Days after Malaysian religious officials raided a Halloween party organised by the LGBTQ community, queer folks say the silence by political parties jockeying for support ahead of the November 19 election is telling about their place in society.
Enforcement officers from the Kuala Lumpur Islamic religious authorities (JAWI), accompanied by police officers, detained 20 people from a private party held in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown on Saturday, as rights activists fear growing intolerance towards the LGBTQ community.
Homosexuality is considered a crime in Muslim-majority Malaysia, which practices dual civil and sharia legal systems that empower states to deploy moral police to oversee compliance to religious laws among the country’s majority Malay-Muslims, who account for over 60 per cent of the country’s 32.7 million people.
Carmen Rose, one of the organisers of the private party dubbed “Shagrilla”, said they had received the green light from the police to hold the event. “One of the organisers even met up with the police a day prior to answer questions,” she said, describing the raid as an “ambush”.
Jay, a patron at the party, recounted being stunned and described the raid as dehumanising for the trans and non-binary folk present.
“The enforcement seemed arbitrary, and the police targeted people who showed any feminine outer appearance; there were even men who were arrested for wearing earrings,” said Jay, who declined to reveal his full name.
While everyone was eventually allowed to leave the venue after an hour, the 20 who were detained spent another three hours under interrogation by JAWI before being released with instructions to attend counselling.
Gender activist Numan Afifi, who supported those detained, said the 20 were asked a series of “humiliating and demeaning personal questions” before being released. “This is pure intimidation and harassment from religious authorities,” he said.
Since then, the only party to issue a condemnation over the incident is the small Socialist Party of Malaysia, which called the raid “politically motivated”.
“The mobilisation of government machinery against one of the most vulnerable communities in Malaysia should be questioned as they arrest, harass, racial profile and intimidate Muslim drag queens, transmen, and transwomen,” the party said through its youth wing, Sosialist Youth.
Parties in Malaysia’s current coalition government – an amalgamation of right-wing Malay nationalist parties of Umno, Bersatu, and the staunchly Islamist PAS – have long vilified the LGBTQ community on the basis of religion.
Political commentator Bridget Welsh said politicians are cautious of backlash from conservative voters, which still account for most of the country’s 21 million voters.
“Many politicians are also conservative, as views on this issue remain conservative,” she said.
Sentiments aside, the issue is even more hyper political in Malaysia due to it being used as means to attack politicians and to garner political support. “Some hope to return the political narrative to a religious polarised narrative,” she said.
But many from the LGBTQ community are questioning the silence from the more progressive Pakatan Harapan coalition, as well as the new youth-centric party Muda, which has portrayed itself as the country’s most inclusive party since its creation in 2020.
From the Pakatan Harapan bloc, only human rights activist Charles Santiago, who did not make the DAP’s list of candidates for this election, condemned the raid and urged the authorities to “cease hunting [LGBT people] down as if they are criminals”.
“We have people who are still reeling from job losses; the ringgit is weak; the economy needs resuscitation,” Santiago said. “But you use resources to go after people who were at a Halloween party?”
Numan questioned Pakatan Harapan’s move to drop human rights-affirming candidates like Santiago, reject forming an electoral pact with a pro-worker party, and ignore minority and marginalised groups.
“[They are] abandoning their base for what winning strategy?” Numan questioned.
Numan had left his job as press officer to then-Youth and Sports Minister Syed Saddiq Abdul Rahman barely two months after the Pakatan Harapan coalition formed the government in 2018, following public pressure after being outed as gay.
Remembering the incident, transwoman Mischa Selamat said it was “amusing” to see younger candidates being fielded to shake up the election, only to “maintain the status quo” instead of challenging it.
“What’s the point of having younger candidates contesting if we’re still being served stale rhetoric like ‘LGBT is a vice’, or this and that is a sensitive issue for a particular major race or religion?” Mischa asked.
Her sentiment was shared by Natalie M, who said Pakatan Harapan and its allies had been associating itself with the LGBTQ community as “political props to win power”.
“But when the going gets tough you wash your hands and dispose of us. You don’t care about us,” she said.
While the ideal was to vote for a party that would publicly defend LGBTQ rights, Natalie said her vote was still going to Pakatan Harapan, who she said was still “the lesser evil”.
“Sadly I think most [in the LGBTQ community] would be voting PH tactically to stop the other camp from taking power,” she said.