Indonesia's gay community driven underground after police raids

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

WORLD NEWS | Thu Jun 29, 2017 | 8:06pm EDT

Indonesia's gay community driven underground after police raids

By Gayatri Suroyo and Stefanno Reinard | JAKARTA

When an angry mob of Islamists threatened to burn down a place hosting a gay and lesbian film festival in Jakarta in 2010, Indonesian police came to protect those staging it.

A volunteer at the festival, Adi, 28, now fears that instead of safeguarding their rights authorities are targeting his community, forcing them to hide their lifestyles or even consider moving abroad.

Indonesia's Islamists have long sought to criminalize gay sex. The Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), the vigilante group that threatened the now defunct Q! film festival in Jakarta, has previously broken up what they said were gay parties and then urged the police to detain the men. But what is sending a new chill through the gay community is that police seem to have taken on the vice patrol role themselves. In May, officers detained 141 men in a raid on the Atlantis sauna, accusing them of involvement in a gay prostitution ring in a part of Jakarta that is also home to many heterosexual "spas".

A month earlier, police raided a hotel in Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya over an alleged "sex party" and made the 14 detained men undergo HIV tests before publicly releasing the results, local media reports said.

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Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-lgbt-idUSKBN19L003

[Odoreida]

1. A part of The religious resurgence wherever it happens.

Usually Muslim these days, but some places in Africa and the Caribbean it's Christian. It could happen here too.

And don't give me the line that it's not real religion when it isn't "nice".