Bangkok, 21 February 2025. On the large screen of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) auditorium, a man in white dances a traditional Lao dance: gentle, effeminate. The clip was interspersed with his talking head, confessional style, sharing the struggles and enlightenment he’d found through dance. Except it wasn’t just about dance. It was about an exploration of queerness in a cisheteronormative world–in his context, the conservatism of Lao society.

Other films showcased similar struggles. LGBTQIA+ refugee Warren Hallett reminisces on his traumatic experiences before giving us a glimpse of the dance that got him severely abused as a child, this time with a wide smile on his face. Other films: Cis and trans girlhood in Brunei. Elderly trans women taking care of gardens in Indonesia. Notes of encouragement stuck in corners across Manila. An animated interpretation of Sappho’s Fragment 147.

The room was quiet in the way film screenings were, but the empathy for the characters on screen. was palpable. It had been raining earlier that Friday, and at less than 50 people, the large auditorium was slightly less than half-full. Regardless, it was a decent turnout for Pride Playground–SEAQCF’s satellite event in Bangkok that I helped organise–and the audience appreciated the discussions and collection of films screened that day. The screening closed off with the concert film of Indonesian lesbian icon Kai Mata, yet another one with a lot of dancing in it. People cheered.

Bangkok had that queer-friendly energy you could hardly find anywhere else in Southeast Asia. The screening happened one month into Thailand’s marriage equality bill, and already by that time thousands of gay and lesbian couples had registered their marriage.

Two weeks after the screening, SEAQCF and New Naratif hosted a week of online discussions to follow up on all of the activities they have conducted in the months prior. The question on everyone’s mind, of course, was whether the kind of queer-affirming energy reflected in Thailand’s marriage equality bill–and more specifically in that space at BACC that Friday afternoon–can become a norm instead of an exception in the rest of Southeast Asia.

Queer Spaces of Not Knowing
“Why should it become a norm?” people may ask. “Isn’t LGBT a Western import?”

This is, unfortunately, a common objection against queer rights in Southeast Asia (and many of the non-Western world). It’s hard to rebuke: the initials are English. The idea of gendered pronouns is English. Never mind that Southeast Asia has plenty of indigenous queer legacies–the erasure has run so deep most people are no longer aware of the history and indigeneity of queer identities in their own traditions.

The opposite is true, really: Colonisers are known to be extremely strict in their enforcement of cisheterosexuality, so much so that scholars have theorised how genocide can be seen as a performance of heterosexuality. In the colonisation of Southeast Asia, queerness of all flavours was dethroned from its pedestal of sacred spiritual identities, straight down into the abyss of plague and pollution. Queerness is seen as an infectious disease, an aberration that must be corrected. This was how we ended up with the false idea of conversion therapy and censorship of LGBTQ+ content, lest we influence others into our sinful ways of life.

It was against this background that the discussion on building queer communities and safe spaces was held. Moderated by Fatima Qureshi with Fairuza Hanun as a discussant, Monday, March 3^rd’s discussion featured Anan Bouapha, Raham Abyasa Dirgantara, Adolf Ximenes, Arra Foncesca, and Kuro Roi.

People feel threatened by what they don’t know. Seeing queerness as a disease is a framework of knowledge–a false and harmful one that nonetheless serves to fulfil a gap in our very narrow knowledge of gender and sexuality imposed on us by colonialism. To counteract this, then, a safe space must embrace not knowing, championing disepistemology as opposed to potentially suffocating epistemological systems.

A safe space that enforces any system of knowledge–fixed labels, non-negotiable levels of visibility, and so on–therefore can never be safe, no matter how queer-affirming their brand might be. Conversely, queer-friendly safe spaces can be fostered in the most hidden of spaces. A queer-affirming teacher, for example, can ensure the safety of the classroom space for all marginalised identities, even if this means protecting students from their own parents.

This requires a careful engagement with vulnerability. Questioning one’s own system of knowledge is a harrowing process, but it is indispensable in fostering and maintaining safe spaces. It is, after all, what all queer people do in coming to terms with their gender identity and sexuality, and what it means for us to live in a world so blatantly designed against people like us.

Fairuza Hanun brought up the parallel between this process and fostering child-friendly spaces. According to their observation, safe spaces are, by definition, spaces that embrace the vulnerability of the not-knowing of childhood. Therefore, to create a safe space is to child a space as such.

As a child, we learn through embracing our not-knowing, exploring spaces to share stories and make our own. Is this not also the definition of solidarity? As Koris Kolektivu of Timor Leste shared, solidarity happens when we step up to take the responsibility of caring for other people’s stories.

Responsibility is a powerful keyword here. Safe spaces happen when we embrace the vulnerability of not-knowing and give as much room as needed for everyone in the space to explore this epistemological uncertainty: You don’t have to know everything. You don’t even have to know that much about yourself yet. Take your time. You are safe here.

To grow, we require mutual responsibility. So we continue: Explore to your heart’s content. Your story is safe here. We will make sure of that.

It is through this foundation of solidarity that communities thrive. And it is through storytelling, story-sharing, and story-keeping that communities resist erasure.

Queer Culture in the Peripheries
“We’ve had queer public figures before [the Indonesian independence of] 1945,” says Nurdiyansyah Dalidjo, writer and member of SEAQCF’s Advisory Board. Speaking on the queer literature discussion on March 4^th, he was accompanied by Kukasina Kubaha, Aiden Nguyen, and Mark Anthony Cayanan in a session moderated by Ng Yi-sheng and myself as a discussant.

Diyan continues sharing what it was like in 80s and 90s Indonesia. Gay organisations have started blossoming in the country since 1982 (Lambda Indonesia, now Gaya Nusantara), and the decades that followed saw a thriving queer scene. The Philippines too, had its first gay publication in 1994, whose co-editor, Danton Remoto, went on to found a political party of the same name.

It was only after the rising conservatism of the 2000s–worsening in the 2010s–that shutdowns of queer publications and persecution of visibly queer people became widespread that queer culture started going underground once more. A mixture of the right-wing turn in the global zeitgeist, anxieties post-2008 financial crisis, and an increased visibility with the birth of social networks are probably to blame, but it didn’t matter. Threats against queer people keep increasing, severely impacting the livelihoods of the queer community across Southeast Asia.

It is in this context that queer literature–its research, production, and archiving–finds itself relentlessly struggling. Like wildflowers amidst the cracks of barren concrete, they manage to blossom. Community archives, zine-making, and other collectively-produced literature projects became the driving force to link queer communities past, present, and future, ensuring the continuity of our voices.

“Shouldn’t we push for more mainstream acceptance?” asked an audience member. “Shouldn’t we strive to make mainstream publishers in Southeast Asia more accepting of LGBTQ+ stories, so that we don’t have to remain in the periphery?”

This was an interesting question–and the speakers had a more interesting answer. Of course, that kind of push is important–the more normalised LGBTQ+ literature and content is, the better. But it’s not an either-or situation. We’re not always in the periphery because we’ve been marginalised and sidelined. Sometimes we choose to be there.

Most of the time, the periphery–zines, community publications, and so on–are the only places where we can genuinely embrace not-knowing and experiment with new things. To prioritise the mainstream over the periphery is to prioritise establishment over exploration, and this perspective can be harmful in fostering queer communities.

Of course, exploration does not only happen in indie queer literature. For queer people, the primary site of exploration–indeed, the primary site of political struggle itself–is the body.

Queer Bodies as a Site of Political Struggle
Ishvara Devati is no stranger to science fiction. Her medium is not literature–it’s dance, and the occasional film and music explorations that come with it. Transcending biological humanity–in transhumanism or posthumanism, in the synthesis of hybrid beings–is more than just artistic exploration. It’s life. Because, like myself, Ishvara is transgender.

I resonate with this idea a lot. Ishvara was not the first to say it–trans people have always viewed the body as a site of transformation, experimentation, and self-determination in a way that ultimately feels closer to science and speculative fiction than the everyday reality of cis people. To exist in a trans body is to be thrown into constant dialogue between your identity and your physical presence, and there is hardly a stronger premise of speculative work than such profound existentialism.

“A trans person’s deadname isn’t a name that’s dead–it’s a name most people will remember us by when we’re dead,” I added to the discussion. “That’s why we find it so grating, so anxiety-inducing.”

I was once again a discussant in the March 5^th session moderated by Renan Laruan. Ishvara Devati spoke alongside Nerisa Ricci, Vatey Tan, and Oat Montien on the arts. I specifically brought up the idea of deadnames because, aside from sci-fi ideas, trans people are also very close to the concept of death, grief, and mourning–issues which Nerisa grapples with in her body of work.

Sparked by an untimely personal tragedy, Nerisa Ricci creates moving artistic performances on the invisibility of queer mourning. Ideas of absence, erasure, and invisibility echo as common threads in oppressed populations, but Nerisa takes it further: Not only are our existence erased, but our mourning of that loss is itself erased.

Giving visibility to this image of the invisible mourner–and, in turn, inviting the audience to imagine particular queer people in the afterlife as an invisible audience–is a driving force behind her work. I found it powerful and moving.

Strong emotional reactions are also a motive in Oat Montien’s art. “Most people didn’t expect to cry when they came to my exhibition,” he said. “I do erotica, after all, so they were clearly expecting other things. But a lot of them had tears in their eyes coming out of the exhibition hall.” He laughed.

A child of a woman who had to run a sex work business to make a living, Oat became intimately familiar with the violence and politics intimately connected to one’s body and desires. Erotica, for him, can serve as a path towards empowerment, some kind of reclamatory remedy for the day-to-day reality of cisheteronormative sexual exploitation.

I’m reminded of the Can Do Bar in Chiang Mai, run by sex worker collective Empower. The bar had a museum of sex work that showcased the inextricable link between Thailand’s historical role in the colonial era (and beyond) and its sex work industry. I’m reminded, then, of the safe spaces of solidarity of marginalised communities in the peripheries.

Such a spirit, unsurprisingly, is also what Oat embodies. Today, he runs an art space for queer people to facilitate these connections in Bangkok. “Queer people usually only get to hear each other through the chaos of bars and protests,” he says. “I would like to create a space for more queer encounters.”

The same sentiment is echoed by Phnom Penh-based Vatey Tan. If Ishvara sees the body as a site of transformation, Nerisa as a negotiation between presence and absence, Oat in the contradictions of desire and tragedy, Vatey finds value in communities–specifically, how encounters lead to new possibilities of exploration.

She is more concerned about the process rather than the output, because, for her, the togetherness of collective art-making is an underappreciated part of the art. As she put it, she makes art to create a space where “anything can be everything”, where the unknown is pregnant with new potentials of friendship and solidarity.

Queering Desire, Queering Production
This community-based approach, if it’s not already apparent, is a running theme throughout all of our SEAQCF discussions. The March 6^th discussion on queer films is just as strong a testament to that spirit as any other sessions. Moderating the discussion, I was first curious about the speakers’ visions on queer film–as a medium, in terms of inspiration and representation, in the production of gaze and desires–your usual film school banter.

I was pleasantly surprised when the discussion went much more fruitfully in another direction. Filmmakers Hong Anh Nguyen, Atikah Zainidi, Htet Aung Lwyn (Eddie), and Ineza Roussille, along with discussant Sinta Wibowo, were all very keen to talk about conditions behind the screen.

Hong Anh and Atikah are involved in more commercial film projects. Atikah works in lighting, which has traditionally been very masculine. But aside from the common challenges for queer people, what bothered them most was the lack of basic safety and appalling working conditions of many of their film workers.

“That is why we need to queer the production process itself,” said Ineza. Indeed, queer representation on screen won’t do any good if the industry still works under sexist, patriarchal conditions. “To queer the process means to make it collaborative and abolish hierarchy as much as possible.”

Ineza, who runs Srikandi Seni collective and Songsang Studios, its related queer film school initiative, emphasised how she mostly works with people who have never worked with films before and do not aspire to become professional filmmakers. This way, she’s more certain she’ll be able to keep the process queer and equal.

Eddie echoed the sentiment. Indeed, he actively avoids working on commercial films, since, as he put it, he just wants to make films with the people he loves.

But is there a way to queer the production process of more mainstream industries? Indeed, is there a way to queer our economic production and way of life in general, or at least push towards that dream, little by little?

Pride, or: The Struggle to Queer the City
There is–we call it Pride. The last and final day, March 7^th, was a discussion moderated by Megan Stevens featuring Iloilo Pride, Queer Language Club Bali, Hanoi Pride, and Dili Pride, with Jirajade Wisetdonwail (Maprang) of Bangkok Pride as a discussant. Central to the discussion was the spirit of Pride: In the treacherous, increasingly queerphobic waters of Southeast Asia, what is Pride trying to achieve?

Speakers shared the refrain so common to many anti-LGBT protests in Southeast Asia, one we touched upon earlier: Isn’t Pride a Western import? To this, Natalino Ornai Gutteres of Dili Pride had the perfect answer: Much more than anything else, Pride in Southeast Asia has its roots in anticolonial struggles. The Dili Pride, for example, is known more as Diversity March. For Nata, the march is an action in the direct line of tradition to Timor Leste’s political marches for self-determination against Indonesia.

Quang Tran of Hanoi Pride echoed this spirit further in his accounts. While the government of Vietnam has made significant strides in making conversion therapy illegal, stating that homosexuality is not a disease, Pride marches still draw a lot of negative attention for their political nature. Much more than queerphobic sentiments, Quang feels that the idea of marching for human rights in Vietnam is significantly more dangerous. This proves how Pride is situated much more in local political struggles for liberation than in the vague notion of Western cultural products.

Louela Prado of Ilolo Pride noted how dangers also lurk in their marches. Despite drawing crowds numbering in the thousands, it doesn’t mean everything is safe and accepted. In a country where the SOGIESC bill lay without progress for years, students are still forced to cut their hair to conform to the rules, and dissidents have a high risk of being red-tagged and persecuted, many people are still hesitant to be so vocal in their political demands during Pride.

But perhaps Bali is the least safe of all of the locations present. Purba Widnyana of QLC Bali shared how, to this day, any events related to Pride in Bali must be done in secret–no march, no publicity, in an invite-only verified venue. (And note that Bali is considered one of the most queer-friendly provinces in Indonesia!) Still, the spirit needs to be kept alive.

Reflecting on all this, Maprang of Bangkok Pride invited us to ask ourselves how we define success. Some Pride events are loud, city-wide political marches attended by over ten thousand people. Others are intimate, invite-only events attended by a couple dozen. One is not better than the other, as long as the spirit of joy and liberation is still there.

Pride takes after the decolonial movements in Southeast Asia. Therefore, Nata reminds us, Pride organisers need to ask: Have we reached the most marginalised?

Of course, reaching everyone would be impossible. Compromises need to be made. In Bangkok, for example, Pride was only able to gain widespread popularity–and thus funding–after pivoting to a more artistic approach instead of focusing on policy change. Organisers also need to determine how much corporate funding they may allow.

At the end of the day, there’s always push and pull between multiple factors. To conclude, Maprang reminded us that it is through these risky but necessary processes of learning that we grow together as a community.

Of Tiredness, Movement, and Rest
The rain had let up in Bangkok. The atmosphere was chilly as we all wrapped up the film screening and tidied up the venue. I still had work to do. I went with some friends to Siam to shop for some clothes–an irresistible activity whenever I’m in Bangkok–and, after some crepes, sat down at a coworking space to continue my work.

The world moves fast. It keeps moving faster in the geopolitical uncertainties of 2025. I look at the chaos and think back of what Maprang told the audience that Friday night. Being queer is exhausting–even when we’re at rest, the world doesn’t stop hurling us everywhere. Marriage equality may be legalised but anti-trans sentiments are widespread. There is pervasive fear in backlash if some Pride events ever go public.

But, Maprang says, in Pride, we rest. Our bodies may be marching a dozen kilometers, our legs aching, our shirts sticking to our back. But our souls, surrounded by a community dedicated to queer our world, are at rest.

“Aren’t you tired?” people often ask me. “Relentlessly doing all of this activism, traveling to places just to march?”

Of course I’m tired. But I will keep going. For our queer past, present, and future, and for all the stories people have shared and entrusted to me to retell and safekeep.

I’m tired, but I will keep going. I hope one day, all of us can finally have our rest.