Turning the lion city pink: interrogating Singapore's new gay civil servant statement

Abstract

On 4 July 2003, Singapore’s former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong dropped a small bombshell of an announcement in the main local newspaper The Straits Times. He declared, “In the past, if we know you’re gay, we would not employ you. But we have changed this quietly.” Now, the government will employ gay Singaporeans in ‘certain positions’, even sensitive ones, provided that these civil servants openly declared their sexual orientation. Expecting considerable indignant resistance form the conservative quarters, Goh attempted to placate them: “We are born this way and they [i.e. gay people] are born that way, but they are like you and me. The furore that came in the wake of this announcement saw one very heterosexual man publicly decrying that the government had lost its moral authority to rule. To those of us more experienced in queer politics elsewhere, this man’s outrage seemed misplaced. Goh was merely offering employment to openly gay men and women, not legalising same-sex marriages as had happened in Toronto earlier in the summer. So why the public uproar?