But more importantly, you needed validation and assurance that you are not alone. That somebody has already gone through what you’ve gone through. And that this emotional turmoil is just a common phase. You needed someone to identify with. But when you’re a minority… how are you going to find others like yourself?

I don’t know how the wise ladies in this forum could have survived in the ’80s and ’90s, when the Internet wasn’t as available as now. Because for me, I would be at a complete loss as to how to find others like me if I didn’t have the Internet. I couldn’t exactly go around asking, ‘Eh, you gay not? Want to be my friend?’

From the Internet, I discovered that the only safe place for me to meet other GLBT was the Pelangi Pride Center. But I was really apprenhensive about going to the PPC because 1) I will be meeting complete total strangers 2) I don’t know how to get there on my own 3) I will be forced to step out of my comfort zone of familiar school and family, and into that big unknown adult world.

But I went anyway. And this was because I had finally come to a point in my life whereby, f-ck this, I better find some gay people to talk to or else I am going to die. Seriously. That was how isolated I felt in a heterosexual environment.

The Pelangi Pride Centre (a GLBT library) was a god send.

Wait, let me repeat that again. The PPC was a god-send!!! It was a glimmer of hope on my tiny computer screen, which blossomed into an experience so real and so affirming. There were people like me. And they were all so normal. It was nothing like what they show of gay culture on TV. Of drag queens and effiminate men which spoke with a high-pitched lisp and had broken wrists. The lesbian community was more diverse than I thought. It wasn’t just all butch-y girls and their femme girlfriends. There were literally ALL KINDS OF WOMEN. And I’m glad to say that most don’t fall into a label that I could neatly pigeon-hole them into. In fact, I used to think that all lesbians were young women. (How ignorant right?), and that it was just a phase that you grew out of. When I saw more of the lesbian community (through Women’s Nite, a social gathering for queer women), that old stereotype of mine was completely blown to bits. Yes. You can possibly be a lesbian for life. It has happened to others.

I met many wonderful people at PPC. I even met a straight volunteer librarian who impressed me for the fact that she, although straight, could emphatise with the marginalisation of GLBT. But there was one thing that bothered me about the gay community in Singapore. And this is just my personal point of view…