, I’m not sure how the tudung issue has now become part of the bargaining chip to ward off lgbt pressures to scrap Section 377A of the Penal Code in Singapore.
I can’t understand the logic of the argument that by allowing Muslim women to don the tudung, the government will also be obliged to scrap Section 377A of the Penal Code.
All the while I thought the reason as to why the Government is not willing to do away with Section 377A is due to the fact that the MAJORITY of Singaporeans are still very conservative. Hence, it is surprising that tudung is now implicated.
Police have arrested two men, aged 29 and 63, for their suspected involvement in a case of obscene act at Woodlands Town Garden.
At about 11.55pm on Saturday (Oct 17), officers from Jurong Division conducted operations in the area when they spotted the men performing an obscene act in public.
Both were placed under arrest, a statement from the police said on Monday.
First-time offenders found guilty of committing an obscene act in a public place, under Sec 294(a) of the Penal Code, Chapter 224 shall be punished with imprisonment which may extend to 3 months, or with fine, or with both, the statement from the Singapore Police Force said.
Kenneth Chee and Gary Lim have been together for almost two decades, but in the eyes of the law they’re criminals.
The couple met by chance at a shopping mall in Singapore in 1997. “I guess my ‘gaydar’ went off,” Chee recalls. “I just went up to him and asked him for his number.” They’ve been inseparable ever since.
“If gay marriage was legal here, we would get married in a heartbeat,” Lim says. Chee, by his side, nods in agreement.
But gay marriage is not legal in Singapore. Same-sex civil partnerships are also not recognized, and there are no laws that protect against discrimination on the grounds of gender expression or sexual orientation.
In 2007, Singapore, which is a former British colony, made headlines when it struck colonial-era penal code Section 377 from its books. The statute had criminalized “carnal intercourse … against the order of nature,” which included anal and oral sex. The law, which dates back to 1860 and was exported to many British colonies, is still in place in several countries, including India, Malaysia and Myanmar. The statute has been called “England’s least lovely law export.”
Though 377 was removed, a related provision — called Section 377A — was kept intact. 377A specifically targets sexual acts between two men. Under this law, homosexuality is criminalized and punishable by imprisonment of up to two years.
The LGBT community in Singapore was incensed. Lim and Chee, who are both graphic designers, say they were shocked.
“Why are we being singled out to be punished? It’s legal for straight people to have anal sex and oral sex, so why are we seen as criminals?” Lim says. “This law is now always hanging over our heads.”
Outraged by the “blatant discrimination,” the couple decided to challenge the state in court — a decidedly unusual move.
“I just refused to accept this nonsensical label,” Chee says. “We didn’t want to be seen as ‘illegal.’”
In 2010, a Singaporean man named Tan Eng Hong was charged under 377A for having oral sex with another man in a public restroom. At the time, Tan challenged the constitutionality of the law. Two years later, Lim and Chee raised a second challenge.
This was the first time in Singapore’s modern history that the constitutionality of a law was being challenged, according to the couple’s attorney, Peter Low.
Last October, the final ruling for the case was delivered after several years of bouncing through the courts. Singapore’s Court of Appeal, the nation’s highest court, determined that 377A is constitutional.
Homosexuality remains illegal in Singapore.
“We were very disappointed,” Lim says, his lips pursing grimly. “The message was loud and clear: We’re not ready for change.”
Singapore’s government has repeatedly said that it will not “proactively enforce” Section 377A. (In the case of Tan Eng Hong, the charge against him was later changed to “committing an obscene act in a public place.”) But Jean Chong, co-founder of LGBT rights group Sayoni, says the law — whether enforced or not — has had a profound effect on the country’s LGBT community, and on human rights in general.
“377A may be targeted at men, but it has a cascading effect. It shapes public opinion, and informs policy. It impacts the entire LGBT community,” she says.
Scott Teng, a 30-year-old gay man, points out that the government’s stance on the law is akin to “holding a gun to a person’s head, but saying, ‘oh, we’ll never pull the trigger.’ That’s the case here. You always wonder — at what point will the trigger be pulled?”
Such a law, he adds, can encourage marginalization.
“It gives people the justification to treat you as a lesser Singaporean, as a lesser human being,” Teng, who is an associate director at a brand consultancy, says. “It filters down to individual experiences, to the hurtful words people choose to use.”
SEAN LEE“When I first came out to my mother, it went horribly,” said Scott Teng. “My family’s very traditional, and the first reaction I got was ‘Get out of my house, you devil spawn!’ She took it very hard. But though it took her a few months, she’s accepted it and now she’s honestly the best mom ever. She told me, ‘Even if the sky falls down, mom will be here for you.”
Sayoni has been documenting cases of violence and discrimination against Singapore’s LGBT community for several years.
Most abuse is underreported Chong says, and she’s been “shocked” by many of the stories she’s heard.
“Transgender women and gay women spoke about being assaulted, sometimes sexually, because of their appearance,” she says. “One trans woman said she was gang-raped at a hotel room, but she didn’t report it to the police. She’s trans and she used to do sex work, so she didn’t feel comfortable.”
Chong says that the poor and the under-educated are particularly vulnerable to abuse. “They have less vocabulary to articulate what’s happening to them and they have fewer resources,” she says. These are individuals who don’t have access to the growing, though still small, LGBT community here.
Avin Tan, 30, is a gay man living with HIV. According to Tan, there have only been two gay people with HIV who have come out publicly in Singapore about their condition. Paddy Chew, who died in 1999 from HIV-related complications, was the first. Tan is the second. “More people need to come out. It takes guts and yes, it’s a risk, but we need people from every walk of life to speak up,” he said. “Only then will we see change.”
The first gay protagonist in a local TV series featured in a 2003 docu-drama called “Crunchtime,” which was aired on Singapore’s Channel U. It was a landmark moment, but the series, supposedly based on a true story, was criticized for promoting homophobia.
A subsequent exhibition about the history of Singaporean television, suggested that homosexuality was depicted as a mental illness in the show. The protagonist, named Shaohua, is seen visiting a counseling service in an effort to find the “correct and normal” path. By the end of the series, Shaohua is happily married to a woman, with whom he has a son.
Storylines like this aren’t unique in Singapore.
“A happy LGBT character, who has a good job or family support, isn’t allowed on Singaporean television,” LGBT activist and corporate attorney Paerin Choa says. “They have to be sad, troubled, or suicidal. In Chinese dramas, the gay character is often a serial killer or a comical sidekick.”
The “promotion or glamorization of the homosexual lifestyle” is not allowed on television or in radio broadcasts, according to guidelines established by Singapore’s Media Development Authority.
“Information, themes or subplots on lifestyles such as homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexualism, transsexualism, transvestism, pedophilia and incest should be treated with utmost caution,” the guidelines state. “Their treatment should not in any way promote, justify or glamorize such lifestyles.”
Activists say that media restrictions like these have impacted their ability to organize and advocate.
More than 50 percent of the 6,000 people who have been diagnosed with HIV in Singapore are gay men, yet, “because of the media law, we cannot run LGBT-specific campaigns,” Avin Tan, the head of advocacy and partnerships at Action for AIDS Singapore, the only organization in the country dedicated solely to HIV/AIDS awareness, treatment and prevention, tells HuffPost.
“We can’t even run condom ads” on mainstream media, he adds. “We have to rely on putting posters up in clubs or using social media. We end up only reaching 10 percent of the community.”
Tan, who lives with HIV, says that these restrictions aren’t just frustrating for advocates, but are potentially fatal for vulnerable individuals who are not being reached.
“For every person who is diagnosed, one is not,” Tan says, quoting an as-yet unpublished AFA study. “One of the greatest challenges right now when it comes to HIV/AIDS is a serious lack of access to information.”
Later this year, 32-year-old Ching S. Sia, a PhD student in architecture at the National University of Singapore, will be going to Australia to freeze her eggs. “Since young, I’ve always thought that I want to have a family one day,” she said. “As a gay woman, I want the option of having a kid when I want to.”
But for all the obstacles facing the country’s LGBT community, “there has been positive change,” according to Lynette Chua, an assistant law professor at the National University of Singapore and the author of Mobilizing Gay Singapore.
“As a scholar, if you solely study outcomes and if your main concern is what laws on the books have been changed, then you’d say activism in Singapore has not been successful,” Chua says. “But if you look at other outcomes, at what’s happening on the ground, there definitely has been progress.”
LGBT activism has a 25-year history in the country. The movement emerged in the early 1990s with small community groups, according to Chua. It was only a few years ago, however, that local activism gained real momentum. In 2009, Singapore’s first public gay pride event — the annual Pink Dot — was launched, and Sayoni was founded in 2012.
The size of the LGBT movement has ballooned in the last decade, Chua says, “and young people are coming out earlier.” There are more activists than ever before and the government has shown “an increased willingness to acknowledge the existence of gay activism.”
“Even as recently as 2009, the word ‘gay’ was very taboo. It wasn’t used in the media, it wasn’t often used in public. LGBT event were held behind closed doors. People were scared of being outed, of losing their jobs, that their families would find out. But that’s slowly changing,” said Pink Dot spokesperson Paerin Choa.
Indeed, when speaking to some members of the community, there is a tangible uniting sentiment: hope.
“When I was younger, ‘gay’ was such a disgusting word to me,” Teng says. “I had trouble even saying it. There wasn’t a sense of pride associated with the term at all. Instead the negative power of the word made me question if I even wanted to be called that.”
But the situation, he says, has “changed significantly.”
“Now being gay is associated with a lot of positive attributes. There’s a better narrative attached. There were no gay role models when I was a kid, but that’s changed too,” Teng says.
In recent years, a handful of local celebrities have come out. Kumar, a prominent comedian, revealed that he was gay in 2011 after years of being in denial. Last year, local actor and theater director Ivan Heng announced in a moving Facebook post that he had married his longtime partner in a ceremony in the U.K.
Paerin Choa, the spokesperson for Pink Dot, says that the LGBT community has grown “more fearless.” The younger generation is “not so frightened or constrained by societal norms.”
“Just look at Pink Dot’s numbers,” Choa says. “In 2009, the first year it was held, 2,500 people showed up. The following year, we had 4,000. In 2015, we had 28,000 people.”
(Pink Dot has had its share of challenges, however, as conservative Christian and Muslim groups have called for believers to oppose the event.)
Progress has been visible in other ways too.
Christopher Khor, a 24-year-old transgender filmmaker, is releasing next year what promises to be a groundbreaking documentary about Singapore’s trans community.
“When we started making this film, there was absolutely nothing, no exposure for the community. I was the first trans person that I knew,” Khor says, his face breaking into a smile. “We hope this film will start to challenge the idea of trans as ‘other.’”
As for the future of Section 377A, both legal experts and activists tell HuffPost that it’s unlikely the statute will be removed anytime soon. “Not in my lifetime anyway,” attorney Peter Low says.
Activists say that there’s plenty of work to be done before that goal can be reached.
“It’s going to be a long fight,” Chong says. “Activists must work the ground and it’s going to take a long, long time. Look at the U.S. How did they win gay marriage? Activists worked the ground for years, they knocked on doors, they educated people, they worked so hard. You need resources, you need tenacity and you need the commitment to slog it out for 10 to 20 years. You need to not give up, and yes, it’s going to be hard.”
Lim and Chee say they’re crossing their fingers that they’ll be around to see the needle shift.
“It took the U.S. 40 to 50 years to get where they are. We’re heading in the right direction, it’s just a matter of when,” Lim says. “I wouldn’t mind being 80 and getting married. I’d do it.”
Singapore-based photographer Sean Lee captured many of the portraits featured in this article. See more of his work here.
