Queer Arts and Activism in Indonesia
By Hendri Yulius Wijaya

'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.

Photograph of Hendri Yulius Wijaya. Image courtesy of Hendri Yulius Wijaya.

This essay is a preview of the content that will be published in Check-In 2022. If you would like to support the making of this publication, you can make a contribution here.

In 1982, Dédé Oetomo, a co-founder of the first Indonesian gay organisation, Lambda Indonesia, envisioned the pathways of Indonesian gay politics in his unpublished paper, ‘Charting Gay Politics in Indonesia’. In the early stage of the movement, gay activists had to reach out to gay men across the archipelago and promote a more positive understanding of homosexuality to society. Next, the activists could start engaging the press and set up a gay publishing house to continue their consciousness-raising efforts for gay people. Once the gay community was politically solid, Oetomo expected they would subsequently persuade the government to legalise specific laws to protect their identities. As the activist practices on the ground do not always progress linearly, consciousness-raising and community formation using diverse approaches remain at the heart of Indonesian queer activism to the present, alongside their legal struggles to challenge the existing discriminatory laws.

This year, still facing the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing hostility from society toward queer people, Indonesian queer artists and activists have continued to engage various art forms and technological infrastructures to define queerness, solidify the community, and forge connections across queer Indonesians. In this brief kaleidoscope, I particularly focus on the art production and circulation, mostly related to literature and written texts, arising from the grass-roots. What is also important to acknowledge here is that I do not intend to produce an exhaustive list. The term “queer” I use throughout refers to LGBT people and their non-LGBT allies that work in collaboration to produce and distribute the arts. Recently, a similar term has also been increasingly embraced by Indonesian LGBT activists to denote the diversity of sexualities and genders beyond the popular identity category of LGBT. For these reasons, queer in this context refers to non-normative gender and sexual identities while remaining attentive to its capacious strength in expanding what it can and might encapsulate.

Literature, while being central to the imagination of queer lives and worlds, also invite us to think about what is and can be considered queer literature proper. At the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF) 2021’s ‘The Many Faces of Gender in Literature’ session in October 2021, as one of the speakers, I raised this question to posit a long history of the Indonesian queer literature that has emerged, involved and proliferated from the local grass-roots and independent or smaller publishers which often had relatively limited resources compared to big, mainstream publishing houses. Specifically, I asked whether and to what extent we can meaningfully position short stories and poems published in the queer organisations’ zines and websites as part of the Indonesian literature landscape. In the same panel, the presence of Stebby Julionatan, a UWRF emerging writer from Probolinggo in East Java, also led us to consider the role of smaller or independent publishers in queer literary production. His most recent novel about queer lives in both small and big cities, ‘SEKONG!’, has been published in July 2021 by independent publisher Basa Basi. As LGBTQ+ novels and books have increasingly become a distinct and marketable category, a critical approach to examine the inclusion (and also the simultaneous exclusion) in making and institutionalising the category of queer literature proper or LGBTQ+ literature is more than necessary.

Attending to the role of publishers entails an exploration of the infrastructures that make possible queerness to arise and traverse across boundaries. In June 2021, EA Books, a smaller publisher based in Yogyakarta, released a call for queer non-fiction manuscripts for their latest book series ‘Seri Queer’ (Queer Series). It was then followed by the release of ‘Queer Etc.’ as the first title under that series. This personal essay collection brings together 17 writers from diverse backgrounds—including trans, the non-binary, people with disability, people living with HIV, and ethnic minorities—to configure multiple forms of queerness that cut across gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, and social class. Taking a similar step, in November, Buku Mojok, the sister publisher of EA Books, also invited several Indonesian fiction writers coming across different genres and locations to collaboratively prepare a queer speculative short story anthology for publication in 2022. All these attempts do not just reflect but actively generate a supportive and queer-friendly arts ecosystem. Rather, this move should be understood as an attempt that is inseparable from the early gay activists’ vision of creating a gay publishing house for consciousness-raising and community formation through art activism.

Sadam Husaen (designer), ‘Call for Manuscripts’. Image Courtesy of EA Books, 2021.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet and its technological platforms have also facilitated queerness to dismantle walls and borders. At the same time, for some artists and activists, the lockdown summoned attempts of journeying inward to the self, locating queerness inside and subsequently expressing it through art forms to form a deeper connection across queer individuals. Among their various online activities bringing queer individuals and allies together like book discussion and movie screening, one of the highlights from Panggung Minoritas (Stage of Minorities), a safe learning space for gender, sexuality, and minority issues in Bandung, West Java, is the ‘Saint of Our Own’ event in October 2021. In this activity, Panggung Minoritas invited the participants to project, imagine, and translate their faith and spirituality into a drawing of a saint figure. This activity is aimed at connecting queerness with religion and/or spirituality since both aspects are often misunderstood as irreconcilable. Further, inspired by the zines published by queer organisations, like the now-defunct Lambda Indonesia and the longest-running one, GAYa Nusantara, Panggung Minoritas frequently and independently published zines on gender and sexuality issues, which are distributed underground to avoid backlash from anti-queer groups.

Moving across different art forms and platforms is the collaborative project ‘CERITRANS: Cerita Transpuan Lintas Batas’ (‘Trans Stories Transcending Borders’) between InterSastra/House of the Unsilenced, Eliza Vitri & Infinity, Sanggar Swara—a Jakarta-based trans community, and Khairani Barokka—a poet and disability justice activist based in the United Kingdom. Other collaborators include Seven Ten Media, Cindy Saja, Ruth Marini, and Hore Besok Libur. From March to June 2021, the project mentored ten trans women to write their personal stories and translate them into performances to be filmed. The performance videos, along with the stories in Bahasa Indonesia and English, are made accessible online on Sanggar Swara’s website and on YouTube. Again, this project brings us back to the centrality of infrastructures in circulating queerness, allowing it to be unbounded by space and time usually found in live performance. The project aims to utilise arts to increase respect for trans stories and acceptance of Indonesian trans women.

Cindy Saja (designer) and Rayner Wijaya (photographer), ‘CERITRANS’, 2021. Image courtesy of CERITRANS.

These art activities are run by people whose work is often voluntary or relies on grants from donors. This situation has resulted in the lack of fair remuneration, health care, and institutional support for their well-being, making them more economically and socially precarious. In the same year, Ratri Ninditya and Harits Paramasatya, two researchers from Koalisi Seni, released a research report, ‘Merawat Seni Dengan Hati: Kondisi Kerja Emosional Perempuan’ (‘Caring for Arts from the Heart: Emotional Labour Situation of Women’). In brief, based on a survey and in-depth interviews with the women’s artists, besides the lack of well-being support from the workplace, the report demonstrates to what extent both cisgender women and transwomen are affected by gender stereotypes, making them more susceptible to burnout and frustration in and beyond the workplace. Such a vulnerable position is primarily caused by the emotional labour of these women in the workplace; a few examples are suppressing negative emotions, constantly showing positive feelings to the stakeholders, and adhering to feminine gender roles to show they are women proper.

“While the title ‘Queerness in Motion’ attends to the ways queerness emerges and circulates across different forms and forms in the arts and cultural production, I also show that this proliferation of queerness is also made possible within and through specific infrastructures that are sustained by artists’ and activists’ labour. ”

While the title ‘Queerness in Motion’ attends to the ways queerness emerges and circulates across different forms and forms in the arts and cultural production, I also show that this proliferation of queerness is also made possible within and through specific infrastructures that are sustained by artists’ and activists’ labour. Economic precarity and the imperfect politics of curation, inclusion, and visibility continue lurking underneath. Queer arts and activism should continuously interrogate what lies beneath their visibility while at the same time considering what queer theorist Jasbir K. Puar hints in her 2017 book ‘The Right to Maim’ as “the cost of getting better”.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of A&M.

This essay was first published in CHECK-IN 2022, A&M’s second annual publication. Click here to read the digital copy in full, or to purchase a copy of the limited print edition.

Read all My Own Words essays here.

About the writer

Hendri Yulius Wijaya is an Indonesian writer. His latest academic publication is ‘Intimate Assemblages: The Politics of Queer Identities and Sexualities in Indonesia’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), and a poetry collection, ‘Stonewall Tak Mampir di Atlantis’ (EA Books 2020). He is currently co-editing an edited collection on queer Southeast Asia.