Don't Ask, Don't Tell

By Natalie Shobana Ambrose                                                                            
theSun, Malaysia (page 18)
January 27th, 2011

Only polite conversation was allowed, no talk of politics, religion or sex. However, it seemed impossible after a while to follow that rule and impossible while writing today’s column.

In America a number of teenage suicides sparked the nationwide campaign ‘It gets better’ which saw politicians, religious leaders and celebrities record blips saying it gets better and that people should be free to decide their sexual orientation. A common thread in these suicides – the issue of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered commonly known as lgbt.

That openness triggered a local to tell the world that he’s gay and it’s OK which sparked outrage and now he fears for his life after he received death threats. All this happened in the same month of the same year, in two different parts of the world, with two very different reactions.

Here in Malaysia we practise the don’t ask, don’t tell routine. Even if we know someone is out rightly gay, we pretend, avoid talk of it to their face and carry on. If in a more arty farty setting, it’s the norm and probably shoved in your face. So better just don’t ask, don’t tell or sometimes, we kid ourselves and ask when an out rightly gay person will be heterosexually married. We contradict ourselves so often in being pious, yet as a nation we are fed too much detail about sodomy cases in our papers.

In some countries it’s easier to be gay because if a man is seen with a woman other than his wife, mother or sister, it becomes a big problem. However if a man has a male guest in his house, no one questions or intrudes. While women hanging out together is quite natural so who would even question?

We condemn people who come out and say they are gay, yet we have extremely feminine men on local television. It may be two different things but one has to wonder what the guidelines for condemnation are.

Personally I don’t know if sexual orientation is something we’re born with or something we’re taught or even if it’s a combination of both. I do know what the holy books say and yet I also know that judgement is God’s right not ours and that bullying is not condoned by any religion. There are far worse acts that are a daily occurrence in our society - child pornography, paedophilia, incest, rape where perpetrators roam free. Shouldn’t these be the monsters we judge and punish?

Further more, if we believe that we have the right to condemn such acts, then there are other laws that govern what can and cannot be done with regards to sex but how many people actually follow them? And being heterosexual does not grant anyone immunity from such sins.

If one is being indecent then stop it but who’s to say what is indecent. We are extreme, either we condemn or we pretend it doesn’t exist. Foreign television programmes with lgbt storylines are not censored, while Malaysian productions are not to have such storylines. We can pretend all we like, or think that it only happens in foreign countries because in Malaysia, people on tv end up becoming heterosexual. Why are we kidding ourselves?

These issues are real and in real life we can’t just censor it. It would be easier if everything was black and white and clear, but it isn’t. We have to deal with it, we have to cut our prejudices and ask ourselves, if someone we love deeply told us they were gay how would we react.

Would you love them any less? Would you bully them to the point of suicide?

At the end of the day, what happens in the bedroom of consenting adults is nobody else’s business, how we treat others is what matters.

Natalie knows that it’s easy to ignore or pretend difficult issues don’t exits but the reality is they do, and we need to address them compassionately.
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