by Dédé Oetomo
When we read about the Indonesian national independence movement, whether in the official historiography of the State or that of Indonesianists, there is a total silence on homosexual women and men and transgendered people. We do not know if among the pemuda (youths) who kidnapped Soekarno and Hatta and forced them to proclaim independence on 17 August 1945, and the millions of others who had been active in the nationalist movement before them and took part in the independence war afterwards, those studied and adulated by the likes of Benedict Anderson, there were pemuda who loved one another or who were transgendered.
We do get glimpses of gender bending in Soekarno: An Autobiography, As Told to Cindy Adams (1965), of the nationalist leader as a young man cross-dressing in a ludruk theatre performance typical of East Java, in which he took part as a female character. But almost in the same breath we read about his disgust and condescension towards Dutch gay men who would go to such performances accompanied by young Indonesian men. This aversion to transgendered people and homosexuals was also found amongst communist leaders by James L. Peacock in his study of ludruk in the 1960s (Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Indonesian Proletarian Drama, 1968). They urged cross-dressing ludruk actors to consult a psychiatrist to be cured. Later we learned from the work of Saskia E. Wieringa (Politicization of Gender Relations in Indonesia: The Indonesian Women’s Movement and Gerwani Until the New Order State, 1995) that the leftist women’s organization, Gerwani, purged its chairwoman in the 1950s because she was a lesbian.
The only obscure piece of good news we hear from Benedict Anderson, in his foreword to my collected writings, Memberi Suara pada Yang Bisu (Giving Voice to the Mute, 2001), is about the nationalist leader, Arnold Mononutu, who later became a minister in many of the early administrations of the republic. Apparently many of his comrades knew about Uncle Arnold’s homosexuality, and yet they respected and accepted him.
Given such a situation, we wonder as today’s Indonesian lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people what kind of place we have after our founding fathers and mothers, some of whom might have been homosexual like Uncle Arnold, or transgendered, took us across the golden bridge of independence.
We could cynically state that it was Dutch colonialism that gave us a penal code based on the Code Napoléon in the 19th century, in which homosexual acts by consenting adults is not criminalized. We could then continue that today’s apparent independence, which in political economic terms is really but a newer version of colonialism anyway, after the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998 put us in jeopardy, with attacks by Islamist vigilante groups and local shari’ah-based ordinances criminalizing homosexual acts such as those in the City of Palembang and the Province of South Sumatra, not to mention the impending draft qanun being debated in the provincial parliament of Aceh.
It is exactly when we think about the dilemma between the independence of our nation and our personal freedom as LGBT people that we need to think clearly and strategically, especially as the LGBT movement in Indonesia grows in size and importance.
The spirit of our nationalist movement was the struggle for economic independence. The means to attain that was understood as political or national independence. Nationalism has a weakness in that it diverted attention from class divisions to those between colonial nations and colonized ones. In its name, those who are seen as nationals are almost automatically embraced as sons and daughters of the soil, without examining their ulterior class-based motives. Some of them then subverted the original goals of the nationalist movement to benefit their class or even themselves. One of the founding fathers of the republic, Sutan Sjahrir, feared that this would be the case, and he was proven right in the last quarter of 1965, when what Soekarno termed neocolonialist-imperialist forces worked through their Indonesian lackeys to open our doors totally to foreign investment and exploitation again.
Now many, if not most, Indonesian lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered people and other men who have sex and women who have sex with women are as poor as other Indonesians. The typical Indonesian lesbian or woman who has sex with women, in addition to being trapped in an oppressive marriage, for instance, is most likely also disenfranchised economically, perhaps exactly because of the heteronormative trap. Yes, we certainly need our gender and sexual rights, but the fulfilment of those rights cannot be separated from the betterment of our livelihood.
Most LGBT activists do not realize that the gender and sexual oppression they live under are directly linked to such issues as poverty. The lessons learned from developed societies should show us that economic development could translate into the freedom to determine the way we live based on our gender identity and sexual orientation.
Thus the writing on the wall is clear: Yes, we can emulate the admirable high spirit and passion of our erstwhile nationalist leaders. We could not really blame them for silencing LGBT people among them and in the ranks of the people. It’s a generational thing: Identity politics based on gender identity and sexual orientation was then not yet a human rights issue, was not their cup of tea, as it were, but now it is for us, and for contemporary nationalist leaders like Nelson Mandela, and it is really up to us LGBT activists to join hands with other progressive elements in society to continue the struggle towards a better future in material and immaterial terms, not just one or the other. After all, the goal of our independence movement is a just and prosperous society. These days justice is increasingly understood as involving rights to diverse gender identities and sexual orientations.[]
This article is exclusively published by Center for Minority, Gender, and Human Rights.