Safe SPACE

For queer people in Singapore, community is hard-earned. Jesslyn Lye takes a tender look at how far we have come in terms of the spaces we have built and where we can go from here.

It is my third week of junior college and I am seated along a long table in the crowded school canteen, squeezed shoulder-toshoulder with my new theatre classmates. At the far end, two of my new friends converse loudly and unabashedly about the trials and tribulations of secondary school crushes. There are discussions of unrequited love and the things they have done to impress enigmatic school seniors. Both my friends have come from single-gender secondary schools. No one bats an eyelid. I stay quiet and focus on finishing my lunch, but on the inside, I’m amazed. How are people so comfortable in their queerness?

The theatre was the first space I found myself in after I realised I was queer. Within a year, I went from barely being able to acknowledge my identity to being entirely comfortable in my own skin. Without looking for it, I had stumbled into a safe space.

It was only after my classmates and I left the theatre that I started to feel increasingly out of place. Having turned 18 and no longer stuck in rehearsals from morning to night nearly every day, my friends began frequenting queer parties of all sorts.