Chapter 1:
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
Positioning the Gay Poet and/in the City

I am haunted by the sadness of men
hanging out at night
in all parks and alleys of the world.
-- Jaime An Lim, “Short Time”
This thesis reads and examines the poetry of four gay writers from Manila and
Singapore. The study positions the selected poets as writers operating within a
particular spatial context. The reading of their poetry thus takes into account both sexual
identity and the notion of place and is ultimately interested in locating the ways in
which patterns of urban production and sexual identity inflect the creative practice of
writing poetry.
In this thesis, I examine the works of Alfian bin Sa’at and Cyril Wong from
Singapore and J. Neil Garcia and Lawrence Ypil from Manila. Existing scholarship and
critical writings on most of these poets as well as creative commentaries done by these
writers themselves (through interviews and creative essays) often do not posit a vital
connection between poetic production and the urban environment. Scholarship makes
mention of their sexual orientation and alerts us to the various works and instances in
which such themes appear in their works. Alfian Sa’at for instance is notable for works
like the Asian Boys Trilogy as well as gay-themed poems in One Fierce Hour (1998) and
History of Amnesia (2001). Cyril Wong is widely regarded as Singapore’s “first openly
gay poet” (Ng et. al 12). J Neil Garcia is an academic, poet and literary editor whose
writings and academic work highlight the intersections between Filipino post-colonial


identity and gay identity. Ypil’s long poem “Five Fragments: A Confession” highlights
the varied experiences of coming out as is framed by the fragmented lyric form.
In this thesis then, I posit that the patterns which characterize the production of
urban space in Manila and Singapore enter the ways in which gay poets write about

what it means to be gay in a particular urban context. The position of the gay poet in
Manila and Singapore, I argue, is one where he utilizes the patterns of urbanism to write
about what it means to be gay in these spaces and to offer possibilities to reimagine
urban life. I argue and eventually demonstrate how both sexuality and geography enter
the process of poetic production.
While the works of these poets can certainly be appreciated (merely) for their
aesthetic merits, an examination of the poets’ various contexts can lead one to a greater
understanding of poetic production itself.

More nuanced appreciation for a poet’s

aesthetics takes into account the various threads that the writer eventually weaves into a
text. As far as this thesis is concerned, one finds in the poetry of these writers from
Manila and Singapore an aesthetics of fragmentation/self-splitting and confinement
respectively.

For Alfian and Garcia, there is an emphasis on the use of the everyday

Everyday space for these two poets is rendered as liminal space, creating dual
experiences of discomfort and transformation. For Wong and Ypil, there is what I
would demonstrate, a “domestic perspective” in the way they do their city writing.
Indeed, what is interesting in the way Wong and Ypil is how the kind of optic they use
to render urban experience. Much of city writing is done from outside space such as
streets. (Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur is one example). My reading of Wong’s

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and Ypil’s poetry on the other hand focuses on how representations of domestic space
are projected into the way they view urban experience. . Singaporean poet Ng Yi-Sheng

and Filipino Ronald Baytan whose poetic projects offer an interesting and exciting
challenge to the framework I seek to establish in the next few pages will make an
appearance in the concluding comments of the thesis.

In this introductory chapter, I will unpack the theoretical concepts I will utilize in
my analysis. In the first subsection, I draw upon Georg Simmel’s seminal work “The
Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) to show how urbanization is an orchestration a locus
of patterns. The discussion is complemented by a brief survey of how poets in the West
responded to these shift in patterns. The second subsection looks into the ways in which
one can compare Manila and Singapore. Here, I demonstrate how the patterns of
urbanism which characterize the production of space in Manila and Singapore are
horizontalized fragmentation and verticalized compression respectively. I extend the
analysis by looking at the different ways in which certain poets write about their cities.
The third and final subsection positions the relationship between the gay poet and urban
space and problematizes the role of the gay poet and what unique forms of engagement
he may offer to this creative engagement of urbanism. In all I demonstrate that the gay
text draws its power from the notion of liminality, a kind of liminality grounded on the
experience of eros and public practice.

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Ebb and Flow
The City of Pattern and Rhythm

What links poetry and urbanism is the fact that they are in many ways connected
to the idea of rhythm and form. Like the poet who creates it, the poem is a play on form
and rhythm. As Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren write:
The human body itself is a locus of rhythms: the beat of the heart, the inhalation
and exhalation of breath, waking and sleeping, effort and rest, hunger and

satiety… Rhythm is a principle of all life and all activity and is, of course, deeply
involved in the experience of, and the expression of, emotion… the very origin of
language involves rhythm. (Brooks and Warren 2)
Poetry is translation and appropriation of such rhythms. The poem, as the Filipino poet
D.M. Reyes describes it “is the most enduring on the line of the world’s oldest rituals”
(Reyes 7). Across time and centuries, the poet can be seen as a laborer and a synthesizer:
“poetry is the synthesizing act, no mere act but labor – attention, dedication and
inevitably, love for translation of intangible energies to graceful shapes and tangible
accomplishments” (7).
The human intellect is further gifted with the ability to understand these
rhythms of the human body and of nature itself and to ultimately find ways to
manipulate such patterns. Modernity as a massive technological, social, intellectual and
cultural transformation of human civilization is a testament to this idea. Modern
industrial cities, the spatial articulation of the logic of capitalist modernity transformed
human civilization in great ways: landscapes were flattened and reshaped; patterns of
production shifted; labor became organized and in many ways mechanical; man-made

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goods were produced at an exponential rate. These changed not only the external
environment but the human condition as well.
In the opening paragraph of what would eventually be a foundational reading of
metropolitan life, Georg Simmel in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” posits that “the
deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual of his existence
in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and
of the technique of life” (Simmel 23). Urbanization marked not only a systematic and
calculated re-landscaping but spurred as well a radical change in the pattern and
rhythm of the human psyche. This change was oriented towards the idea of progress
promised by the post-Enlightenment notion of the modern and maintained by the

gradual mechanization of the body. The geography of the city affected the disposition of
the body and how the body related with other bodies and the spaces they occupy. The
human heart became a clock whose beats were synchronized with particular pulses of
the city: the traffic of cars, the pitter-patter of pedestrian feet, the tabulated demands of
the time card. As Simmel writes, “if all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go
wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication
of the city would be disrupted” (26).
Moreover, urban life is not simply about a shift in mental dispositions but also in
the way an individual would relate to others, to the environment and more importantly
to himself. The fissures created by new articulations of space altered and reconfigured
human cognition and relations. Simmel outlines these different strains that affect and
influence the production of the urban self as a relational being: “social forces” which

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point to relations that may be personal, impersonal (as in hierarchal relations at work)
and even anonymous (as in relationships with the crowd); “historical heritage” which
refers to spatial and material evidence of the past; external culture which point to the
material and socio-economic conditions of the present; and the “technique of life” which
encompasses the cognitive and bodily practices these different relational strains entail.
People became each other’s employers, employees, tellers, bankers, market vendors,
customer, landlord – identities and relations that the various spaces of the cities created.
The changes in physical, cognitive and social landscapes introduced a new
environment for the poet. This new relationship between the poet and the city however
was not exactly a happy one. The poet was gradually taken from the allure and
imaginative fertile fields of the pastoral and was thrust into the arid world of the
concrete streets. In this new environment, poets offered various ways which, according
to Ellman and O’Clair in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1993) “called into
question” the “reality of the objective world” (Ellman and O’Clair 1). In their renditions

of urban life, the modern poets creatively transformed urban experience through image
and language. In “The Crisis of Language,” (1978) Richard Sheppard presents the poet’s
socio-cultural context of the early modern age as one characterized by a sense of
“linguistic aridity” (Sheppard 324) wrought from the “suppression of an aristocratic,
semi-feudal, humanistic and agrarian order by one middle-class, democratic,
mechanistic and urban” (325). He thus argues that what characterizes modern poetry is
its “sense of homelessness” (327) and that the task of the modern poet:

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… becomes the creation of a redeemed, visionary world of language in which
‘something fundamental’ is given back to form and in which the lost dimension
of language and the human psyche was rediscovered or preserved… the
Modernist poet [ceased] to be the manipulator of fixed quanta and [attempted] to
liberate the repressed expressive energies of language; ceases to be the celebrant
of a human order and becomes the experimenter who searches for barely
possible ‘redeemed and redeeming images.’ (328-329)
Language thus became a critical means to represent the poet’s vision of modern life. The
task of the modern poet thus was to “explode language” before he can create an
adequate “‘verbal ikon’” (328). T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) and “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) as examples explore the various notions of ruination and
decay in urban experience. Prufrock’s city “is a murky place” where his sense of social
refinement is balanced by a sense of vulgar temperament (Versluys 176). “The Waste
Land” on the other hand somberly depicts London as a fractured and fragmented city
(Versluys 179). Eliot’s play on language which incorporates various dialogues, linguistic
play and use of obscure word play – “Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug” (“The Waste
Land” 203-204) – highlight this sense of fragmentation. Walter Benjamin in his reading
of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry on the other hand utilizes the idea of the flaneur and sees
urban experience as essentially a successive sequence of fleeting, fragmentary moments

that paradoxically are but repetitions within the same system. Such experience,
Benjamin argues forms the cause of ennui or “boredom” (Gilloch 211). Baudelaire
specifically looked at crowds and how such crowds elucidate an experience of loneliness
(Hyde 337).
The list of poets, their works and the unique ways in which they engage the
experience of modernity and urbanism is long and rich. In all of these, we find how the

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poets utilize image and more importantly language to engage the complex materiality of
urban experience. As Versluys points out “The poet, therefore, could no longer look at
the city from a distance… The flaw became the fabric” (Versluys 18). Indeed, there is a
vital connection between the poet and the city. The poet in the city is seen to have
transformed this sense of aridity and lifelessness into viable poetic material. Poetry
mirrors and refracts the language and patterns of the streets. As G.M. Hyde in “The
Poetry of the City,” writes “the city is inherently unpoetic... and yet the city is inherently
the most poetic of all material” (Hyde 338). The city can be poetic, or at the very least a
valuable source for poetic material precisely because in many ways it is an amplified
mode of patterns.
In the next subsection, we zero in on Manila and Singapore and explore the
ways in which one may read these as comparative cities. We will also look into the ways
in which certain poets not included in the thesis respond to these spaces in their works.

Push and Pull
The Case of Manila and Singapore

More than a century after its first publication the insights in Simmel’s seminal
work still hold merit. In today’s increasingly fast-paced, wired and globalized world,
Simmel’s metropolitan man is more and more adept at absorbing the audio-visual shock

of the city landscapes as well as registering within his body the cognitive demands of
late and globalized capitalism. In this subsection, I demonstrate how Simmel’s analysis

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of modern industrial cities in the West can be applied specifically to cities in Southeast
Asian cities.
Though the thesis does not take a post-colonial approach, it still necessitates the
drawing of works that are concerned with scholarship framed by post-colonial and
globalized discourse if only to illustrate in detail the spatial and urban growth of these
cities. Manila and Singapore make for viable samples for comparative study precisely
because the patterns of their spatial production and the implications generated by such
rhythms highlight the various complexities of post-colonial, globalized urbanism. Both
cities were once colonial port cities and in varying degrees now share dispositions as
postcolonial cities in an increasingly globalized world. More than that, the various
characteristics which define the logic of capitalist modernity can be seen in the way
these poets render urban experience.
The urbanization of Manila and Singapore as two postcolonial Southeast Asian
cities is grounded by a constant negotiation between two opposing forces – first in their
colonial past and secondly by their orientation towards globalized narratives. In
“Perpetuating Cities: Excepting Globalization and the Southeast Asia,” (2003) Ryan
Bishop, John Phillips and Wei-wei Yeo contextualize this interplay by positioning the
“identities” of Southeast Asian cities precisely through tensions and contestations of
various narratives:
[Cities] in the region have a unique relation … insofar as they went from being
colonial cities serving the material bureaucratic, technological, ideological, and
imaginative needs… to explicitly modern, international cities in a matter of
years, with the concept of national playing an important but oddly peripheral
role (Bishop et al 2).


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This statement challenges Peter J. Rimmer and Howard Dick’s assertion in The
City in Southeast Asia (2009) which argues that cities in Southeast Asia have already
undergone a period of “decolonization” and must be read in the same way one reads
other global cities of the world. All global cities, they argue, are oriented and guided by
one particular pattern and as such “any attempt to explain the historical or
contemporary urbanization of Southeast Asia as a unique phenomenon is therefore
doomed to absurdity” (Rimmer and Dick 48-49). The problem with Rimmer and Dick is
that they look at malls, superhighways and Starbucks branches and make the claim that
Southeast Asian cities can be read and placed alongside global cities in the west. What is
important to highlight and call attention to I conjecture, is how these malls are
juxtaposed with other sites that in turn form the much bigger picture of a city’s urban
production. Rimmer and Dick’s reading of Southeast Asian cities does not take into
account the active participation of local dynamism in the production of city space. As
William S W Lim in Asian Alterity (2008) writes:
In Asia, chaos uncertainty, pluralistic richness and evolving complexity are now
accepted as essential elements of its urban dynamism… In Asian cities, the
introduction of modernist planning and spatial and usage separations are
constantly contested and defied by the dynamic human interactions taking place
on the streets everywhere. This fluidity and the rebellious attitude of Asian
urban dwellers in interpreting spaces in response to evolving demand are
precisely what fuel the vibrancy and dynamism of Asian cities. (Lim 114)

To compare Manila and Singapore then is to locate the ways in which the cities spatially
negotiate the reoccurring tension between various forces –local color and global
orientation, informal and formal economies etc –and how these dialectical forms of


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articulations shape the cities’ forms and patterns. What differentiates their modernities
however is how these negotiations are done. In the case of Manila and Singapore, what
orients their urbanization has to do with a horizontal, outward spinning force for the
former and a verticalized kind of compression for the latter. These notions of
fragmentation and compression define and orient the production of multiple spaces and
the patterns of spatial practices.
In what follows then, I will discuss how such notions can be used to describe the
urbanization of Manila and Singapore respectively. I then extend this by discussing the
potential implications of such generalizations.

Manila’s Modernity as Horizontalized Fragmentation
In arguing that the pattern of urban production of Manila is fundamentally
horizontal, I do not simply point to horizontality in the mundane sense that Manila is
essentially a sprawling metropolis. Horizontality points as well to the pattern of spatial
experience in the city.
Manila is a messy city. In her analysis of the city’s new metropolitan form,
Neferti Tadiar regards Manila as essentially a “flat city” where one goes around like
someone “swimming underwater in a shallow metropolitan sea” (Tadiar 77). Indeed, to
the inexperienced untrained foreigner or probinsyano (non-Manila residents), the city can
be a difficult place to swim around in. Wading through its polluted streets where the
perennial sight of garbage and the glaring honks of frustrated drivers stuck in 2

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kilometer per hour traffic are among the flotsam and jetsam of urban mismanagement,
one encounters an urban experience that is severely disorienting and confusing.

The disorientation and fragmentation of Manila’s metropolitan form reflect the
city’s violent and tumultuous history. Sitting in the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, the city
is battered by typhoons and is a potential ground zero for a devastating earthquake. The
city was one of the most devastated cities after World War II (Zaragoza 13). Widespread
poverty in the city mutates into a pandemic of crime. Australian academic Trevor Hogan
writes that one vital way to understand Manila is thus is to see it in terms of “violence,
suffering and loss” (Hogan 105).
The idea that Manila is a fragmented city is a notion which also stems from its
post-Second World War fate: that it is a city without a clear center. To understand this,
we first have to briefly examine the history and fate of what was considered by Filipino
writer Nick Joaquin as the “original Manila,” (Joaquin 354) the walled city of
Intramuros. The genesis of Manila was essentially a narrative of compression. Like most
colonial communities in the Philippines during the Spanish occupation, the population
of the walled city of Intramuros grew largely because of the relocation project called the
reduccion where “dispersed barangays were… reduced into compact and larger
communities” (Caoili 28). Intramuros was deemed the seat of the economic and
ecclesiastic power of colonial Philippines and from 1580 to 1625, Manila became “the
foremost capital of Asia and enjoyed unprecedented prosperity” (34). In this respect, the
tall walls of Intramuros did not just help repel invasions. They also compressed people
as well the narratives of guns, gold and God. Colonial Manila’s urbanism thus

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materialized the logic of colonialism and inserted the archipelago into the enterprise of
colonial trade and geopolitics. American occupation in the Philippines saw massive
change in economic policies on tariffs and as well as political and cultural structures.
This sense of compression would later on “explode” (almost literally and
figuratively) during the Allied liberation at the end of the Second World War. As
Zaragosa writes in Old Manila (1990):

Modern facilities in transportation, communication, electrification, and port
works were established. Massive urban and rural development and town
planning marked the beginning of the modernization of Old Manila… All these
developments came to a halt during World War II with the Japanese Occupation
of Manila from 1942 to 1945. At the end of the war, Manila was considered the
most devastated city in the world… Manila lost its centre. [emphasis mine]
(Zaragoza 13)

This notion of Manila as a city having no center is mentioned in other critical and
creative materials. In Malate: A Matter of Taste (2001) a coffee table book on a site known
for its unique bohemian subculture, Rafael Ongpin echoes Zaragoza’s sentiment: “[In]
the post-war era, Manila’s population exploded outwards from the rubble of the center.
Instead of there being an increasing population pressure on the core city, there was a
vacuum” (Ongpin 49). Thus, the liberation did not just obliterate a good number of
Intramuros’ basic infrastructure. The explosions that ruptured the core city spurred as
well a massive exodus towards the fringes and enabled what were once communities
and spaces in the periphery to develop into more urbanized spaces. For instance,
Makati and Ortigas once suburbs are now regarded as the business districts that
integrate Manila (and the Philippines) into the economic global network of nations.

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The “vacuum” that created an open space in Manila’s center would function as
the bedrock for Manila’s modernity and spatial articulation. As Caoili writes, the postwar reconstruction and brief economic boom of Manila saw the rapid migration of
families from the provinces (Caoili 161). Having no money to buy or to lease living
spaces, these workers lived as informal settlers in what used to be the center of the city.
Erhard Bernard in his study on urban poverty in Manila Defending a Place in the City:
Localities and the Struggle for Urban Land in Metro Manila (1997) writes that “In Metro
Manila… we find a high percentage of squatters and slum dwellers relatively close to

the city center” (Berner 161) What is interesting however is that these informal settlers
are not much of a nuisance as they are a necessity. They take on the hard jobs (cooks,
waiters, carpenters etc). They are the ones that keep “the heart of the city throbbing”
(Duldulao 46). Indeed, what was once the powerful center of Manila now has two
paradoxical functions: on the one hand, it is no longer the center of formal economic
power – Makati and Ortigas are. Yet on the other hand it still functions as a critical
center in that this space now houses workers who provide necessary the cheap labor
that maintain and support much of Manila’s infrastructure.
In her analysis of Manila as essentially a “flat city”, Neferti Tadiar argues how
flyovers were used as a way of separating the producers of informal economies (treated
as “excess”) represented by the urban poor with the formal/transnational ones (Tadiar
81). Flyovers provide those travelling through flyovers easy access to spaces of
transnational narratives while keeping those representing informal labor and practices
(street peddlers, the urban poor) literally below. Flyovers physicalized Manila’s global

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dream by means of easy access and unique perspective (Tadiar 84). Flyovers were a way
of “discharging” but not necessarily eliminating the so-called urban excesses (Tadiar 96).
Using this survey of various critical writings on the urbanization of Manila, I
argue that the urban production Manila’s modernity is fundamentally horizontal in two
ways. First I point to the dispersal wrought by the literal explosion of the center. This
migration does not simply refer to the rapid urbanization of the geographical fringes but
to the development as well of multiple internal narratives and systems that often
compete with the narratives of other spaces in the metropolis. Tangential to this is the
so-called ruralization of Manila. The occupation of informal settlers in the center has
both physical and socio-cultural implications. This presence influences much of the
policies and patterns of urbanism that spatially articulate the tension between the
increasingly ruralization of urban space and the need to function as a city in a globalized

world. Such influences include the construction of infrastructures that negotiate,
partition and space out the conflicting and contesting narratives within the city. In a city
with no clear, physical center, it can be argued that, as Tadiar would posit, the center is
network more than any downtown center (Tadiar 84).
To speak then of Manila’s modernity as one of horizontalized fragmentation is
not simply a matter of seeing it as a sprawl or even a city without a center but to see it as
a city in constant flux. It does not just refer to the earlier exodus towards the fringes but
to a perspective characterized by distance, dislocation and fragmentation.
Writers whose poems creatively engage urban experience draw their themes and
poetic material precisely from this idea of fragmentation. For instance, Jaime Dasca

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Doble in his poem “The Sky Over C-5 Corner Kalayaan Avenue” (2005) traces the
chaotic flow of the city as he comments on the impoverished state of a small community
in Manila. The disorientation is seen as the subject matter of the poem shifts from line to
line, describing children playing hopscotch on a busy street (3) with “a pebble stolen
from the construction site nearby” (5-6), illustrating the lack of a decent playground and
the danger of having children playing near hazardous sites; an old “carpenter” who
counterflows with traffic (7). Representations of luxurious brands mock the poverty as
towering “advertisements boast of the good life” (26). The poem ends with the image of
dogs commenting on the inhumanity of the chaos and impoverishment:
Two mangy dogs leashed on a rise
bark at all the confusion.
Their agitation lifts up to the sky,
to the clouds forming myriad masks,
of colors shutting out the very sun
(31-35)
Doble’s rendition of urban space in Manila lies precisely in how the line cuts attempt to

trace the contours of confusion and chaos in a highway that ironically cuts through the
wealthier parts of the metropolis. The poem in itself is a highway and the images that
are presented counterflow this attempt to create a coherent and central picture of the
city. The incoherence is thus highlighted by the idea that Doble chooses two dogs that
do not possess in any way the ability to interpret human activity, as the final focalizer
for this chaos.
In Conchitina Cruz’s “What is it about tenderness,” (2005) the woman-persona
(presumably an undertaker) attempts to gain dominion over a dead body by means of

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anatomical geography – by naming the different parts of the body the way an urban
planner would assign street names. This familiarity with the body is contrasted with the
unpredictable city portrayed as a dark and savage jungle where “streets sprouted
overnight like weeds and snaked their way into each other’s aimlessness” (2-3). The
personal control is lost when the urban jungle invades the body through the descent of
maggots (12-13). There is no sense of control and cohesion and the body in time will
absorb these narratives. The “bodies” of Cruz’s different poems which experiment on
form reflect this. Particularly interesting to this experimentation are “Geography
Lesson” and “News of the Train.” Here the reader does not find any body text but
footnotes to a blank page. Her experimentation on the different forms of poems which
shapeshift into different forms reflect this idea of a fragmented city whose form
ironically rests is precisely in its formlessness.

Singapore and the Modernity of Verticalized Compression
In this subsection, I unpack the idea that Singapore’s mode of urban production
is characterized by a notion of verticalized compression by drawing upon critical
writings on Singapore urbanism, most notably from Robbie Goh’s Contours of Culture
(2005). Critical analyses of Singapore’s urbanism focus on the notion of wholesale

erasure of certain urban structures (Luck 2004; Yeo 2003; Powell 2002). My reading of
Singapore’s urbanism does not seek to dispute this notion but focuses instead on the
production of certain spaces. Verticalized compression I would demonstrate is the
subtext that negotiates various contesting and conflicting narratives in Singapore.

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Verticality is not just about the significant presence of high rise buildings and the
need to accommodate a growing population of locals and migrants within more limited
space. It points as well to its upward-mobile movement that is hierarchized, controlled
top-to-bottom management of urban production. Verticality is a critical subtext that
grounds the patterns of Singapore’s urbanism, one characterized by a sense of
compression. In the case of Singapore, the idea of the vertical cannot be separated from
the notion of compression. The compression I speak of, however, does not just refer to
meticulous economics of space but to the compression of narratives as well.

To

illustrate, I focus on two prominent and critical spaces: the typical Housing
Development Board (HDB) community and the Civic District.
HDB communities exemplify this notion of verticalized compression. HDB
communities are clusters of buildings within a relatively small number of hectares.
Walking around a cluster of HDB community buildings, one encounters a sense of
tightness in the way high-rise buildings appear as walls. The height of a typical HDB
building can range from 10 to 30 stories.

The typical HDB community then can

accommodate (and compress) as many as thousands of residents within such a small

space. Moreover, the HDB community compresses not just people within its space but
more importantly the dual narratives of cosmopolitan and heartland culture. As Goh
writes:
The spatial semiotics of ideology of the HDB is a crucial part of this modernist
collectivity, and its changing directives towards the millennium reflect the new
ideological battleground, and the new project of reconciling cosmopolitan
individualism with heartland collectivity. (Goh 77)

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Goh extends this analysis further by zeroing in on void decks. Open-spaced void decks
ironically compress the different state policies and other privileged narratives. As he
argues:
… void decks played a more complex role in social construction… Beyond this
physical openness and its facilitation of gazing, mingling and informal (though
necessarily legitimate and approved) socializing, “community bonding” in the
Singapore context is ever mindful of racial/cultural, neutralization, the creation
of “empty spaces” (voided of vernacular, ethnic historical and local cultural
particularities) in order to remove grounds for racialized politics and social
tensions. (Goh 78)
Open spaces in void deck therefore materialize the logic of the HDB narrative in that
they compress and articulate notions of surveillance as well as state policies on racial
harmony.
The busier parts in Singapore, the Civic District as well as Shenton Way,
articulate and physicalize as well this notion of verticalized compression. Like the HDB
community, the notion of verticality becomes immediately evident to the casual
pedestrian who are encounters the walled, overt presence of high-rise buildings which
compress and articulate Singapore’s posture as a global city. Peggy Teo et. al in Changing
Landscapes of Singapore (2004) list the different areas in which Singapore chose to excel in:

In particular, Singapore promoted itself in the following areas:
• cruise and air hub of Southeast Asia;
• convention centre;
• education hub;
• medical centre; and
• arts and entertainment (Teo 155)
Walking along the busier districts in Singapore, one eventually encounters particular
buildings and sites within proximate distance which physicalizes this vision: Suntec for

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conventions, the Esplanade for entertainment and the Singapore Management
University along Orchard Road.
The city center compresses not only the different promises that Singapore offers
but as in the HDB community, the growing tension between local color and global
identity as well. To illustrate, I use as an example Goh’s discussion on landmarks. Goh
outlines how historical architecture, cultural symbols are located within proximate
possible space:
Key landmarks in this Civic District – a roughly ‘L’ shaped area on the north side
of the Singapore river, up to Bras Basah Road and stretching to the foot of Fort
Canning – include the Singapore Art Museum, Raffles Hotel, the Armenian
Church, St. Andrew’s Cathedral, the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, the
Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, and other buildings from the colonial period.
(Goh 30)

More than just preserving and maintaining these sites within the small geographic,
cultural and political center of Singapore, these sites simultaneously articulate
Singapore’s identity as a Southeast Asian nation and a global city. What the Civic
District thus conflates within the small space are imposed meanings as well. Landmarks:

… are thus characteristically sites of narrative overlays by virtue of a
combination of their long history and wealth of associations, their co-option by
different institutions, discourses and media and their foregrounded experience in
everyday urban experiences…
In the context of Singapore, landmark
designation is a project of tourist promotion, the attempt to create a national
discourse and identity of global progressivism and the management of
multicultural and multi racial relations all at once. (29)

Now, a good counter-example to further illustrate the comparison between
Manila and Singapore would be present-day Intramuros. Like the Civic District in

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Singapore, Intramuros is still preserved as a colonial city where one still see bungalows,
crafts and weapons from the colonial period. Unlike the Civil District however (and this
perhaps emphasizes the notion of distance and fragmentation), Intramuros is very much
distant from the spaces that articulate Manila’s global economic stature. Intramuros in
fact is surrounded by spaces of poverty and impoverishment whereas in the Civic
District one encounters a sense of compactness where compressed spaces articulate
narratives of privileged cultural memory and nationhood.
In contrast then to how Manila replicates the notion of dispersal in the spatial
articulation of urban space, Singapore addresses the perennial problem of lacking space
in how it negotiates the reoccurring tensions by compressing space and condensing
meanings. In the case of the HDB community, the tall buildings that can accommodate a
considerable number of people conflate and compress narratives of multiculturalism
and ethnic diversity. As Goh points out, the open spaces of void decks ironically and
almost invisibly compress these policies on racial neutralization as well as notions of
surveillance. The central district on the other hand functions not only as narratives of

national identity but viable objects for tourist consumption. Verticalized compression is
not only evident in Singapore’s physical landscape in that the towering buildings of the
city not only stand as a testament to the city’s economic prowess but as a series of walls
that seem to encase the crowd that walk between them. It is also more importantly seen
as an overarching narrative that orients and directs urban and cultural policies to
accommodate the tension between global and local forces.

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The poets of Singapore who write about their city respond to this kind of pattern.
The idea of the vertical and the image of towering things seem to be a reoccurring image
in several works of Singaporean writers. We can go back to Edwin Thumboo’s much
quoted “Ulysses by the Merlion” where he describes the urban landscape of the growing
Singapore as one filled with “towers topless as Illium’s” (“Ulysses by the Merlion” 25).
Alfian Sa’at, one of the poets included in the main body of this study, utilizes the image
of the elevator in “The City Remembers” (2001) as a metaphor for mechanization of
urban life in the city.
In his foreword to No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Poetry (2000), Dennis
Haskell quotes Philip Jeyaretnam who says that “the Singpore writer’s situation is
claustrophobic; in a city-state there is no escape from the city, there is no country to go
to” (Haskell 18). This sense of claustrophobia is not only seen as a response to enclosed
physical space but also to the suffocating aridity wrought from the experience of an
overtly controlled modernity. The poets in this collection lament the loss of identity as a
cost for this upward mobile direction of progress. This yearning for escape is
exemplified by Paul Tan (1994) in “Train Rides” where writing about a ride “out of a
country drugged with / its modernity and its self-image” (1-2) he explicitly states how
Singaporeans have spent too much time in “claustrophobic comforts” (16).

In both cases, I sought to demonstrate how the patterns of Manila and Sinapore

negotiate various often contesting narratives that move around in their particular
spaces. I also surveyed the ways in which certain poets write about their cities with

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particular emphasis on these patterns. What of the gay poet then? In the third and final
subsection of this introductory chapter, I look into creative possibilities opened and
offered by gay poets.

Sex as Text
Positioning the Gay Poet in the City
Utilizing sexuality as a way to examine urban life is especially useful because
sexuality is relational itself. Sexuality practices are not merely private acts in that they
ultimately play vital roles in the production of urban space. Heterosexual intercourse
leads to birth and population growth within urban space. Economic activities generated
from consumption of various cultural texts (fashion, film, tourism) rely heavily on
advertisements that are in many senses inflected by representations of sexuality.
Homosexual identities and practices make for an interesting case because of the
kind of fluidity and interrogation they offer to these patterns and to urban space. As
Alan Collins in Cities of Pleasure: Sex and the Urban Landscape (2006) writes, “[The] milieu
by which the clustering of homosexuals has long been a discernible feature (as least
since the classical era of ancient Greece) is the city environment” (Collins 8). What
makes homosexuality and its relation to city space interesting is essentially an
experience of liminality. Examination of this relationship between homosexual identity
and space exemplify this kind of ambiguity and fluidity. In “Capitalism and Gay
Identity” (1983) John D’Emilio discusses how structural changes wrought by capitalist
social relations and urban migration enabled individuals to move out of the structure of

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the family, establish their own identities and create spaces that develop, sustain and
nurture such identities. His essay cites bars, YMCA gyms and living communities (103)
as places where gays and lesbians may commune and interact. For D’Emilio, space
functions paradoxically in both enabling and at the same time minoritizing identities.
Lawrence Knopp (1995) echoes the idea as he argues that “heterosexuality is still often
promoted as nothing less than the glue holding these divisions of labor (and indeed,
Western society) together. But on the other hand, “these divisions of labour create
single-sex environments in which homosexuality has the space, potentially to flourish”
(Knopp 149). Both Knopp and D’Emilio position space as ambiguous one

which

simultaneously opens possibilities for forging new identities but also oppression and
violence.
Other critical works focus their attention not on homosexual men and women in
space but the notion of what is called “queer space.” Unlike D’Emilio’s YMCA gyms and
neighborhoods, queer spaces are not defined but are in a way created or “activated.”
Sites, often public and open ones such as malls, bathrooms, streets and parks may be
used for gay sexual practices. Cruising was one of the ‘earliest’ ways in which “the city
was rewritten by men… refusing to accept its strictures” (Betsky 12) Queer space then is
“something that is not built, only implied” (17). Sally Munt in “The Lesbian Flaneur”
(1995) connects her own experience of wandering with flaneur figures in literary history.
The experience of homelessness for the lesbian flaneur is not a lack as it is as an
opportunity to create and recreate special experience. As she writes at the end of the

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essay: “Space… is never still… I zip up my jacket, put my best boot forward, and tell
myself that ‘home’ is just around the corner” (Munt 125).
The relationship between space and homosexuality highlights the idea that the
relationship is indeed an ambiguous and fluid one. The relationship between space and
homosexuality discussed by Knopp and D’Emilio points to the opening and widening of
thresholds for possible new identities as well as narratives of repression and even
violence. The notion of “queer spaces” on the other hand points to those spaces that
require “activation” and reveals how narratives of spaces are impermanent and
destructible.
In the case of Singapore, the gay and lesbian movement has been increasingly
tied to the creation and appropriation of space. In “Tipping Out of the Closet: The Before
and After of the Increasingly Visible Gay Community in Singapore” (2001) Russell Heng
Hiang Khng traces the formation of gay and lesbian community in Singapore from the
1960’s to the present. While his focus lies primarily on the formation of the gay and
lesbian movement, Heng’s comparison between the liberation movement in the west to
the socio-political situation in Singapore reveals albeit tangentially the necessity of
space. Space and more importantly the creation of space become a necessary
determinant in the creation and production of identity. Indeed, the gay and lesbian
movement in Singapore has become a constant struggle to the creation and
legitimization of space. Heng cites that the earliest indications of such articulations were
the opening of a bar called Niche and the beginning of cruising culture in the 1980’s
(Heng 83).

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