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   Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 15-Sep-2025 21:27:11 JST Adrianna Tan

   I hung out with someone I knew when I was an awkward teenager. He’s also now a fabulous gay man in New York City. (Yes, Singapore is actually extremely queer)

   It was wonderful comparing our paths. He didn’t see a path to fabulous gayness back home and had to leave much earlier (for college) while I tried to make it work. My Chinese and other privileges (our society can’t really read into obvious queerness unless you’re ’loud’ about it) made my particular queerness more.. tolerable?

   Anyway, we remembered what it was like being young and confused. We went to a ‘writing and pottery summer camp’ attended primarily by people from the top boys and girls schools. I think it’s an even split: 1/3 of us are flaming gays, 1/3 of us are handy dykes, 1/3 of us are evangelical Christians. Half of the evangelical Christians are repressed queers.

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 15-Sep-2025 21:31:44 JST Adrianna Tan

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     We also laughed about how all the evangelical Christian boys thought I was the girl of their dreams because I didn’t care whatsoever for them (because I’m gay). I’m sorry for anybody who ever assumed that I might ever be into boys.

     I’ve always felt like an imposter into my girly cis body.

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 15-Sep-2025 21:35:21 JST Adrianna Tan

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     I did eventually (briefly) end up dating one of the boys from this group.

     A few years ago, he became famous for being the gay man lawyer who helped win a massive LGBQT legal milestone in Singapore. We still laugh about how it must have been that we felt very safe with each other, even as 15 year olds without the language to describe who we really were. It just looked like what we were supposed to do. Go out with someone of the other gender. And for a while I guess it bought us cover.

     I was still a year or two away from my first real queer relationship.

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 15-Sep-2025 21:41:19 JST Adrianna Tan

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     I spoke about how a subconscious effort on my part to ‘achieve things’ started in this era.

     I was the only lower middle class kid in this sea of extremely privileged people (people who had no doubt their families would pay for their literal Ivy League and Oxbridge educations). I felt like I had to be..

     .. a better writer, a better athlete, a captain of various sports, a better debater, more conventionally femme

     In order to ‘win’. I don’t think I knew what I was trying to win, but those felt like important status games to play. (It was extremely brutal to be in an environment like that as a queer autistic kid who wasn’t rich)

     Some days I feel like I’m still trying to detangle from that world, but of course everyone I know from this period of my life is a person of some significance back home.

     More importantly I think: I started to learn how to ‘achieve things’ to try to survive in that competitive environment. But I don’t think I ever truly learned ‘I can stop now’. And that’s one of the key things I have to work on for myself today.

     That hyper competitive environment gave me opportunities beyond my wildest dreams. But it also changed me in ways I am still figuring out.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 15-Sep-2025 21:47:34 JST Adrianna Tan

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     In many ways, ‘achieving things’ was my ticket out. I saw no world in which I could have left home without ‘achieving things’. I saw no way of surviving as a queer autistic person in Singapore. It felt existential.

     Today, it’s a little better, but it was still really an existential push to have to go. And it was clear to me the only way I could have a shot at a life was to be abroad, and to be really good at something.

     I struggle with the latter, but that’s even true now more than ever. I don’t love that I only deserved to have a shot at happiness if I was useful to someone on something, but I understood that was the game I had to play.

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 15-Sep-2025 22:11:40 JST Adrianna Tan

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     And while there are plenty of folks who insist that ‘life as a queer is okay and good in Singapore’ that’s only really true with very specific privileges.

     And it also isn’t really true because privileges are not real protections.

     Just a few days ago a group of Singaporean homophobes decided to report me to ICE. They said that would show me that America is not a good place and so I would learn Singapore is actually better for queer people.

     I don’t even have the capacity to go into how that sort of mindset and crab mentality is so rampant back home that they aren’t even their own special class of bigots. They’re just everyday people.

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 15-Sep-2025 22:40:55 JST Adrianna Tan

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     • Jules

     @afewbugs hahahahah yeahhhh

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     Jules (afewbugs@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 15-Sep-2025 22:40:56 JST Jules

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     @skinnylatte between the ages of about 11-14 I had a boyfriend. We'd hang out together at lunchbreaks and in the park at weekends and read science fiction books to each other. Then he moved away and we lost touch, other boys tried to date me and I was very much "wtf, why do they want to do all this kissing stuff, when do we get to the good bit where we just read books together?" Anyway as adults we found each other on Facebook. Turns out we're both gay now