‘Does Your Mother Know? Digital Versus Material Spaces of Queer Encounter in Singapore’

This chapter demonstrates how Singapore’s restrictions on LGBTQ uses of urban space demand an exploration of the interstitial material/digital spaces of the queer encounter. The online community ‘People Like Us’ (PLU) is contrasted with the popular bar ‘DYMK’ to suggest that in Singapore’s illiberal context, neither material ‘place’ nor cyberspace is sufficient for the formation of an anchored, visible LGBTQ public. This chapter therefore suggests that in illiberal contexts where LGBTQ rights are restricted, LGBTQ identity, networks, and socio-spatial relations exist and form in temporal ways in the liminal spaces between the built environment and cyberspace. The practices and negotiations in between are, themselves, a sort of tactical performance of identity and a reappropriation of space for the LGBTQ community.