1. 10 April 1985: The AIDS virus is discovered in Singapore

In 1981, five young gay men in Los Angeles contracted a rare lung infection. The root cause was soon found to be a virus which attacked their immune systems, and was transmitted via sexual contact. The infected were rendered vulnerable to and would succumb to opportunistic diseases like infections. The virus was soon reported in many other gay men, and hence named Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID).

But by 1982, almost half of the infected population were non-homosexual. It was also found that the virus could be transmitted through intravenous injections and blood transfusions too. The mysterious disease was soon given a new name – Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS. In the next few years, the AIDS epidemic spread rapidly across major US cities, and, due to air travel, across the world. In 1985, three male sex workers in Singapore were found to have AIDS.

“The disclosure that three local homosexual prostitutes had been discovered with the AIDS virus has spread alarm among the gay community. Heterosexuals also were concerned that they might pick up the dreaded virus in public places… Several homosexuals, or “gays”, said fear of the disease had impelled them to change their lifestyles. Many said they believed the virus existed in Singapore even before the three cases came to light last week.”

Source: Fear and uncertainty hit the gay community by Frieda Koh. In Singapore Monitor (14 Apr 1985), https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/singmonitor19850414-1.2.5

2. 10 October 1985: Bugis Street closes for redevelopment

Following a study by the Ministry of National Development and the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board, the government made the decision to move out the tenants and redevelop the area to improve sewage, clear pollution, and make way for a train station.

Bugis Street officially closed in early October 1985, with bulldozers moving in to demolish buildings on 11 October. The redevelopment completely wiped out Bugis Street’s vibrant street food scene, and its infamous transgender sex trade.

“The trans-sexuals give character to Bugis Street. It was not uncommon during it heyday to find 30 to 40 trans-sexuals gathered there on any one night. But since 1980, the authorities came down hard on trans-sexuals after a spate of robberies and street brawls. They were not allowed into Bugis Street… Today, only three or four can be seen after midnight, dressed in tightly-cut clothes, often with their cleavages showing.”

Source: The street that wouldn't sleep. In Straits Times (11 Oct 1985), https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/Digitised/Article/straitstimes19851011-1.2.23.34

3. September 1993: Police entrapment of gay men at Tanjong Rhu

In a week-long operation, police officers baited and arrested 12 gay men in Tanjong Rhu. The area where the operation took place sat on reclaimed land that had been left to settle. This remote seaside location was popular among gay men cruising for sex.

The arrested men were pictured and named in newspapers and tabloids. They were tried in court and received jail-time ranging between two and six months, as well as strokes of the cane.

“…plainclothes policemen from the Geylang Police Division Headquarters posed as decoys. They would identify themselves when contact was made before back-up officers moved in to help round up the alleged offenders.”

12 men nabbed in anti-gay operations at Tanjong Rhu. In Straits Times (23 Nov 1993).

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The Vault: Desert Blooms is a lecture-performance tracing the history of Singapore theatre from 1985 to 1995 through a queer lens. Desert Blooms was created by Ng Yi-Sheng, directed by Tan Shou Chen, and performed by Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai, Yap Yi Kai and Izzul Irfan . Find our more here.

It was in April 1992, at the opening of the Singapore Press Holdings Young Playwright Series, when then-Senior Minister of Education Tay Eng Soon intoned, “Ours is still a traditional society which values what is private and personal and is not comfortable with public values and explicit discussions of sexuality and what it considers as deviant values. By all means, let our “cultural desert” bloom. But please let the blossoms be beautiful and wholesome and not be prickly pears or weeds.”

The mid-80s to the early 90s was a particularly prolific period for Singapore theatre. This was the decade which theatre academic Robin Loon described as a “golden age” for local drama. Researcher Terence Chong also noted this period as a time when theatre-makers, both queer and queer-allied, felt emboldened enough to “perform their authenticity”.

The Vault: Desert Blooms delves into these ten years of Singapore theatre history, unearthing an abundance of LGBTQ-themed plays. Some of these plays are now celebrated works which continue to be restaged. Others, despite breaking new ground, have faded into obscurity.

An accompanying exhibition, titled The Desert Blooms, features nine of these plays. The exhibition details who, when and how these plays were created, and also touched on any resistance these plays might have encountered when they were staged for the first time. The Desert Blooms exhibition runs from 30 Nov to 20 Dec 2019 in the Centre 42 Library.

Here are the plays referred to in The Vault: Desert Blooms, with those featured in The Desert Blooms exhibition indicated with an asterix (*):

1986: Lest the Demons Get to Me by Russell Heng*
1987: Army Daze by Michael Chiang
1988: Rigor Mortis by Haresh Sharma & Alvin Tan
1988: Jackson on a Jaunt by Eleanor Wong*
1988: As If He Hears by Chay Yew*
1989: Liwat [Sodomy] by Nizam Rahman
1990: Akka அக்கா by G. Selvanathan*
1991: The Lady of Soul and Her Ultimate ‘S’ Machine by Tan Tarn How
1991: Marrying by Ovidia Yu
1991: Imagine by Ovidia Yu
1992: Another Tribe 异族 by Otto Fong*
1992: Lives Elsewhere 生命他乡 by Lee Chee Kin
1992: The Next Generations 后代 by Lim Soon Lan
1992: Posteterne 英台起诉记 by Goh Boon Teck
1992: Three Fat Virgins Unassembled by Ovidia Yu
1992: The Famous Five Go on an Adventure by Robin Loon
1992: Glass Roots… Please Don’t Step on Them by Haresh Sharma
1992: Porcelain by Chay Yew
1992: Private Parts by Michael Chiang*
1992: Mergers and Accusations by Eleanor Wong*
1993: Land by Haresh Sharma
1993: Don’t Go Swimming, It’s Not Safe by Josef Ng
1993: Brother Cane by Josef Ng
1993: Bugis Street: The Musical
Music by Raymond and Edmund Ooi,
Lyrics by Tan Hwee Hua and Mock Pak Lum
Book by Koh Buck Song and Tan Hwee Hua
1993: We Are Family by Otto Fong
1994: A Language of Their Own by Chay Yew*
1995: Half Century by Russell Heng
1995: Wills and Secession by Eleanor Wong
1995: Purple by Goh Boon Teck*

And to find out more about making theatre in the 1980s and 1990s, here’s some further reading:
Singapore Theatre in the 1980s
Singapore Theatre in the 1990s

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The Vault: Desert Blooms is a lecture-performance tracing the history of Singapore theatre from 1985 to 1995 through a queer lens. Desert Blooms was created by Ng Yi-Sheng, directed by Tan Shou Chen, and performed by Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai, Yap Yi Kai and Izzul Irfan . Find our more here.

Writer Ng Yi-Sheng has taken on a rather ambitious project – to write a history of queer Singaporean theatre in The Vault: Desert Blooms. But it’s not the first time he’s done something like this.

In 2006, Yi-Sheng wrote the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, a collection of stories based on interviews with LGBTQ Singaporeans. The book broke new ground by featuring real names and real stories. His foray into marginalised histories also resulted in 2018’s Ayer Hitam, a lecture-performance about the lesser-known history of Black people in Singapore, which premiered at the M1 Fringe Festival that year and has since been restaged twice.

We chat with Yi-Sheng to find out more about Desert Blooms.

Why is a project like Desert Blooms needed?

It’s weird how so many of us are going back to the archive and embracing documentary theatre. This year especially, there’s a greater, top down-stimulated interest in history.

For queer people in Singapore, we don’t have enough of a historical narrative. I think a certain one exists among some queer intellectuals, but it hasn’t been mythologised the way, say, Stonewall has. A myth is any narrative that becomes important to the origins of a community, whether it’s King Arthur, or Gilgamesh or LKY.

There is a certain mythologisation of moments, like in the films Tanjong Rhu and Bugis Street. But what I realised as soon as I said I wanted to look at queer theatre from 1985 to 1995, is that this period has got a lot in it. We have the redevelopment of Bugis Street. We have the Marxist Conspiracy. We have Josef Ng. We have the Tanjong Rhu and Rascals incidents.

What I want to show is that the artistic revolution during this period is part of the shift in the national queer consciousness. It’s not just what queer people think of themselves, but it’s the way people in Singapore regard the queer community, waking up to the fact that they exist, developing feelings about them, whether it’s paranoia, disgust, or otherwise. For example, when Mergers and Accusations was advertised, it wasn’t advertised as a queer play. People just turned up and were surprised. The small number of people who could be called a mainstream audience then were suddenly confronted with queerness and given the opportunity to empathise. And it was happening in all four official languages.

I would like there to be a sense of heritage. If you’re queer and if you choose to see yourself as part of the queer community, you should have a Singaporean heritage to look back on. And literature and drama is a part of how this heritage emerged.

Why are you so interested in queer history?

I did my undergraduate studies at Columbia University, very close to the birthplace of the modern queer rights movement. And we had talks by people involved in Stonewall. Columbia also has Barnard next door, which is a women’s [liberal arts] college, so what we ended up with was a very diverse queer activist community in terms of ethnicity, gender and sexual identity.

And so, when I come back to Singapore, I was thinking in those terms already. Like when I was asked to do SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century [a collection of real-life Singaporean LGBTQ stories which was published in 2006], most of the interviewees initially suggested were Chinese Christian men. And when we had early editions of ContraDiction [an annual LGBTQ literary event], it was mostly Chinese men performing. But there have been attempts to cultivate a culture of diversity and the queer literature scene in Singapore did end up being very inclusive. With GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry & Prose [published in 2010], we were trying to include a diverse set of writers, trying to show people there were all these queer writers.

So you can see that this is the kind of narrative I’m interested in constructing, based on how queer history involves narratives of diversity.

Who is Desert Blooms intended for?

I have a desire to teach everyone that there is a queer history. In the literary sphere, I very often interact with younger people, sometimes, younger queer people. I realised that many don’t know anything about our local queer history. I mean, Singlit wasn’t taught in schools until very recently.

A couple years ago, this NS boy on the SingPoWriMo [Singapore Poetry Writing Month] Facebook said there aren’t a lot of queer writers in Singapore. And I was like… [Yi-Sheng makes a face].

Before the Internet, you do grow up queer and alone. It’s unlike a culture that your family already belongs to. But given what a socially connected, wired society we are now, and how well documented Singapore is online, it’s ridiculous for someone today to grow up thinking that there is a paucity of queer writers.

What would you like audiences to get out of Desert Blooms?

One thing I mentioned in the script quite a bit is how young people were when they were doing all of this. There’s this headiness, this excitement to this whole period.

Tan Kheng Hua produced the Twenty-Something Festival a few years back, and I remember someone commenting to her, “Oh, when we were in our twenties, we were doing much more fearless things.”

Also, it’s about how one play connects to another, because these people were hanging out, they were seeing each other’s plays. They had friends in common, they had parallel experiences. It’s like reading the poems of the Romantic period, but also gossiping about what Shelley and Byron were up to.

That is this thing that I want to communicate to the audience. I want to show people that this was an extraordinary time in Singaporean cultural history, where arts, politics and society were undergoing a profound transformation. And queerness is at the centre of it.

By Daniel Teo
Published on 21 Nov 2019

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The Vault: Desert Blooms is a lecture-performance tracing the history of Singapore theatre from 1985 to 1995 through a queer lens. Desert Blooms was created by Ng Yi-Sheng, directed by Tan Shou Chen, and performed by Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai, Yap Yi Kai and Izzul Irfan . Find our more here.