Gaysia (28 page)

Even on his days off, Hasbullah kept recruiting new members, including young people from all intellectual disciplines. The broader the skills base, he reasoned, the more professional and robust the organisation would be. The people he approached often didn't know how to respond. They would stare at him silently and would, as Hasbullah put it, ponder.

‘And what do you think they're pondering about?'

‘I'm not sure. Maybe they are thinking, “Is it okay to research on this topic?” People don't
do
this, right?'

‘You are.'

Hasbullah allowed himself to grin.

‘It's not common,' he said. ‘
Yet
.'

‘But it will be?'

Hasbullah nodded, determined and serene. ‘It will be.'

Hasbullah understood there could be controversy – he had
read about protests against Christian ex-gay groups like NARTH – but he also felt controversy could only be a good thing.

‘If there are people supporting me, who think like I do, there also has to be people who hate what I do,' he said. ‘It makes the world complete.'

Setting up the association was only the first step. Right now, Hasbullah was applying to study psychology at a leading university in Chicago. He had been accepted once before, but hadn't raised sufficient funds. He felt his work with the association would look good on his latest application. It was pioneering work after all.

We pulled up to a red light. Out of nowhere, Hasbullah said, ‘Homosexuality, if not controlled, can destroy the harmony of a family.'

He said it firmly, almost angrily. Confused, I looked up and saw what had triggered that outburst. Above us was a billboard for a whitegoods company, showing a smiling Caucasian family – two parents, a son and a daughter – laughing in the breeze of their portable air-conditioning unit.

‘That's why the issue cannot be left out of the mainstream,' Hasbullah said. ‘I don't know how it feels – I've never been a homosexual – but being able to understand them a little now, I know it's important. If it's not contained, it will be broken families, leading to more deviant behaviour.'

We sat in silence, waiting for the light to turn green. It seemed to take forever. Finally, we drove past more mosques and lakes, past thatches of forest and a gigantic sign built into a hill that featured the Arabic script for Allah over the words
‘Peliharakanlah Terengganu'
: ‘May Allah bless Terengganu.'

‘It's scary,' he said firmly.

I nodded, now watching him a little warily from the corner
of my eye. ‘It's scary,' I said, echoing him.

Gay Muslims were easy to find in Malaysia, but that didn't mean they felt comfortable speaking on the public record. To criticise Islam openly was a crime under sharia law, a code that bound Muslims in Malaysia and worked as a parallel system to the country's secular laws. It was easy enough to find out whether someone was Muslim: everyone's religious status was stated on their government-issued identity card. If you wanted the word ‘Islam' removed from your ID, you had to go to the National Registration Department and the sharia court and declare officially that you were
murtad
– ‘out of Islam' – meaning you had either left the faith or conspired against it. Some interpreted that declaring yourself
murtad
was, paradoxically, a serious crime under sharia – worse, one gay Muslim man told me, than admitting you were gay. It was easier to leave Islam on your ID card and simply shut up about your sexuality.

One gay man I spoke to had studied Islam so thoroughly that he was a qualified imam, but he didn't feel
religiously
Muslim anymore. His problem, he told me, wasn't with Islam itself, but the brand of Islam practised in Malaysia, one that didn't have room for critical thinking when it came to issues like homosexuality. All over the world, there were many Islams, but he felt the type practised in Malaysia proposed one unquestionable version. If he'd been born in the US or UK, things might have been different and he might still identify as a Muslim
and
gay. Over there, he knew there were liberal mosques, but when you lived in a country where the teachings couldn't be contested, there was no room to move. You had to make a choice between your
faith and your sexuality.

And if you didn't make a choice, people would make it for you, and that could be dangerous. Azwar Ismail was one gay Muslim man happy for me to use his name, mainly because it had been used so much in the media, especially during that period when people sent him death threats.

An engineer by day and published poet by night, Azwar was a short man with tiny delicate hands, well groomed and urbane in Tom Ford spectacles. The oldest of five children, Azwar was raised in a family devoted to Islam. They prayed five times a day, his sisters wore hijabs, no one wore shorts (they would scandalously rebel against this after high school) and they were banned from going to the cinema.

But when Azwar hit his late twenties, he started coming out as gay to close friends. To his surprise, he didn't get too many hostile reactions. It felt as though his world was decompressing and loosening up.
What the hell
, he thought. He had already come out; he might as well do everything else blacklisted by Islam. For the first time, Azwar went clubbing and drank alcohol, but he still prayed. He also started hanging out with Kuala Lumpur's tight-knit gay community of artists and activists. When Malaysia's most prominent gay organiser, Pang Khee Teik, started a YouTube project inspired by America's ‘It Gets Better' campaign, Azwar volunteered to be the one Muslim guy who would talk publicly about what it was like to be gay within Islam.

Azwar's video was always going to attract the most attention, but no one suspected that it would score over 140,000 views on YouTube in a week. Comments poured in, most of them negative and hateful. People told Azwar he was going to hell and others offered to take him there themselves. Many posted verses from the Qur'an condemning sodomy, followed by
graphic death threats. After Azwar's video made the news, even Malaysia's cabinet minister for Islamic affairs chimed in, stating he was concerned gay activists were now promoting homosexuality in Malaysia, and hinted at the government taking ‘appropriate action' to stop things like Azwar's video polluting the image of Islam. A prominent Islamic cleric said Azwar had ‘derided his own dignity and Islam in general'.

Azwar's extended family saw newspaper clippings and called his immediate family to ask whether they knew he was gay. They hadn't known, but they did now. Scared, Azwar sought legal advice to ensure he couldn't be charged for sodomy under sharia or secular criminal law.

In the months this was happening, Azwar's own relationship to Islam was changing fast.

‘When I came out, I was still very religious. At that time, I was thinking,
Maybe Islam isn't fixed into one view
. But after some time, I couldn't stand it anymore. Deep inside, I told myself,
If you want to be a Muslim, you don't have to be a Muslim like
those
people. You have your own understanding of Islam
. But whenever I go to the mosque, in the sermon they always talk about negative things. All this hatred. I can't find the authentic Islam that I want, even though I know it exists. In some parts in Indonesia, they have mosques that are very liberal: liberal Muslims.'

He paused, shoulders slumped. ‘We just don't have that here.'

What about liberal Christians? Was there a counter to RLM? Some gay Christians were trying their best. One Malaysian man told me he had reconciled being gay with Christianity by reading the Bible closely and concluding that being gay was
okay, as long as he never had anal sex – ‘unholy penetration', he called it – with another man. Another Christian – an ethnic Chinese pastor named Joe Pang – had started Malaysia's first gay-friendly church in Kuala Lumpur. Joe still remembered seeing another man at a Christian gathering tell his story of being both Christian and gay.

‘Every night, I kneel down and ask for forgiveness,' the man had told the crowd.

Watching the man tell his story, Joe had wept openly, feeling the man's pain as if it was his own.

‘Like him, I would kneel down in my room and cry,' Joe said. ‘I'd say, “God, forgive me.” Every time I masturbated, I asked for forgiveness. It was a very terrible life.'

Joe was thirty years old now and had the balloon-like face of a kid. His church – the Good Samaritan Metropolitan Community Church – wasn't really a church, but a leased mezzanine of a café with high white walls and blond timber furniture. The lease was about to expire. I arrived for Sunday worship completely drenched from the bruising rain outside. Only a dozen or so gay men and a single lesbian had gathered for worship that day, and Joe looked sheepish. He told me there were weeks the congregation swelled to sixty; other times it went right down to ten. This was a particularly bad turnout.

The service was pleasant enough – a man leading us through songs on acoustic guitar; the entire sermon typed and projected on a screen for a deaf member – but after the service, there was an urgent meeting about the church's future. This was Good Samaritan's last week in the café and they needed to find a new space. On paper slips, church members were told to write down how much they'd be willing to donate
to the church each month, before they discussed the pros and cons of the different places they could rent.

On the other side of town, the ex-gay organisation Pursuing Liberty Under Christ – which often taught schoolchildren about the perils of homosexuality – was flush with cash from Christian churches throughout Malaysia. Joe's church was financially anaemic in comparison.

Whenever stories about ex-gay organisations broke around the world, readers often assumed these were fringe groups, freakish, anachronistic relics surely receding in numbers and influence. But there was no stopping the movement. In the Christian world, what started as an American ex-gay movement in the late '70s had given rise to a global network of ex-gay ministries called Exodus International. And although two of its most prominent members – co-founder Michael Bussee and church leader Gary Cooper – eventually renounced the movement altogether, infamously (and spectacularly) leaving their wives for each other, the movement had continued. It remained particularly huge in Asia, and it wasn't just RLM and PLUC in Malaysia. There were Bagong Pag-Asa and the Pathway to Freedom Counselling Center (both in the Philippines), Rainbow 7 (Taiwan) and Choices (Singapore), as well as countless other independent organisations, some that were only just starting up. They were there to help, but you had to want to save yourself or nothing would ever change. They never advertised their services, but if you needed them, there they were. And wasn't that comforting to know?

Who can say ‘Amen'?

MYANMAR

In which four in five of the HIV-positive people we interview will probably die from lack of access to lifesaving medication. Key numbers: 65 (the minimum number of US cents you might pay for sex with a man in Yangon); 42 (how many times likelier homosexual men are to contract HIV in this country than their fellow citizens); 2008 (the year Myanmar's biggest distributor of lifesaving HIV medication was forced to stop taking new clients).