Queerness in Motion: Queer Arts and Activism in Indonesia Hendri Yulius Wijaya
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of the first Indonesian gay organisation, Lambda Indonesia, envisioned the pathways of Indonesian gay politics in his unpublished paper, ‘Charting Gay Politics in Indonesia’.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 consciousnessraising 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 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
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