Saga is a limited-series podcast about the 2009 AWARE Saga, hosted by Bharati Jagdish and written and produced by Jasmine Ng and Kelly Leow. For Saga, the creative team interviewed 50 individuals about their role in the AWARE Saga and their observations about its legacy in Singapore.

One of those individuals was Alex Au, the activist (current vice-president of migrant rights organisation TWC2) and writer behind the long-running LGBT blog Yawning Bread. Alex’s involvement in the AWARE Saga back in 2009 was fairly marginal: His involvement as a speaker at an AWARE event on HIV, held shortly before the Saga, was cited by the New Guard as an example of AWARE’s supposed insidious “gay agenda”. Beyond that, however, Alex was diligently writing about the events of the Saga on Yawning Bread (though, sadly, we have been unable to retrieve his writing from 2009).

Kelly and Jasmine spoke with Alex in mid-2019. Though we were unable to find a way to include his interview in the main podcast, we wanted to post it, in a condensed version, here.

Listen to Saga and read more about the podcast here.

Kelly Leow (KL): Can you introduce yourself and give a brief background of how you came to publish your blog, Yawning Bread? 

Alex Au (AA): Around 1993, ’94, I was involved with a very nascent gay rights group called People Like Us. The internet was just about coming into play. People Like Us wanted to put out a newsletter. And you needed a license from the state to publish a newsletter. We put in an application, but it was denied. Were we surprised? No, we were not. But that put us in a quandary: Were we going to publish one in defiance of the refusal? Because we couldn’t claim ignorance anymore, right? My colleagues and I looked around for a solution and we came across then this newfangled idea called a website. Well, that could be where we could put our newsletter. It would have been one of the earliest online newsletters if we’d ever got to it, but we never got to it because it was, I think, technologically too far out for some of our peers.

So what the hell, I decided, OK, if we can’t do it collectively, I shall do it personally. And that’s how it began. Yawning Bread began as a kind of a personal web project for myself. Why Yawning Bread? Precisely because it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just sound. It started on 30th of November, 1996. And at that time, my chief interest was LGBT issues. And many of the early articles—extremely naive, extremely embarrassing—were not so much about the issues, but were a testimony to my learning curve. Saying all the stupid, silly things, but maybe getting better, getting deeper into the issues as the years went by. Within five, six years, I guess I’d exhausted all the nooks and corners of the subject and began to branch out into more general social political commentary. And that’s probably how you found us by the time the AWARE Saga rolled in.

KL: Do you remember how and when you first heard about the takeover at AWARE?

AA: I must have heard about it from like, what, 32 different sources all at the same time. So it’s really difficult to recall when exactly it hit you. It was not like the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I felt I had to write about it because it was very obvious that it was a significant event, and I had already, by that time, known some of the women who were in the Old Guard, and they were very affected by it. And so indirectly, I was very affected by it, too, because it was personal.

I do remember—definitely after the first Straits Times article came out—I actually took Constance Singam out for lunch. I knew she was very, very down. And I thought she needed a change of scene, and needed somebody to talk it over. So we went out to Great World City. Cedele. We had bread and soup. It was important to just give her two hours or so to unburden herself to some extent. For me to offer whatever little encouragement and fortitude or whatever one might call it, to her. That conversation was also when I had the opportunity to hear about the specific details of what actually happened, was not so much from the newspaper, but from Constance.

KL: And do remember your feelings after learning about the incident? Was it shocking to you?

AA: Was I shocked? This might happen in some other countries, but it was, I think, very new in the Singapore context. So yes, it was a shock.

The emergence of the background information, that there was a religious faction that motivated the takeover of AWARE, resonated very strongly with me and my peers in the LGBT movement, because for some 10 years prior, the major resistance to progress on LGBT issues had come from people identified with the American church. There was a certain strain of Christianity—so-called Christianity—that emerged in the 1990s, as the LGBT movement grew strength in the United States. And as soon as we in Singapore began to bring the LGBT issue into the public agenda, they too piped up and from that point on, I’m talking like 1998, they became the major locus of resistance. So when it, it emerged, that the perpetrators of the takeover of AWARE were similarly connected, well, it resonated very, very strongly. And then when it further emerged that part of their rationale for the takeover was the Old Guard’s, really, minor efforts at opening some space for the discussion of sexuality… then all the more we were appalled that things had gone so far. So yeah, it became important to express oneself, to link it to the broader issues and not leave it merely as a set of events that were naturally confined to just one civil society organisation.

We put two and two together very, very quickly. Remember that in 2007, two years earlier, when an attempt was made to repeal Section 377A in Parliament, there was one Nominated Member of Parliament [Thio Li-ann] who stood up and spoke very strongly, very disparagingly, about gay people, particularly gay men. And as soon as the connection was made that the mentor, leader of the takeover faction was none other than the mother of the same Nominated Member of Parliament, I think all of us in the LGBT community knew where they were coming from. The speed at which things clicked, fell into place, was astounding.

KL: What kinds of points were you making on your blog about the takeover? 

AA: I thought it was important to situate the issue in the larger issue of pushback from extremely illiberal waters. And to make the point that such things are going to be very, very damaging to Singapore as a whole. Because, ultimately, the takeover was a power trip. And that’s why I try also not to cast it purely in religious terms. Because Christianity is a wonderful religion in its own way. And, of course, there are many shades of Christianity. And we can too easily get carried away, merely referring to “the Christian group” or “the church group”, and by that means tar lots of others who have a very different view of their faith.

The thing about power trips throughout human history is that people on a power trip need followers, they need foot soldiers, they need combatants, they need people who would look up to them, worship them and basically do their bidding. It requires a suspension of rationality, it requires a suspension of skepticism, of questioning, for a power trip leader to succeed in what he or she is doing. And it so happens that a fundamental requirement of a lot of religions is that suspension of rationality. You have to ultimately believe in something that cannot be explained by logical, empirical means. Consequently, there is always that ripe body of adherence among those who are inclined to be religious, because fundamentally already they have suspended rationality. And that is why too often in this world, power trippers draw their strength from those who are already religious. Now, I’m not only talking about the takeover of AWARE. By all measures of power-tripping, the takeover of AWARE is a peaceful, small event. There is a power-tripper right in the White House even as we speak. There are much bigger examples of this. The Saga really was a power trip by somebody who totally believed in the righteousness of that cause, but who also really was unaware of their own personal motivations for what they were doing.

KL: You believe that on the part of the feminist mentor, there was actually some kind of cognitive dissonance, with perhaps subconscious reasons for her actions that she was not aware of herself?

AA: Exactly.

KL: And that there is a herd mentality, almost, in her followers?  

AA: Oh, no. Surrounding the key power tripper are often people who would draw affirmation, draw their own power-trip experience, by being close to the center of the endeavor. “Herd mentality” would excuse them from responsibility a bit too much.

KL: Oh, so everyone is going through their own little power-trip experience, at different tiers?

AA: Yeah, exactly. That’s right. And that gave them strength. The AWARE Saga was kind of a group effort. It gave them further reach into an already minimal community for support.

It’s not something that we should dismiss, because it’s going to happen again at some point. Power-tripping, as I said, is part of the human psyche. I’m not talking about a takeover of AWARE again. It’s a known thing that niche groups need to a, distinguish themselves and b, acquire justification for their existence and their programme by clearly delineating themselves from the other. And we know, obviously, that they like to pick on the more vulnerable “other” to buff their own ego and to give themselves moral justification for whatever campaign they want to embark on. Nothing unusual in that. You see that again and again.

KL: Thio Su Mien’s theory at the time was that AWARE was being used as a front for gay men and foreign gay people to spread the “gay agenda” via AWARE’s comprehensive sexuality education programme, and other various means. What do you make of this rather elaborate theory?

AA: If you know that the word “gay” is a kind of a push-button issue, and it immediately elicits a certain response from your audience, then anything can be put as a “gay agenda”, because you just use that word, “gay”, in order to elicit a response. Right? It could well be, like, “walking a dog is a gay agenda too”, if you really want to do something about walking dogs. So that’s how language can be used, yeah? But of course, it’s convenient if, of course, there is some rational connection with being gay, like inviting myself to speak [on a panel about HIV]. Or screening the [lesbian Taiwanese] film Spider Lillies. It’s close enough, convenient enough, for them to use words like “gay agenda”. And it has effect.

“Gay agenda” is one of those irritating terms that has been around since the earliest days of People Like Us, which we fought against. It’s never meant anything to us, except that it’s a label that’s often been thrown at us. And we’ve had to grapple with it—I don’t think very successfully. You see, it’s like this. There used to be a time when the word “queer” and “homosexual” were loaded terms. And the progressive movement managed to turn those two terms around in their favour. People could wear the terms “queer”, “lesbian”, “homosexual”, “gay” with some pride. But “gay agenda” was one we couldn’t turn around. We never invested it with new meaning. Instead, we found ourselves constantly struggling against the meaning imputed into it by the other side. On the defensive all the time, as opposed to being on the offensive. And that was the one front, I think, that the LGBT movement never made much progress on. Of course it doesn’t mean anything except what meaning the other side wanted to put in it for its own purposes. And the AWARE saga was once again another instance where it was used liberally. But the Old Guard had no argument against it. No comprehensible, digestible, in-a-nutshell argument against it. It was just so debilitating.

KL: Right—just putting the word “agenda” behind anything makes it seem sinister. 

AA: Something like that. I would say that you need to define a term, you need to come up with a term to throw back at them. You might say “the power hungry agenda” or “the power trip agenda” or something like that, and then put them on the defensive on that term, so that you take the pressure off on the term “gay agenda”. Really, there are plenty of clever marketing and advertising people around. We really should be tapping on their knowledge for this. But our technique should not be to play defense on “the gay agenda”.

KL: Terms like “gay agenda” and “promote homosexuality” caught fire, and were used very effectively at the time by the New Guard and its supporters to spread this kind of moral panic around Singapore. One other idea they had was that girls become lesbians because they have abusive fathers—that all lesbians come from broken families and they need protection. Why are these ideas so persuasive?

AA: Because they resonate with the already existent notion that to be healthy, to be normal, implies a certain sexual orientation, sexual behaviour, sexual presentation. Yeah, we all know these are all different things. It’s very complex. That complexity, however, makes it very difficult for it to get into the general consciousness. People prefer a simple narrative and a simple structure of this is how society is. Everything else is just outside normal. And anybody on a power trip would want to reinforce that abnormality by making exactly these empirically unsupported statements. The general community, that’s not very aware of these empirical facts of scientific knowledge, are easy prey to these tropes. So if you’re on a power trip, you just want to reinforce it, in order to win the people sitting on the fence over to your side, by making the other side as dirty as possible, as dangerous as possible. At the same time, you can position yourself as some kind of a saviour, some kind of messiah. Which, of course, at the very least, boosts one’s ego.

Jasmine Ng (JN): Connie mentioned when she spoke to us that she had been afraid that the LGBT community was very disappointed in AWARE’s Old Guard, and felt that AWARE had failed the LGBT community [by not standing up more strongly for LGBT rights prior to 2009].

AA: I  think one danger we may fall into, is to speak of the “LGBT community”. I tend to speak of the LGBT communities. In many respects, the so-called “LGBT movement” is a marriage of convenience. [laughs] The lesbian communities—I am not in any position to speak on behalf of them, nor do I even claim to know very much what goes on in their minds—may have felt a lot more let down by the Old Guard than gay men. And I think there would be a significant number of gay men who might have shrugged their shoulders and said, “What’s the AWARE Saga got to do with me?”

I’ve long known from speaking to Sayoni and the other offshoots of Sayoni that there was some expectation that AWARE should be speaking up more for the rights of lesbians. I can put on record here that I’ve been not been particularly supportive of that expectation. I saw it partly as disenfranchised lesbians latching on to an established organisation and hoping that the established organisation could do what they, as the disenfranchised, cannot do. Nothing wrong with that. In our migrant worker work, a similar dynamic is at play: The migrant workers are disenfranchised, and the organisation that’s run by Singaporeans is then expected to carry that burden for them. And sometimes, we may be a lot more moderate or conscious of the limitations and therefore we may act in ways that may not fully satisfy the disenfranchised. So that dynamic was probably happening at that time, and may still happen because lesbians continue to be unable to establish and register their own organisations.

Here’s a little bit of irony too: Pink Dot has becomes analogous to AWARE, vis-à-vis a particular gay agenda. A lot of people have criticised Pink Dot for it’s very middle-class, Chinese-elite aura, you know, and that it doesn’t speak for the working-class gay man, gay woman, working in a coffee shop. It doesn’t speak for the ethnic minorities dealing with the particularities of their communities and being gay at the same time. It seems to only address queerness within that Western framework. They’re valid criticisms, but at the same time, no organisation can be all things to everybody. You gotta choose what you want to be, make progress on that front, without foreclosing what your parallel organisations might want to do on their agenda. So this is again something to be very careful about.

It’s a message also for AWARE, that we ourselves should not be on our own power trip. Too many established organizations, after a while, begin to see that they have some kind of monopolistic rights to that particular issue in which they are situated. And they begin to say, “Our definition of the issues is the definition of the issues and we begin to foreclose opportunities for parallel organisations with a different take on the issues, serving slightly different agendas, albeit in the same general direction, to grow and have a voice of their own.” It’s a real danger that established organizations—and we can think of one called the People’s Action Party—tend not to be aware of.

Sometimes, the established organisation has privileges that others don’t have. I mean, it’s very easy to say, “Well, you just go out, and you start your own organisation”, but they can’t, you see, and they look to you to serve their interest. Because they don’t have the same privilege of experience or establishment, of acceptability, that you have. There’s a constant need to be humble and to question yourself and to try to see it from their point of view. It’s very, very difficult. It’s very exhausting. But I think it’s important. And I think that’s what this history should be. That’s how it’s going to be of value to those who are looking back when they didn’t live through the same times.

KL: People have told us that they were concerned about the emotional and psychological well-being of LGBT individuals during the Saga. Was that something that you were worried about as well?

AA: Don’t forget that the bigger trauma for the gay men was 2007, when the repeal [Section 377A] attempt failed, and you had really nasty speeches being made in Parliament, and the government took a position publicly that was very unsatisfactory. At least in 2009, when the AWARE saga was happening, it was one private party against another private party. It wasn’t a situation where the government was taking a position. So in the larger scheme of things, at least for the male side of the LGBT movement, the AWARE saga wasn’t all that central to their self-image and their own ideas of where they belong.

JN: How did you read how the government was responding, or rather not responding, to the events as it was happening?

AA: My guess, and it can only remain a guess, was that they were as flummoxed as everybody else. I don’t think they saw it coming. I mean, it would have been ridiculous to think that they ever saw it coming themselves. They were disciplined enough to keep quiet at the start. But eventually, they had to take a position. And I think my guess, again, is that at the end of the day, they saw what it really meant: not so much about the gay issue but as an example of a religiously motivated group flexing its muscles into a secular space. And therefore, and as a result, their statements were to say, “Let’s leave it to the private parties to fight it out.” But they also laid on the subtext that “we prefer that everything remain secular”. I think we all read it that way. I think they meant to communicate it that way. And to that small extent, it might have been helpful to the Old Guard.

KL: You mentioned that in 2009, the government was caught off guard by the AWARE Saga. But since then, we have seen a few scandals relating to conservative Christian groups, such as the NLB incident over the book And Tango Makes Three, and more recently, the controversy about the Swedish metal band Watain. Has the government acted differently during those compared to how they acted in 2009? 

AA: On one hand, you could say that the state has no further excuse anymore to be all at sea, when new attempts are being made by Christian-affiliated groups to further their oppression of gay-related expression. But unfortunately, I believe the government has never really worked out a coherent position; instead, it’s neither here nor there. But it’s part of a larger trope. I mean, I have an ongoing criticism that in so many ways, our government has become too comfortable in being reactive as opposed to proactive. In terms of economics, demography, Singapore’s foreign policy. We’re very good at reacting, but not very good at thinking of a path forward. So you have reactions, responses from the government that tend to be more conservative than they need to be.

Sooner or later, we’re going to be dealing with a very changed world. It’s very hard to know exactly what the changed world will be. We’re going to be dealing with massive technological changes, environmental changes, political realignments, and the over-valuation of preservation, of stability, is in fact going to be a recipe for the inability to respond to changes. Let’s not put blame on anybody—not AWARE, not any other civil society organisation. If I have to put blame, it would be on whoever it is who created the limitations for civil society in Singapore. There’s so little room to grow, to flourish, and to put down deep roots that would anchor the shifting sands when the sands shift, which they will. I think all histories have that element of Shakespearean tragedy.

KL: You were one of the more prominent bloggers covering the saga in 2009. What did you make of some of the other bloggers at the time? Specifically, there was one blogger, akikonomu, that called on people to boycott the New Guards’ businesses and that kind of thing.

AA: I don’t remember specifically what you cited about other blogs calling for boycotts, but I definitely think there is value in boycotts, I think it is actually a very powerful tool, for not just civil society, but for individuals, the empowered individual, to do something. In its aggregate, it has tremendous power, boycotts. And I think people, businesses or whatever, have to be accountable for what their leaders get up to. So even though there may be other shareholders in the business who had nothing to do with one prominent shareholders’ activities, that doesn’t absolve the business from watching out for itself. So if others mobilised, good on them, you know.

And that multiplicity of voices and a multiplicity of ideas and directions is something that I would not diss. It was good that people were proposing different approaches. I remember seeing some posts on the internet that were pretty critical of the Old Guard as well. I think there has to be space for that.

KL: At one point, some of the individuals in the New Guard started to receive death threats. This affected them greatly. They talked about this a lot during their press conference, and later on during the EGM.

AA: I think it’s very frightening for people who have never encountered these things before. If we want to be a vibrant society, I think we’re going to have to live with [the possibility of threats], though that is not very comforting. People go overboard. They make threats. Again, and again, again, and again, I think we need to make a distinction between verbalisations and actual acts. I think it is important to have a robust investigative body that can get to the root of these threats, and is distinct from trying to police speech. Maybe it’s just easier to police speech. But in societies that want to take shortcuts, we prefer to deal with the symptoms, not with the roots.

KL: Some have pointed out to us that the LGBT community itself receives death threats often.

AA: But where does that argument get you? Do I wash away the other side’s death threats by saying “I’ve also received death threats”? That conversation is not gonna go anywhere. I would much rather say, look, there will always be crazy people who will make death threats. Some mean it, some don’t mean it. The danger will be those who mean it and we need to do something then.

JN: Have you ever received death threats, or a lot of hate mail? 

AA: No. That’s a good question. Maybe my dismissiveness, if you wish to call it that, is simply because of the peculiarity of my personal experience, being lucky enough not to receive death threats. Hate mail maybe. Death threats, no. People respond very differently. I don’t dismiss the fact that your life could be temporarily disrupted [by a threat].

KL: Did you attend the Extraordinary General Meeting on 2 May 2009?

AA: No. I remember strongly that at a time of the EGM, the policy in place was that men could only be associate members. And that meant no right to vote. As a matter of principle, I didn’t like the discriminatory flavor of that. That meant that I couldn’t attend. But that was fine. I didn’t have to attend. There were enough friends involved in the whole saga to wallop me with all the details. I kind of got a blow by blow account of it. Yeah.

KL: Did you expect the result?

AA: The reason it was so important was that it was sewn on a knife edge. I had no right to expect one result or another. So it was a huge relief that it turned out the way it did. It wouldn’t be the end of the story, because I think the grumbling continued after that, especially from the lesbians.

JN: You mentioned that many people presented their own narratives, right? One example is that the New Guard themselves tried to spin the Saga as a victory for them. Because they got AWARE removed as a vendor for MOE’s sexuality education programmes. So depending on where you stood, many people read the aftermath of the Saga very differently.

AA: Is it any surprise that there are different narratives? It’s in the nature of things that people might genuinely have seen it in different lights. And also that, for their own purposes, subsequent to the event, people would prefer a certain spin to be perpetuated. So yeah, that’s par for the course. That’s the beauty of history, you keep recording different takes on it. Are the New Guard wrong to say that they achieved what they wanted? No, they’re not wrong. So as much as there’s reason to celebrate what happened at EGM, as much as there’s reason to be grateful for all the efforts that people put in to support the retaking of AWARE, I think one must not forget that at the end of the day, it’s not very clear what that really achieved. There can be different takes on what was achieved, many of them quite valid. Being in constant communication with a lot of lesbians, I was acutely aware that there was a lot of dissatisfaction. They felt they had a right to receive greater support from AWARE going forward after the Saga. They felt disappointed they didn’t get it. Was that expectation valid? Again, you can dispute that. I must say that what has resulted in 10 years is a certain stasis. Nothing seems to have moved very much. So if stopping change was on the agenda of the New Guard, maybe you could say that’s partly achieved as well.

KL: Stasis on the part of the LGBT movement?

AA: Yeah, in terms of the state’s position, as opposed to social change. It is terribly disappointing. I think there was a period in the first 10 years of the century, from 2003 maybe until 2010, 2011, in which you could see a certain effervescence on the subject of the place of LGBT persons in Singapore society, and the rights and equality and so forth. But there have been a number of setbacks ever since. There was a high court case and the Supreme Court case where there was a challenge to the constitutionality of Section 377A. And it failed. So everybody got very discouraged by that. And it’s been a lot of treading water ever since. What has been important is that at a personal level, social level, the trend of LGBT people being out has continued. A trend that I would say kind of started with People Like Us in the 1990s.

JN: Do you think this kind of power grab could happen again, perhaps in subtler ways?

AA: Well, don’t imagine that history repeats itself precisely. It never does. But can you imagine a power grab by some group of some otherwise liberal voice in order to stop its liberalism? Maybe a media organisation—a takeover of a media organisation in order to change its editorial stance? Yes! It is one of the constants of human history that there are going to be egotistical, power hungry people, who will use what means they can—and quite often religious identity is a very useful lever—to get adherents and supporters and allies to go on their power trips. It may not be AWARE; it could be some other organisation that used to be a pillar of the liberal establishment.

JN: Does it then tie back to what you said about being resilient, that society needs to also allow for fractures and not be so brittle—that you need discord to some extent in order to be able to build up some other kind of nimbleness?

AA: Yes. And the risk mitigation that we need to put in place is to try to somehow create a society that can cope with, adapt to, the changes. We must seize the initiative. If the state can’t carry out all its responsibilities, then the rest of us have to do it. We have to agitate for that right to experiment, to adapt, to argue it out. Who’s holding us back? Why is civil society so handicapped? Why don’t we even have our own data? You can only go so far by being hippie flower people. Ultimately, you need organisation, you need mobilisation, you need resources, you need money, you need dedicated people working full time at it, to make change.

I have a very complicated reading of what really happened in the AWARE Saga. I think that what was ultimately fatal—if not fatal then, it would have been fatal later—for the New Guard was that its message could not really travel. They were trying to sell a product that inherently cannot travel. You can have the most fantastic brand campaign, really slick, you can push it out to all sorts of distribution outlets, but that’s still not going to guarantee your market share or a sale, because there’s something inherently wrong with your product. And so in the short term, you can create a lot of buzz, you can make an impact, especially when people are not expecting this product to be launched. But there is a flaw in the product. And the flaw of the New Guard’s product was that it was a very ungenerous in spirit. And in this world, I think people want to be generous in spirit. There’s as a certain human aspiration throughout history and throughout all societies and cultures: People want to be good. And it just cuts against the grain of a lot of people’s nature to be so angry, so exclusionary.

On the other side, of course, it was an absolute wonder that despite all the shambles, that loose coalition that was the Old Guard and their new allies somehow managed to come together. It was really wonderful to see. You could say that it was almost accidental that at the end of the day, they prevailed. But that’s how it is. We cannot explain everything. Sometimes just things just happen. Let’s never forget that sometimes accidents, good accidents, happen.