The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia

"It is an academic book and it’s ostensibly about queer Indonesians, but to me it is also the most insightful book about Indonesia the nation-state and Bahasa Indonesia, which is the Indonesian language. Bahasa Indonesia is this amazing discursive invention that from my first day there struck me as faintly amazing, but I wasn’t sure why—until I found this book. In brief, Bahasa Indonesia is the nation’s lingua franca. It was used by Malay traders for a long time and then, in the lead-up to Indonesia’s independence, they decided to make it the national language of Indonesia, to unite the country. These early nationalists were really ingenious in picking it because, first of all, it’s really easy to learn: there are no verb tenses. And, they didn’t pick the majoritarian or elite language, which would have been Javanese (Java is the most populous island in Indonesia—and the world!—and a lot of the political elite, including every single president to date, are Javanese). They picked this trade dialect that was less prestigious and easier to learn and less politicized. And everyone just… learned it. So you get to go to this country that’s just staggering in terms of diversity, but with a modest effort, you can communicate with the vast majority of people. The closest comparison I can make is India, but in India, famously, no one speaks the same language. No one can agree on what it should be, for their own good reasons. But in Indonesia, they took this alternative path. Once I learned Bahasa Indonesia, it really unlocked the whole country—from the jungles of Borneo to Maluku, and even beyond national borders: Timor-Leste, peninsular Malaysia, Deep South Thailand. This was and remains amazing to me. Where does the The Gay Archipelago come in? First of all, Boellstorff takes ‘Indonesia’ as his geographic subject. That’s something, by his own account, anthropologists tend not to do; there’s a tendency towards hyperspecificity. But the ingenious thrust of his book is that modern queer identity in Indonesia is indivisible from the nation-state and Bahasa Indonesia. He argues very compellingly that ‘gay’ and ‘lesbi,’ which are loanwords, are specifically Indonesian identities that are completely circumscribed by this young nation. “Once I learned Bahasa Indonesia, it really unlocked the whole country” The first couple of chapters of the book are so insightful into what holds the nation-state together conceptually that I would recommend it to anyone who has been to Indonesia and wants to learn more about it. The conventional wisdom has it that social science or critical ‘theory’ obfuscates, but I’ve never quite believed that and this book is a great example of how a sophisticated theoretical framework can totally unlock some murky corners of lived experience, especially in a foreign country. One concept that he coins in the book that I find really compelling is ‘dubbing culture’, like in dubbing a movie. It’s the idea of borrowing English words for some of the new states of mind or phenomena in this young country, which is still less than a hundred years old. The book became super-useful to me when I started trying to understand some of the discourses swirling around modern Indonesia when I started reporting there. For example, the loanword ‘hoax’. ‘Hoax’ is a powerful, almost conversation-ending accusation lobbied by politicians today and also a mainstay of social media and WhatsApp propaganda. But I always wondered: why did they borrow the English word? One way to understand it is as dubbing culture. So Boellstorff’s book is not just about queer Indonesians, it’s about Indonesia the nation, but then it’s also full of these really wonderful stories about people like the first openly queer Indonesians, the first lesbian couple featured in a national magazine, and the early years of the now-veteran activist Dede Oetomo. It recovers this remarkable recent queer history that’s already imperilled given the awful gay panic that is now ubiquitous in Indonesia. Reading the stories in this book was heartening and somewhat hopeful. Today for sure, but this anti-LGBT—and again, they use this English acronym LGBT even in Indonesian, consistent with dubbing culture—is pretty new. The modern wave of anti-LGBT attacks started in 2016. Before then, most queer people had to be about as closeted as anyone living in a somewhat traditional society, but the virulent and politicized hatred is a more recent phenomenon. I didn’t expect it when I moved there, but yes. I started taking classes immediately and it was easy to learn, easy to spell and to read and write. It’s very forgiving and you get a lot of positive feedback when you start using it. So you can immediately hit the ground and start practising, because Indonesians are very happy to help you practise your language, for the most part."