I couldn’t make it for the “Pecah Lobang” screening in Johor Bahru.

Friends from Komas said there was a heated discussion after.

Here’s an excerpt from a post on Yawning Bread about how the audience at the Freedom Film Fest responded to the LGBT films, including “Pecah Lobang”:

“… Islam figured strongly again during question time following three queer (LGBT) films. Except for two Malaysian women in the audience who identified as gay, almost all the other Malaysians who spoke adopted a negative stance, usually based on their religion, be it Islam or Christianity.

One young woman in a headscarf argued that in Islam, a person is not complete until he or she marries and procreates, and that is why being homosexual is wrong, because it frustrates the possibility of completion.

A young man, asked whether he would marry someone he couldn’t love — something often demanded of gay people — evaded the question, saying it was “hypothetical,” without explaining why he thought it was so.

The same negative attitude was seen after the screening of “Pecah Lobang,” a documentary about transsexual sex workers, 88 percent of whom were Malay-Muslim, according to the film. Again, the audience’s stance seemed to be that they “should not be like that”; it’s against the teachings of Islam which says “males must be male and females must be female.” Also, why can’t they hold a proper job, they asked, without even realising that it was the job discrimination the transsexuals faced that forced them into prostitution.

I was quite amused to see how a group of people, obviously attracted to a film festival that celebrated “Democratic Space” as the tagline of the event called it, and perceptibly sympathetic to the demand for greater freedom of expression, reverted to religious authoritarianism once the subject of sexuality came up. One moment they are nodding when the Mufti of Perlis is shown in a film saying that when someone asks to leave Islam, he has already renounced it in his heart and forcing him to stay within the religion is meaningless, another moment the same people are demanding conformity with the religion in matters sexual. It only goes to show how difficult it is to integrate various aspects of liberty in people’s thought processes.”

Read the entire article by Au Waipang from Yawning Bread by clicking on this link.