Nationalism and Two Sexual Moral Panics in Indonesia

In 1965 the first sexual moral panic was created in Indonesia: the slander that communist women would have castrated and killed army generals. In reality the generals had been abducted and killed by army personnel. This moral panic served to help legitimise the rise to power of General Suharto and incited militias to murder possibly one million people. Since late 2015 another sexual moral panic has been raging. It is again directed from above by political and religious elites. This time the LGBT community is targeted. Though same-sex relations between consenting adults has never been criminalised, and Indonesia has been known as relatively tolerant of homosexuality, raids on gay saunas and bars are held, and lesbian couples evicted from their boarding houses. Activists are targeted, foreign funding is blocked, and anti-LGBT legislation is being prepared. The old communist phobic campaign persists and is even combined with the present homophobic campaign. Right after the re-election of President Joko Widodo conservative forces in the Parliament produced a revised draft of the Criminal Code in which both homosexuality and the spreading of Marxist literature would be criminalised. The passing of this bill was only prevented by student demonstrations, at the cost of the loss of several young lives. In this chapter, I will compare both campaigns, discuss the political and religious motivations behind them and sketch the current human rights climate in Indonesia.