photographer’s note
02
I took these photos in a place I may never be able to find my way to again. It was after rehearsals, and I was with my castmates. I didn’t know where we were exactly - some indie district - but the streets were pretty and W said they knew the way back to the station, and we all followed. Quaint bookstores and hipster coffee shops melded into pubs and karaoke lounges as the evening melded into night. Places I wasn’t expected to be, and in a time I wasn’t exactly trusted to be around them. But then again, nobody had ever expected me to join a queer theatre project either. (I don’t think my family even quite knew what I had signed up for). A tribe of wigs and brightly-dyed hair, of unexpected names that we claimed for ourselves somewhere along the line anyway. People I wasn’t expected to be with. People who wanted our deviating, unexpected stories to be seen. It was why we were all here together, and in those back alleys with my colourful head and uncommon name just like theirs, I felt safe amidst all the expected “dangers” I’d been warned about. I felt queer. I felt alive. We passed yet another karaoke pub, one with neon beams lining its outer corridors. Laughing and walking with my castmates, the rainbow light seemed to signal that I had found a new type of home away from the expected mold, both in this community I’d found, and in myself, breaking away from all expectations. It was man-made as we were, creating our own identities and names and hair colours, but shone twice as bright as the real thing. Bathed in the fluorescent glow, I raised my phone camera to the ceiling. They say you can’t capture light, but I wanted to capture everything this rainbow stood for. I wanted to capture this moment forever. And I did. W knew the way and I didn’t, that is to say, I may never find my way back to that pub with its neon lights again. We haven’t seen each other as a full cast since the last curtain call later that month. But as sure as the photo of this artificial rainbow stays with me, so does the pride and comfort I felt that day in being queer. Michael
Editor’s Note Tw: Brief mention of homophobia and transphobia in the first paragraph. Between transphobic school policies and repeated homophobic attacks by members of the public, 2021 had not always been kind to the queer community in Singapore. As we open the curtains on 2022, we hope for a kinder year just as we do every new year. However, as we know that such is not always possible as a marginalized community, most of us also hope for a stronger self to see us through the hard times. But kindness and softness is often the strongest strength, and I hope we will all remember to be kinder to ourselves this year, regardless of whatever may come for us LGBTQIA+ folks. Once again, I thank all the artists and writers who made this issue possible. Reader or contributor, I hope this zine will continue to be a sliver of that kindness and safety you can return home to time and time again over this new year. Happy 2022! Michael Neo Founder Editor-In-Chief
Listen by kate m. Listen to your body: Paper in your throat? Time for a drink. A crick in your neck? Stretch a bit. And the strange, lasting pangs in your chest? Not a sickness; they recur, unfurling time-lapse quick shoulder skin in evening light dress belted at a hip slope of cotton slipping, supple ‘round her– aesthetic which you appreciate. Listen to your words: “My girlfriend,” your boy friend says. She waves hi. “You’re so pretty,” you say, to which she beams and you weirdly want to cry. “Who’s the hottest guy in class?” your girl friends ask. You sit, study boys. Squeeze hotness out per face like juice from shriveled lemons, but you don’t even like– “How do you define hot?” you ask, triggering a philosophical debate. It arrives in hindsight. A fist pushing out the membranes veiling your eyes, building up, pressuring tight, until it strikes. Now, listen to your mind: You liked that pair of pretty breasts, and owe no alternatives any taste test. Barricades solidify, soaring to the sky, unveiling the same world you see with your true eyes
Two Girls by kate m.
mired in the net, we spin blankets out of web, tapping fingertips on threads, hoping vibrations shiver back. Come noon, I wait by laptoplight, where conversations stray towards confessions at midnights. Underfoot, sea sands sway, still foundations for our every byte. Alaska, road trip– but first, to achieve: work, cash, flight. No more detail; this goal works best as a perhaps – someday met.
A/N: It’s way easier to meet queer people online than in reality, but the thing about online relationships is that you don’t have physical cues to understand where you stand. You know their secrets but you don’t know their names. Though the plans and what-ifs you promise are comforting all the same. :)
Some Women (2021) Review by Cab Some Women, Quen Wong’s daring feature documentary debut, clinches the Audience Choice Award at Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF) 2021 and updates the trans documentary for the new age.
Some Women (2021) / Tiger Tiger Pictures
One word that comes to mind when I think of Some Women (2021) is intimate, describing the incredibly privileged position the audience occupies as Quen Wong lifts the veil on her past. Turning the camera on herself, the director becomes subject: no longer is she a removed observer in the shadows1 but an active self-ethnographer, working to preserve stories about trans histories, and more importantly trans presents and futures. Quen Wong unearths a box of old photos that she had sworn to seal up forever, and at the end of the film goes through them for the first time with her loving husband, Francis. She looks beautiful and quietly dignified in them, but that is not the point. With the unearthing of the box of photographs, a once-painful reminder of her childhood, Wong exorcises the shame and secrecy that she has kept for all these years. Along with Wong, the documentary casts its focus on two other women, one from the generation before and after her: drag legend Anita who was born again in the sisterhoods formed among the women and queer people of Bugis Street in the 60’s, and Lune Loh (she/ they), an eloquent young trans activist. The charismatic June Chua (I will forever be fond of her, for giving me ice cream at Pink Dot) also
appears sporadically, brightening up whatever space she occupies with her zesty jokes and laughter. As Singapore’s first trans documentary, Some Women is beyond groundbreaking. When one thinks of trans documentaries, one thinks of the gritty film footage of the late 80’s and early 90’s. Paris is Burning (1990) comes to mind, featuring working-class Black and Latine trans and queer people. These specific moments in time, preserved forever in 16mm, are without doubt of significant historical and cultural value, serving as a window into a long bygone past (notwithstanding Paris is Burning’s complicated legacy and fraught relationship with mainstream co-optation). But therein lies the problem: the trans documentaries that come to mind are thirty years out of date. As Lune Loh laments, Paris is Burning could not be further from the realities of trans women, 30 years later in time and a thousand miles in distance.
Some Women (2021) / Tiger Tiger Pictures
Updating the trans documentary for the new age, Some Women as a documentary gives a glimpse into trans lives, past and present. It honours the trans and queer past of Bugis Street with stories from Anita and her friends, and with archival footage showing various Caucasian
men and women mingling with the glamorous and beautiful trans and queer youths who found refuge and safety in each other back in the 60’s. Did you know, for instance, about the five genders of the Bugis people, for which Bugis street was named after? It seems almost unfair that more than half a century later, as Quen stands at the same spot across Bugis Street, nothing remains of the vibrant trans and queer culture that once took root there, organically, before police crackdowns in the late 1970’s and urban redevelopment in the 1980’s.
Some Women (2021) / Tiger Tiger Pictures
Beyond reviewing the past, Some Women continues on to set its sights firmly on the present and future, where it is firmly unapologetic about its advocacy. Camera footage of the 2020 Ministry of Education (MOE) protest, where five trans and queer advocates stood outside the MOE Headquarters with placards calling for justice for Ashlee (an anonymous trans student denied support from her school for her transition), reminds us of the stark lack of justice and safety for trans people in Singapore. The footage makes my heart age: it reminds me of pride marches in 70’s USA captured on film, of men and women and people of every race and ethnicity under the sun (I’m thinking of Arthur J. Bressan’s Gay USA (1977)). Except the year is 2021, and the footage
is captured on a smartphone and not on a film camera or camcorder. A new queer documentary, for a new age. In an act of speculative transgression, several trans and non-binary participants parade and model dream uniforms that they would have loved to wear as students. Together, the digital and archival film images form a seamless narrative, telling the unbroken history of generations of surrogate daughters, thriving and living well. Despite the factual overtone, Some Women remains startlingly personal. Watching the documentary in the Carnival Cinema, I was reminded of Audre Lorde’s adage that the personal is political. Some Women, in many ways, feels like a spiritual successor to Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Lorde’s biomythography, combining history, biography and myth. It feels as expansive as that: at once, we learn of Quen’s own biography and also of the mythos and history of trans existence in Singapore. Do catch it in cinemas, where it’s now showing!
1 In landmark trans documentary Paris is Burning (1990), the unobtrusive presence of cis director Jennie Livingstone is barely notable in the film’s 78-minute run-time. What is notable, however, is the questionable ethics of Livingstone’s project, where participants in the film including were uncompensated despite the film’s financial and critical success.
Droplet by Ivy When I enter the ocean as another droplet The music of my being melts into its melodic expanse The bubbles gently hold my spirit In its hours of softness Their murmurs call to me With no name, no title The fishes see me With no colour, no shape When I am Foam So completely and utterly useless, that No man could ever think Of putting me in a fancy package to be Sold Or to give me a price In a room of gazing eyes When I am rhythm On the vastest continuum of rhythms Of water that embraces me eternally I breathe as a cell, along with millions And that is how I lived again
untitled kate m. I dream of kisses peppered on gooseflesh her lips finding ensnaring me from you.
A/N: Pining??? girls
artists Jia (she/they) physically a final year sociology student but mentally wants to be a frog on a lily pad poets kate m. (she/her) attempts to write in one document and ends up with writing in seven different documents and a piece of scrap paper. ivy (she/they) loves the arts and nature. She dreams of queer communes. writers Cab (they/them) is still a taxi. As of writing this Michael (they/them) is very cold. They are still collecting dead queer people (historical figures not homOcide) like Pokemon. etc Max (they/he) is about to graduate and dying from it.