COMMENT | Reframing our conversation about the LGBT community

COMMENT | I didn’t know who Matt Healy was until I came across the Good Vibes festival. So, I turned to Wikipedia and YouTube. I may now place Healy and The 1975 on my playlist – if only for a while.

Healy’s lyrical acoustics and soft ballads get my accolade. But when he flagrantly flouts Malaysian laws and blatantly offends local customs with his ‘in-your-face’ sexual fluidity – that makes me mad.

As reported in the BBC, Healy insulted the Malaysian government and said he was “furious” that he made “a mistake when we were booking shows… I do not see the point of inviting The 1975 to a country and then telling us who we can have sex with.”

Healy’s drunken slobber with his male bassist is all over YouTube. He pulled a similar stunt in August 2019 – to provoke the anti-LGBT establishment and propagate his gay politics.

However, Healy, a recovering heroin addict, does not identify as gay, according to his Wikipedia writeup. He describes his private self as being “soft and quiet”, that his “meta-layered” approach to performance often leads to public “misconceptions” about him.

Healy’s brandishing of a “white saviour complex” over the Malaysian LGBT community was “very patronising and very tone deaf”, according to drag queen Carmen Rose. 

In a podcast interview with Rice Privilege, Rose said that Healy’s stunt “could possibly undo years of progress that the queer local organisations have been doing… (and) to say that (Healy) did something good for us is very patronising because you are not listening to what the local queer people have to say, and what it means for them, the damage that he has caused”.

His on-stage stunt has inadvertently presented the LGBT community as a scapegoat of the Good Vibes’ cancellation, at much financial cost to the organisers, local artistes, festival fans, food vendors, and various stakeholders.

The government’s knee-jerk reaction – like Healy’s stupid stunt – was as short-sighted as it was irrational with uncertain ramifications for the local creative industry and future music festivals.

The cancellation of the Good Vibes weekend raises a more fundamental question: How can we better understand the complexity of LGBT rights and ‘acceptable’ sexual norms, especially when a friend or family member comes out as gay?

Better understanding of LGBT community

I had more questions than answers when an extended family member came out after graduating from university. It was hard to know what to say or think. 

To this day, I still wonder if she was ever predisposed to become a lesbian. Why did I not see the signs?

Even as she continues to identify herself as a gay activist on social media, I have continued to read up more on the history of LGBT social movements, countries where homosexuality is still a crime, and LGBT rights in Malaysia. 

According to the Human Rights Watch report, and a global survey of public attitudes, discrimination against LGBT persons in Malaysia is prevalent. 

Add in race and religion, the prejudice intensifies. Being better informed about gay issues does not necessarily make me an ally of gay activists. Certainly not of the performative slobbering Healy type.

Reading up on LGBT studies does help me better understand the complex influences of biological, physiological and psychological and social media environments on same-sex attraction, and the consequences of coming out on family and friends.

Narrative should be minimising harm, empathy

Michael LaSala, author of ‘Coming Out, Coming Home: Helping Families Adjust to a Gay or Lesbian Child’, wrote in an article in Psychology Today, that in his decades of psychotherapy practice, his “most distressed gay clients are the ones who cling to the notion that being gay is shameful, perverted, and indicative of weakness.”

“Parents of gays and lesbians, like their children, must be able to withstand the slings and arrows that come with living in a world that persecutes those who challenge its restrictive norms…

“In order to develop and maintain good self-worth, gays, lesbians, and those who love them must grow to learn that some of the established ideas are just plain wrong.”

Given Malaysia’s anti-gay jurisdiction, families are just as affected by the social and cultural stigma of homosexuality as their gay daughter or son. 

Malaysia is among 68 countries in the world that still criminalise consensual sex among LGBT couples. This comes as no surprise given our traditional conceptions of gender roles and belief in the ‘natural order’ and purpose of male-female sexual union.

The Healy stunt should make us ponder how LGBT individuals across racial and religious lines are being perceived, persecuted, or accommodated in our communities.

Ultimately, the Malaysian narrative of homosexuality should be framed less by moral judgment and the Penal Code.

It should be more about minimising harm to LGBT individuals in their own pursuit of personal fulfilment and showing empathy for their fears in a jurisdiction where their private intimacy and way of loving will land them in jail.

ERIC LOO is a former journalist and educator in Australia and a journalism trainer in parts of Asia.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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