Go Home, Gay Boy! Or, Why Do Singaporean Gay Men Prefer to “Go Home” and Not “Come Out”?

Abstract

Anglo-American ontologies posit that gay men should come out to match their outer selves with their inner ones. In Confucianized Singapore, however, gay men refrain from coming out to their parents to avoid shaming their families. Instead, they couch their homosexuality in kinship terms and “go home” with their boyfriends (Chou, 2000). “Going home” gains familial acceptance, but it does not challenge mainstream discourses of homosexuality. By examining how Singaporean gay men negotiate their sexuality with their families, I question the validity of coming out and going home as both ontological discourses and strategies.

Keywords:

• Anglo-American self
• coming out
• Confucian self
• going home
• Singapore

Acknowledgments

This article grew out of a chapter from my doctoral dissertation, and I would like to thank the many people who helped me during the research and writing process. First, I thank my field consultants for their insights into gay social life in Singapore that ground my theories. Although I may not have named you in my essays, Aaron, Alan, Alex, Brian, Chor Pharn, David, Ernest, Gary, Han, Harry, Hongjun, Iggy, Kenneth, Jazy, John, Kelvin, Khalil, Nam Khim, Nick, Otto, Peter, Ray, Roy, Russell, Terence, Thomas, Tim, Yangfa, and Yasser, here's a big thank you. Second, I would like to thank the participants of the dissertation writing workshop that I joined in the fall of 2009. “As is known to all” (does hand gesture), without the help that “you park people” gave me, the dissertation would have been a lot more painful. So, here is to Alma Gottlieb for organizing the workshop, and Karin Berkhoudt, Angela Glaros, Isabel Scarborough, Elizabeth Spreng, and Julie Williams for the comments and the laughter that you have given me. Last but not least, I would like to thank the participants of the 2010 Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference at American University. In particular, I would like to thank Ellen Lewin and Denis Provencher for their post-presentation comments, and Bill Leap for organizing the conference. His efforts at nurturing junior scholars like me led me to submit this essay to this journal.

Notes

1. I transliterated the spoken Cantonese using Jyutping, or the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme.

2. In 2008, SDU merged with Social Development Services, a state match-making agency for non-university graduates, to form the Social Development Network. Despite the name change, I continue to use the acronym SDU in this article partly because of its popular usage in local discourses and partly because SDN's goals differ little from those of the SDU's.