Dédé Oetomo
GAYa NUSANTARA was founded in 1987 as a gay support organisation. Its initial activities focused on publishing a magazine, gay peer counselling services and coordination of an Indonesian network of gay and lesbian organisations. With time, however, the NGO has taken up a leadership role in public advocacy, organising campaigns to raise society's awareness on gay and lesbian persons' sexual rights and emancipation. Its approach has been different in that it is more open and honest about sexuality and sexual health, without moralising the issues.
Discrimination against gays
Throughout Indonesian history, sexual and/or emotional relationships between men have been common in different communities and settings, such as in the context of intergenerational relationships, religious learning, the search for prowess, shamanism or medium priesthood and initiation rites for young men.
Homosexual identity also has a place in modern Indonesian society. Homosexual acts between consenting adults and cross-dressing are not criminal offences, and gays seldom are the targets of violence. Nevertheless, discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) persons does take place – usually in more subtle ways and mainly in the family. Strong social pressure to lead a heterosexual married life means that many gay men and women, and their spouses, suffer throughout their lives.
A more open form of repression is found in proscriptions from some coercive religious leaders, who make insulting pronouncements that hurt many gay and lesbian Indonesians, precisely because they are religious. The silence and invisibility surrounding GLBT people in social life is another aspect of discrimination. The mass media scarcely address issues important to GLBT people; when they do, they treat gays as curious objects that can increase the media's circulation.
Organising the GLBT community
Against the background of this open and hidden repression of GLBT persons, strong leadership was needed to organise and defend gay rights. The first openly gay organisation, Lambda Indonesia (LI), did not appear until 1982. The expansion of the Indonesian gay movement took place when media attention was focused on issues around homosexuality, especially with the founding of GAYa NUSANTARA in 1987. The number of organisations increased from two in the late 1980s to more than a dozen in 1993, when the First Indonesian Lesbian and Gay Congress was held in Yogyakarta.
Beginning in the early 1990s, the public discourse about HIV/AIDS became more prominent. Since 1996, the new socialist Democratic People's Party (PRD) has also explicitly put the struggle for ‘homosexual and transsexual rights' on its political agenda. With the party's legalisation in February 1999, the number of gay organisations in various parts of the country has increased. The development of gay organisations can thus be traced according to three phases: the phase of mass-media controversy, the phase of empowerment through HIV/AIDS programmes, and now the phase of political alliances.
Organising lesbian women has been more difficult. The few existing lesbian organisations have not been open to the mass media. They are also hit twice by oppression: that of discrimination against women and discrimination against people with an unconventional sexuality. In December 1998, however, lesbian issues were discussed at the Indonesian Women's Congress, and an openly lesbian woman was elected to sit on the presidium of the Indonesian Women's Coalition for Justice and Democracy, formed at the same Congress.
A significant phenomenon in Indonesia's GLBT history was the appearance of waria (male-to-female transgender) organisations as early as the late 1960s. This seems to be an effect of the brief liberalisation period at the beginning of the Suharto regime (1966-98). Waria have traditionally met a relatively high level of tolerance and acceptance in Indonesian society, although mainly through ghettoised occupations, such as entertainers, beauticians, wedding consultants and psychics.
source: http://www.kit.nl
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