Dear LGBTIQ Activists in Indonesia, greeting from the L-side.
I’ve been following your moves for a while and I just want say that I am really impressed and adore your spirit in fighting for the rainbow in Indonesia. You all are such brave soldiers.
Do you think our generation will have a chance to experience the first LGBTIQ parade (mardi gras)? Or maybe we need to buy acres of land, and build a 10m high brick walls around it, shut & lock the gates + have thousands of guard dogs, apes, and tigers who sniff and scare homophobias?
But, seriously, we are fighting in country with the biggest muslim population in the world, majority are fundamentalists. If we don’t have concrete strategy, we won’t get nowhere over the next centuries.
So far, we’ve been attacking the system,,, but nothing will really change until we have enough people like us (at least support us) in the parliament and the government – this will take centuries, even the LGBTIQ population in developed countries still have this problem!
Yes, we also tried to educate people that everyone has the freedom to choose their sexuality, but, again, psychological changes don’t occur over a day workshop. I think changing human’s ability to perceive the world is the ultimate goal of human resource development; BUT it needs time, endless education, and real life experiences.
I also think that giving people enough confidence to reveal their sexuality would endanger them physically and mentally rather than giving them pride to be themselves. What i mean by physical danger is that we would never know what would happen to these people when they leave their LGBTIQ zone and return to the ‘normal’ society. What i mean by mental danger is that these people will become prone to verbal abuse and threats from the ‘normal’ society. Unfortunately, not everyone has guts as strong as you guys.
And lastly, Indonesia is just simply too big (by size!), we just keep on falling apart!!! We have a little war here, we have a little war there, but we barely make sustainable changes.
I think we need safe territory, a little LGBTIQ village or town or city or even a county to keep us all together;
A place where we can be the ‘majority’
A place to give us the spirit to come out and act as we are,
A place where we feel ‘big’, confident, and comfortable of ourselves,
A place where we unite our intellectual forces to support our movements,
Do you think we can do that?
I think we can and we should learn from Ciputra who built the Bumi Serpong Damai real estate from a piece of empty land in the late 1980s. I know he took years, but he proves that building an independent city is possible!
DE.
