by Dédé Oetomo

I was driving with my eighty-year-old mother to our monthly family gathering at my cousin’s the other Sunday when I related to her how Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s stand on same-sex marriage had surpassed President Obama’s. She responded by saying that she could understand Cheney’s stand because his second daughter, Mary, is lesbian. We then discussed Mary’s pregnancy, whether it was by artificial insemination (who could be the sperm donor?) or by actual sexual intercourse with a friend.

Then all of a sudden my mother asked me, “Don’t you want to have children?” It threw me off balance for a moment, but then I gave my usual retort when people ask me the question. “Come on, I’m so busy, who’d take care of the kids?” Well, the truth is, I’ve never really liked children, so perhaps even if I were not gay, I would not care to have any.

I’ve been reflecting on that little conversation, and realize that on the surface the question is one that grandparents often ask, but in our case the question is posed in a completely different context, one that would have been unthinkable one hundred years ago. My parents have always accepted my sexual orientation, had good relations with my partners, and I’ve been an out gay person and an activist since I came out in the early 1980s. This is certainly a new phenomenon in any human society.

As an early activist, promoting homosexual emancipation and sexual diversity and debating with society, I was fully aware that I was trying to change society. I later realized how my cultural position as a Peranakan (mestizo) Chinese helped me immensely, having been partly uprooted from “traditional” Chinese culture but also inheriting the values of the early twentieth-century rationalist reform strong among my Peranakan ancestors, having been kind of rejected by “traditional” Javanese culture as people from across the seas (read: uncouth) but then not falling into the oppressive hypocritical trappings of those traditions, and having embraced the values of the Enlightenment and the new values of independent Indonesia. It helped also that partly because of Chinese religious pragmatism my father left the Pentecostal Church early in his youth and my mother was never thrilled by the guilt tripping of the Catholic nuns of her early education.

As I matured in my activism and social thinking, I’ve mellowed out a great deal, but the question still bugs me: why can my people change so that having a homosexual son, after the initial worries, is not really a big deal, and why do others, even to this day, still cannot shake off their heteronormative cultural shackles?

Just the other day a gay friend asked me to accompany him to look at batik material before he takes his fiancée to buy some for their wedding day later in the year. Ahmad (not his real name) hails from a devout but moderate Nahdliyyin Muslim culture, known for tolerating homosexual acts and relations in their boarding schools and transgendering in their communities. He has come out to his sister and widowed mother (now this is something new), who in typical Nahdliyyin fashion are not excessively bothered by his homosexuality, but have not stopped nagging him (his sister being less insistent) about getting married (the heterosexual way, that is), which is why he’s seriously dating his fiancée. But his intention to marry and form a family is sincere. On the other hand, these months he said he’s enjoying every last moment of “freedom.” He’s planning to have one last vacation in Bali, to hit all the gay bars, cafés, cabaret lounges and beaches.

As a gay activist should I be bothered by what guys like Ahmad plan to do? Should I rely on cultural relativism to respect the fact that in his culture gay men do marry heterosexually and form a family, whereas in my culture I might marry (in a gender-neutral way) and have children too, but not in the way he’s doing it? My feminist side, though, is screaming murder. Ahmad has not told his wife (am I being ethnocentric by even mentioning this?) that he’s gay. He said he’d stop having sex with men and falling in love with them. But I know that such a vow is more easily made than fulfilled. Could I again hold on to cultural relativism and compare Ahmad to the philandering or polygamous guy (many of whom have sex or form relations with transgenders and other men)? But don’t the women have any say?

In my activism, I must confess, I’ve been vacillating between militantly wanting to change society and hesitantly respecting local values. Does Ahmad honestly know what he’s getting himself and his fiancée into? On the other hand, should we be so rational and plan our lives? The compromise we’ve taken in our LGBTIQ movement in Indonesia so far has been that one should be honest to everyone involved and respect the principle of consent in matters of heterosexual or gender-neutral marriage, ménages à trois and other polyamorous queer relationships, and so on and so forth.

Indeed the heteronormative pressure to marry and form a family is the strongest obstacle to many lesbians and gay men in Indonesian society, and to a lesser extent to transgenders, in pursuing happiness and well being. Perhaps the Indonesian LGBTIQ movement should set ideal standards of pride, honesty, and equality, but should also be sensitive to cultural impediments, while at the same time working hard to change that culture. Certainly we should be there for our fellow queers who are going through the tribulations of following the call of their hearts in new constructions of gender identities and sexualities not accommodated yet, let alone accepted, by the imaginings of an old guard dominating our society.

If I were in my twenties, I might have written this piece differently (I used to do so thirty years ago). Perhaps age and social science have mellowed me out. But my friend Ahmad is only twenty-eight.[]

This article is exclusively published by Center for Minority, Gender, and Human Rights.