Saskkia Wieringa

Saskia Wieringa’s reflection examines the perilous journey of LGBTQ+ human rights in Indonesia and begins with a moment of enormous hope. 

When President Suharto’s military dictatorship finally fell in 1998, human-rights activists believed that Indonesia’s democratic opening would create new possibilities for everyone—including LGBTQ+ people. 

The Constitution was strengthened with human-rights protections, and activists across the country began demanding greater freedom for women and sexual minorities.

That optimism, however, proved short-lived. Saskia traces a succession of increasingly restrictive developments: the Anti-Pornography Law of 2008, the attack on an ILGA meeting in Surabaya in 2010, the intensification of a politico-religious backlash beginning in 2015, and the 2022 Criminal Code provisions outlawing sexual relations outside heterosexual marriage. In 2026, she writes, the influential Indonesian Ulama Council has been campaigning for further criminalization of same-sex relations.

But Saskia’s most important challenge is to the historical narrative behind this repression. 

Conservative forces have portrayed LGBTQ+ identities as foreign to Indonesian culture, yet Indonesia has a long and complex history of gender and sexual diversity. 

Hindu-Buddhist traditions include figures such as Ardhanarishvara and Durga, while traditional communities across the archipelago recognized transgender healers and priests.

The Bugis people of Sulawesi provide one of her most striking examples. In the traditional La Galigo creation story, the bissu—transgendered priests—played important cultural, religious, social, and political roles. Bugis tradition continues to recognize five genders, including transgender identities. 

The bissu were highly respected intermediaries between the human and spiritual worlds, but colonialism, postcolonial political forces, and Islamic fundamentalism severely diminished their status, and thousands were killed.

Saskia calls the subsequent erasure of these histories “postcolonial amnesia.” 

Colonial administrators imposed Dutch bourgeois moral standards that were themselves shaped by nineteenth-century European homophobia and misogyny. After independence, successive governments largely ignored the archipelago’s history of gender diversity, leaving later generations vulnerable to the claim that LGBTQ+ identities were somehow imported from the West.

Her own connection to this history began in the early 1980s, when she encountered a group of lesbians in Jakarta who were surprised to learn that lesbian communities existed elsewhere in the world. 

At the same time, her lesbian friends in Amsterdam knew nothing about the networks of lesbian women in Jakarta. Saskia remained engaged with Indonesian LGBTQ+ communities for decades, eventually contributing to the 2025 publication of A Political Biography of the Indonesian Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Movement.

She then chronicles the emergence of Indonesian LGBTQ+ organizations during the 1980s and 1990s. Gay men and lesbians established their own organizations, while transgender communities organized around health and community needs. After the fall of Suharto, the movement expanded dramatically. 

At the height of the Reformasi period, more than 100 regional and local LGBTQ+ organizations were working on sexual health, community development, and empowerment. The internet became an important tool for connection and organizing—but also a vehicle for spreading homophobic hatred.

The movement’s growing visibility was met by successive waves of backlash. Saskia describes these as three sexual moral panics. The first accompanied the anti-communist genocide of 1965–66 and helped impose a repressive, heteronormative morality. 

The second emerged around the Anti-Pornography Law, which was eventually adopted in 2008 and explicitly characterized homosexuality as a “deviant sexual act.” The third erupted dramatically in 2015, when political, religious, educational, and military leaders increasingly portrayed LGBTQ+ people as threats to children, morality, and even the nation itself.

Since then, Saskia describes a process of creeping criminalization. LGBTQ+ websites have been closed, offices attacked, clubs and saunas raided, people fired from government and military positions, and men accused of same-sex relationships flogged in Aceh. 

The revised Criminal Code further criminalized sexual relations outside marriage, while conversion practices became more common. In 2026, she warns, the rhetoric has intensified again, with calls for new laws specifically criminalizing homosexuality and “LGBT propaganda.”

What makes Saskia’s contribution so powerful is the contrast between Indonesia’s present and its own forgotten past. The country is experiencing growing homophobia at the same time that its pre-colonial history contains powerful evidence of gender diversity, transgender leadership, and forms of same-sex relationships. 

The struggle for liberation therefore involves not only fighting new restrictions, but remembering what was once known and then deliberately forgotten.