Singapore: Bryan Choong was 27 when he came out as a gay man in a most unlikely setting – while serving as a staff sergeant in the Singapore Air Force.

“The armed forces is not the first place you’d image a gay person would come out in,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on Monday.

“But my friends there understood it … it didn’t matter to them.”

Singapore LGBTI campaigner Bryan Choong came out while in the Air Force.

Now 45 and a long-time advocate for the LGBTQI+ community, Choong says many others of his generation didn’t have such an experience and, fearing exposure in a country where sex between men was illegal, had left Singapore.

Now Choong hopes those conversations will become easier to have after Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced the city-state would repeal the colonial-era law that makes gay sex a criminal offence.

“Private sexual behaviour between consenting adults does not raise any law and order issue. There is no justification to prosecute people for it nor to make it a crime,” Lee said in his annual National Rally Day speech on Sunday night.

Singapore Prime Minster Lee Hsien Loong.Credit:AP

“This will bring the law into line with current social mores and, I hope, provide some relief to gay Singaporeans,” the leader said.

Amid pushback from church organisations, however, Lee said the repeal of Singapore’s controversial Section 377A of the Penal Code would not sway the government from protecting traditional family and societal norms about how marriage is defined. This means, the government will amend the constitution to ensure that same-sex marriage cannot be introduced, he said.

As a result, some activists in this island nation have questioned the announcement as representing any great progress at all.

Choong, who along with other campaigners had challenged S377A in the country’s highest court, is hopeful the government will not enshrine into the constitution the definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Demonstrators form the characters Repeal 377A in a call to repeal Section 377A of Singapore’s Penal Code which criminalises sex between men during a Pink Dot event held in Hong Lim Park in 2019.Credit:Getty Images

On that, LGBTQI+ groups, whose annual Pink Dot rally drew a crowd of thousands when returned in June after pandemic lockdowns, are still awaiting information regarding the move to ban same-sex marriage.

For now, though, he is relieved at the prospect of a change he believes is long overdue.

“A lot of us in the community have been waiting for this,” he said. “We agree with the prime minister that this is the right thing to do.”

Authorities in Singapore have said repeatedly over the past 15 years that they would not actively enforce the law governing gay sex.

Messages of hope fill a board at a Pink Dot event in Singapore in 2019. Credit:Getty Images

Yet in a country in which many people take their social cues from the government, it has manifested itself in other ways.

“If the government says that something is not acceptable, it’s criminal, it builds in the mindset of Singaporeans,” said Choong, who is a trained counsellor. “[Consequently] they’re less open to having conversations about sexuality.

“There are families that because of the way the government looks at LGBTI children, they can’t have a conversation even within their family about it.

“And even though gay men might not be prosecuted in Singapore, a lot of them live in fear of their identity being exposed. Or if they do come out as a gay person, they fear that they might be subjected to a lot of discrimination.”

The pending repeal of law is predictably not being celebrated in all quarters.

The Alliance of Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches of Singapore, which dubs itself a “caretaker of public morality”, has been rallying against it and is calling for a conscious vote in parliament, where Lee’s People’s Action Party holds 83 of the 104 seats, rather than one on party lines.

“The repeal is an extremely regrettable decision which will have a profound impact on the culture that our children and future generations of Singaporeans will live in,” said APCCS chairman Reverend Yang Tuck Yong.

As a result, the coalition of churches said, “we strongly urge the government to entrench the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman in the Singapore constitution.”

People of all ages join a Pink Dot rally in support of equal rights in Singapore in 2019.Credit:AP

That is a proposition that, unsurprisingly, disturbs gay-rights organisations, alghtough they have described the decriminalisation of gay sex as “the first step on a long road towards full equality” and a “win for humanity”.

“Any move by the government to introduce further legislation or constitutional amendments that signal LGBTI people as unequal citizens is disappointing,” LGBTI groups said in a joint statement.

“We urge the government not to heed recent calls from religious conservatives to enshrine the definition of marriage into the constitution.”

– with AP

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