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. More >

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. More >