Real stories from the World - LGBTQ+

a story from Singapore

I'm not exactly sure how to start off with explaining my story or how to explain what it is like in my country so I hope I'm doing this right.

I live on a small island named Singapore, maybe you've heard of it maybe you haven't, either way I wouldn't really be surprised. We're so small that the Google dot on google maps to locate us is bigger than our country and everyone knows one another one way or the other [Yep]. Singapore or as we affectionately refer to her as the lion city, garden city or the little red dot is located in South-east Asia and our closest neighbour is Malaysia which should give you guys a vague sense of where we are. We're a multiracial society comprised of Eurasians, Indians, Malays, Chinese and more but for the most part, we have a Chinese heritage, I fall under that majority category, so lucky me.

Singapore is an odd country to describe because we still continue many Asian traditions and events but we also have many western influences which make our country such an interesting one. Due to these western influences, the majority of our population is either catholic or christian and this is where shit gets real.

I go to a catholic all girls school and have gone to that school since I was 7 but ironically, I've always been supportive of lgbtq+ rights. Love wins right? But I had always thought I was normal, I would get a normal boyfriend, marry someone normal and have kids. Normally. It was when I was 13, I realized how un-normal I was. Since most of us had been going to that all girls school for at least 6 years by then, we had zero sense of privacy. We stripped in classes, openly talked about our periods, all that good stuff. One day, I saw a girl, I can't specifically remember who now but looking back i remember thinking she was pretty. Not in the " I want to look like her" pretty it was the "I want to date someone like her" pretty and it scared me. I remember my friends at the time, while were not homophobes, weren't exactly supportive of it either.

One distinct conversation i had with my bestfriend went something like this. We had been talking about lgbtq+ rights and it just seemed like the appropriate time to bring it up.

Me : What would you do if i ended up being not straight, like maybe bisexual or gay or something?

Her : I dont know, it'd be weird to imagine it

Me : Would you treat me any differently?

Her : I guess I would, it's hard to imagine you in that way you know like can you imagine me being not straight? It'd be damn weird

Maybe it wasn't much and maybe it was just a passing comment but it broke my heart. The both of us were extremely close. I called her when I couldn't sleep, she called me to get my ass out of bed, we could skype for hours on end. We had that kind of friendsbip and we understood each other and suddenly, we didn't.

I never told her and she never knew, by the time we were 15, we had stopped talking anyway so it didn't really matter. I grew scared of telling anyone I saw girls in that way and often times I wondered if I just wanted to make myself seems special, purposefully burdening myself with irrelevant issues when really i didnt like girls at all.

Unlike many people in my school, I was extremely close to my mother and so at 14, after dealing with this confusion for over a year, I told her. In all my years of living, I've never seen her so disappointed in me but she was a good mom, We talked it out and she told me it was a phase which I disagreed with but it was nice, just talking about it.

For the most part, she was worried about how society would see me. She, like many others I knew weren't homophobes, they just didn't accept it.

Singapore is a new country, we've only been here for 52 years [Counting from 2017] and so it's expected we're still pretty backwards, we're scared of accepting new things. We dont talk about these kind of things, maybe it's just the fact that we Asians dont speak our issues out loud or maybe it's the fact that we just fear change, Singapore is not a good place for an lgbtq+ kid to grow up in. Singapore is a great country, in my opinion, but it's not perfect, words like 'gay', 'faggot' and particularly 'lesbians' are still used as insults and they hurt. So while many are okay with lgbtq+ issues since they do not directly affect them, what happens when our community does have an effect on others?

This was a problem my mother faced when I told her since if I did end up getting together with another female, I would be stigmatised, I would not have any grandkids born from natural birth, I would be different.

Another incident I remember quite clearly from my teen days was actually from a friend I made in church camp [Which was pretty ironic] And she told me she way a lesbian. Back then I was still questioning and didnt know what to say so I just told her it was okay and I still accepted her for her. She cried and hugged me and cried some more and I felt like crying too. I couldnt help but wonder what she had been told before that just those few words "okay.a What's wrong with that?" could make her react that way and I grew afraid for myself as well.

It's been a few years since then and I've grown more confident in myself and who I am. My parents have accepted me and my father's even told me as long as I'm still his princess [Or princess if I end up identifying as a male, who knows what will happen?] He's okay with me being who I am. The friends I have now are extremely supportive and I have some prety good friends who are just like me. Different and proud. My above stories, all short, are of course not the only instances I've faced where I've been questioned about my sexuality and those three are the more gentle stories I can remember but I feel that those stories were the ones affected me the most since they happened in my teenage years from people who were close to me. A few people have called me unnatural and a sin to god and maybe I once thought that way too.

A good catholic doesn't view another woman in such a way but I think I've been pretty lucky with my life. I've got a sweet old pastor who's told us that even if "we like girls, like boys, we will always be children of god" and I like that. I like that a lot.

Singapore's grown to be more accepting, or at least I like to think so. We've begun hosting "pinkdot" where queer kids from around the island can come together and it's great, I love it.

So to all the gay kids, bi kids, trans kids and any other confused kids out there in small countries where these kinds of things aren't talked about, Aren't said because people are scared of change, don't worry, I know how you feel. Things will change and everything will always get better. Stay true to who you are and never ever lie to anyone about these things, they're important to you aren't they?

You are valid, you are loved, you are heard always.

Thank you for reading my story