My activities start from my faith. I wear two hats as I am both a pastor and an LGBT activist. I feel challenged when people cannot separate one from the other.
The Christian right wing sees me a gay man masquerading as a pastor. The don’t see me as a real pastor. I don’t see the difference.
Everybody has an agenda. My agenda with IndigNation is simply to find ways for the LGBT community to live their lives to the fullest. We’re not here to convert anyone or shut anyone out. Everyone has a right to embrace, love and be loved.
If laws are signifiers, why aren’t there laws against gambling?
What I struggle with is this city’s desire to be politically correct all the time, to the point of fetishizing our local cultures and religions.
Beyond just wearing each other’s costumes or eating each other’s food, there needs to be a more organic integration among our multi-racial society, rather than just putting everyone into their rightful places.
Creating categories will only break things down. We fail to see everyone as human beings.
Even by disagreeing, we are actually offering alternatives.
Another struggle that I find here is that we don’t have enough dialogues or conversations. Everything usually gets turned into a debate. So often I get conversations shot down before I could even get started.
It’s not a matter of who wins. It should be about being able to listen and see deep down inside a person, regardless of their sexual orientation.
When people are being humanized, it is harder to oppress them.
Social media only allows us to talk to one another and not with one another. Those who engage in it can choose to hide behind the screens. It can become a war of words and people get hurt.
I think we would have been in a different place today if we weren’t so caught up with such a consumerist culture. I was just at the Bukit Timah cemetery the other day at 7am and, for a moment, I felt totally at peace.
We get so enchanted by material things that we lose sight of what really matters. So it looks like we’re going to build an expressway across the cemetery and soon enough, there might just be malls built around it.
Is that what defines our soul? Shopping? All our cultural heritage has been translated into tourism currency.
The pastel color scheme found in many of our HDB flats or conserved buildings also looks fake, almost like a metaphor for who we are. Why can’t we just go for something simple like white or beige?
The only reasons people are still rooted here are relationships and memories.
Nothing here looks the same anymore.
I really like local comic artist Troy Chin’s The Resident Tourist. I feel like a resident tourist when I’m here, too.
The late playwright Kuo Pao Kun once asked about when is Singapore going to “Pop”? We have J Pop and K Pop, but we will never “Pop” if we continue to make art or films that are so caught up with the Singaporean identity. “Pop” cannot be engineered!
But of course I may be wrong with a lot of things and that keeps me going. I don’t feel the need to justify myself. If we are capable to say that we are wrong, then perhaps we’re listening for once.
We cannot be number one in everything.
