Interview: ‘The Sky Didn’t Fall In’

In any human-rights campaign, everybody must do what they can. I was criticized by some gays as being too soft on the government when I made a private meeting in a very public way with John Major, Blair's predecessor as prime minister. Major was sending signals to his supporters at a time where most gay people, including myself, had stayed very quiet. Some people argued that the best thing was to go to the streets and frighten the horses, disrupt the state opening of Parliament, or interrupt the Archbishop of Canterbury's Sunday sermon. That's not my style: I already have enough theater in my life!

But do you think people should be upfront and protest, or take the quiet way?

Both are valid and work well in parallel—think of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. In Singapore, Malcolm X type of activity would be extremely difficult because the government can be very harsh on lawbreakers. I wouldn't presume to tell what people should do.

Some argue that some societies, like Singapore ' s, are too conservative for such changes.

There is nothing special about their situation. We heard it all before: "Gays should respect the views of those who condemn them." "Government is powerless to move until society is ready for change." "The law here that outlaws love between two grown men was left behind by the British." I would have thought any self-respecting ex-colony would want to get rid of the colonizer's laws. When I went to lobby Nelson Mandela while the postapartheid constitution was being drafted, I asked him to endorse making it illegal to discriminate on grounds of sexuality. I'd been warned that he might giggle if I mentioned homosexuality. But he got the point immediately and just said, "Yes, of course." Perhaps a winning slogan might be: "What's good enough for Mandela is good enough for us all."

Do you think pragmatism will change the world?