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Transvestite sex workers waiting for customers in Yogyakarta. Activists are concerned that discrimination against high-risk groups is fueling a growing HIV/AIDS rate. (AFP Photo)

Ingrained social discrimination against gays and transsexuals, at times by the very health care workers charged with helping them, is a major contributor to the spread of HIV/AIDS among these groups in Indonesia, activists said on Tuesday.

“The discrimination they experience, including from health officials, makes them reluctant to seek treatment to curb the spread of the virus,” said Nafsiah Mboi, secretary general of the National AIDS Prevention Commission.

Nafsiah told the Jakarta Globe that his body’s 2007 study, the Integrated Bio Behavioral Survey, found that HIV/AIDS rates among transsexuals were a staggering 35 percent, compared to 10 percent among heterosexuals.

In Indonesia, gay and bisexual men are particularly at risk from contracting the disease as they are more likely to have sexual encounters among the other groups.

“They have sex with transsexuals as well as with other gay and bisexual men,” Nafsiah said.

A UN-backed report, which was previewed on Monday, suggests the situation was mirrored throughout Asia, where gays have registered alarming levels of HIV/AIDS infection rates and are often denied access to services and care due to punitive laws that drive them underground.

According to the report, produced in part by the United Nations Development Program, “up to 30 percent of new Asian HIV infections will be gay men, unless prevention is intensified.”

The report said laws and police practices, such as Shariah law in Aceh and laws on public disturbance and prostitution, drove gay and bisexual men away from the HIV prevention services and care programs established to help them. But a more worrying finding was the report’s assertion that more than 90 percent of gay and bisexual men in Asia do not have access to prevention and care in the first place.

Rohana Manggala, head of the Jakarta AIDS Commission, pointed to the need for increased public awareness to stamp out discrimination against gays and transsexuals in Indonesian society.

“There was a recent incident where members of a hard-line Islamic group broke up an education workshop for transgender and gay groups in Depok,” she said.

Her organization strives to train community health center officials to end the discrimination, but its message often goes unheard. And that is bad news for a country grappling with a growing HIV/AIDS problem, and where 425 people die every year in the capital alone from complications caused by the virus.

Yulianus Rettoblaut, from the Indonesian Transsexuals Communication Forum, told the Globe that the problem within her community was even more pronounced. She said the country’s transsexuals were being “pushed by their environment” toward a greater risk of contracting HIV.

“Everything that happens to us is a result of discrimination, because people see us as being different from the outset,” Yulianus said.

She said that most transgender Indonesians turn to sex work as a last resort and after being denied jobs within mainstream society.

“It’s hard for us to get a job in either the formal or informal sectors, but we need to live and put food on the table,” Yulianus said. “So sex work is the only option left.”

Compounding the problem is a reluctance on the part of many clients to use protection.

“We bring condoms and ask the clients to use them, but they refuse, so what can we do?” she said.

“If, however, we were treated as regular people and not denied jobs, I believe the HIV prevalence among our group wouldn’t be so high,” she added.

According to figures from the UN, there were an estimated 193,000 people countrywide living with HIV/AIDS in 2007. But that figure surged to 270,000 just one year later.

The Health Ministry reported 47,000 cases in Jakarta alone as of October 2008, while in Papua and West Papua, fears are mounting over what some have called “epidemic-level” infection rates.

Other high-risk groups include intravenous drug users and commercial sex workers.

Rohana said her organization was trying to raise public awareness of a 2008 bylaw on HIV/AIDS prevention, but had a bone to pick with the terminology adopted by the legislators who wrote the bill.

In one archaic phrasing, “sexually transmitted disease protection tool” is used in place of the word “condom.”

“They should just have called it a ‘condom,’ as that’s something that we can campaign on more effectively,” she said.

Rohana is now lobbying the Jakarta administration to revise the bylaw to include the word “condom.”

“The problem is condoms conjure up notions of prostitution, which is why the administration glossed it over,” Rohana said.

Lesbian world: A woman reads a lesbian online magazine. Non-political lesbian movements have used the Internet as their media. JP/R. Berto Wedhatama

Families can do twisted things on learning their daughter or sibling is a lesbian.

A brother would force his butch lesbian sister to perform oral sex in an attempt to “educate her”. A mother would hire a gigolo so that her daughter would know the “pleasure” of men.

The sexologist her mother brought her would grope her, asking whether she felt any excitement. Families would force femme lesbians into marriages the latter did not want.

These examples are the stories that came to the LBT (Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender) advocacy and research organization, the Ardhanary Institute, from women who have been abused because of their sexual orientation.

The director of Ardhanary Institute, RR. Sri Agustine, said recently at her office that violence toward the LBT individuals that came to Ardhanary’s crisis center was mostly carried out within the private sphere of the family home.

“At times, the home that is supposed to be the safest place becomes the most dangerous place. The most common type of violence is sexual abuse, especially toward butch females, by brothers, uncles, fathers who suspect the sexual orientation and wanted to ‘set them straight’,” she said.

“Femme lesbians would be forced into marriages because of the stigma of becoming an old spinster attached to unmarried woman,” she added. “A lesbian, who had been married for 13 years after being forced into it by her family, said she felt she had been raped for 13 years,” Agustine said.

The problem is compounded, she said, with the discrimination against LBT people by the state. The police force is yet to be sensitive toward crimes carried out on the basis of sexual orientation discrimination. Agustine said a police office, upon hearing that a rape victim was a lesbian, said: “No wonder you’ve been raped, you’re a lesbian”.

Victims of violence or sexual abuse would prefer to settle the problem without the help of the police. Or if they did report it to the police, did not say that the crime was related to their sexual orientation, Agustine said.

In Indonesia, entering the third decade of the gay movement, discrimination and oppression against homosexuals is still rife. Recently, intimidation from a hard-line religious group forced organizers of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) Asia to cancel their conference in Surabaya, and the police did nothing to stop it.

For lesbian, bisexual and transgender women, their battle is twice that of their gay male counterparts. According to LGBT rights expert Baden Offord, Indonesian lesbians face double discrimination in terms of gender and sexual orientation.

“The Indonesian lesbian movement has a long way to go to bring about visibility and tolerance in the wider society,” he said through an email interview.

Compared to the transgender and gay movement, the lesbian movement in Indonesia is more discreet and less explicit. Agustine said this was due to the patriarchal culture in society.

“In the context of patriarchal culture, society teaches women to be passive and not active.

“There are more rules given to women. If a woman is yet to be married at a certain age, society labels her a spinster. This has made the LBT group more closed. If they came out, the family would be more ashamed,” she said.

“For gay men, society is more tolerant of them and of transvestites, because men have a place in public life. For lesbians, women have the traditional role of domestic life, to be a housewife and to be a ‘good woman’,” she said.

Agustine said she told lesbian women to claim their space.

“Be more educated, show society that we can contribute something,” she said.

Ardhanary works with different LBT groups across Indonesia, creating a vast network and support group.

In the Internet era, it is now easier for LBT individuals to find their community. Mailing lists, Internet forums and social networking sites such as Facebook have become an avenue for LBT people to meet and share stories.

Non-political lesbian movements have also used the Internet as their media. Online magazine sepocikopi.com is one example, in which the articles are written by and aimed at lesbians.

“SepociKopi is actually its own movement. We chose to ‘fight’ — not out — but in. How we view ourselves as humans and not conceptualize ourselves as marginalized,” Alex, SepociKopi editor-in-chief wrote in an email.

“We believe in the power of words to light the path for lesbians when things seem dark and confusing. We’re not pushing lesbians to come out. We have a lot of articles that shows the pros and cons of coming out. But if they do want to, we push for them to do it in a positive way: to be a successful and high-achieving woman — who is coincidentally a lesbian,” she said.

Utari, a bisexual, said the sense of community did help her from being isolated and lonely. “No one around me that I know of is like me. It felt really lonely,” she said. Upon finding SepociKopi, Utari, 25, contributed to the website as well.

She has come out to her then boyfriend and later to a friend in the last year. “I think by coming out, I became more accepting of myself, because I could tell someone who accepted me as I am,” she said.

Agustine said the younger generation of lesbians was more open and educated. Sources of information are more readily available to them compared to the older generations of lesbians.

Since the reform era and the rise of the women’s movement in Indonesia, the lesbian movement in Indonesia, Agustine said, had become more inclusive, aligning themselves with the Indonesian women’s movement, such as Komnas Perempuan and Koalisi Perempuan Indonesia.

However, not all women’s groups were accepting of the lesbian movement, Agustine said.

Gay rights champion and founder of the first gay movement GAYa Nusantara Dede Oetomo said that, despite resistance, the incident of March 26, where the FPI harassed the ILGA organizers, showed that the LBT movement should join forces with any willing civil society elements

“Working with the women’s movement is clearly a logical choice even though there is resistance here and there. History in other countries and regions shows the same thing. However, the women’s movement is progressing, especially with the younger activists who are more open to sexual and reproductive rights discourses,” he said.

Lawmaker and human rights activist Nursyahbani Katjasungkana said up to now there had been no breakthroughs in legislation on the protection of the rights of sexual minorities.

She said she had fought for the rights of sexual minorities to be included in the legislation with legislator Eva Sundari during the drafting of the anti-racial discrimination bill and the citizens’ administration bill.

Both of the bills eventually passed into law witout including the rights of sexual minorities.

The anti-pornography law, in its definition section, states that being lesbian and gay, and sodomy, were sexual deviations. And in Aceh, a bylaw, regulates that homosexuality can be punishable by stoning to death.

Nusyahbani said the discourse for the rights of sexual minorities had been pushed forward, but recent developments such as the anti-pornography law and the bylaw in Aceh had brought setbacks.

“LGBT groups are our social reality. They cannot be eliminated in the name of anything. Aren’t they God’s creatures as well?” she said.

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Indra Harsaputra and Hans David Tampubolon, The Jakarta Post, Surabaya/Jakarta | Sat, 03/27/2010 10:54 AM

Members of hard-line Islamic groups forced their way into a Surabaya hotel Friday, demanding participants of a planned congress on sexual orientation in the East Java city to leave the country by Sunday.

The police took no action against the move, condemned by politicians and activists as “unconstitutional” and violating human rights, who said the conference should be seen as “a celebration of democracy and human rights”.

Dozens of foreign participants from Mexico, Canada, the US and 13 Asian countries were scheduled to take part in the 4th regional Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Intersex Association (ILGA) conference scheduled to run from Friday to Sunday.

But the organizer decided Thursday to officially cancel the event, citing “security reasons”, after the police refused to grant them a permit fearing protests from religious groups.

Secretary-general of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) in East Java, Mohammad Chaeruddin, said the foreigners were told to leave because Surabaya Muslims believed the conference was against religious values and teachings.

“We forced them to return home by Sunday. We also told them not to make a media statement,” he told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

The group also entered several hotels in Surabaya and nearby Malang, including Mercure Surabaya where the conference was scheduled to be held on Thursday. They also urged hotels to make a written statement refusing to host the conference.

On Friday at 3 p.m., FPI members, the Islamic Community Forum and the Indonesian Ulemas Council arrived at Oval Hotel. Hundreds more from the Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, which held a rally protesting gay, lesbian and transexual communities outside Grahadi Surabaya, arrived later.

South Surabaya Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Bahagia Dachi, said the police would ensure the safety of conference participants, including foreigners.

“We’ll provide security escorts for foreigners to Juanda Airport Surabaya,” he said.

Surabaya’s Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence coordinator, Andy Irfan Junaidi, criticized the police for allowing religious groups to undermine and violate the rights of minority groups.

“Religious groups have prevented the groups to gather, against the guarantee of the Constitution,” he said.

Separately in Jakarta, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party politicians have called the police banning of a planned gay and lesbian congress in East Java as “unconstitutional”.

“[Holding a congress] is a basic human right,” Benny Kabur Harman, House of Representatives’ justice and human rights commission chairman, said Friday.

“Gays and lesbians are citizens whose political and legal rights are guaranteed and protected by the Constitution, which allows freedom of opinion.

“The state should in no way forbid the congress from being held.”

Benny’s colleague, Pieter Zulkifli, said the congress should be seen as “a celebration of democracy and human rights”.

The National Awakening Party (PKB) said the congress must be relocated overseas “for the sake of the country’s moral values”.

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