#YISHREADS November 2025

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

World AIDS Day approaches. I remember back when this was a big thing in Singapore, with queer folks gathering for a candlelight vigil every 1 December to mourn the victims of the epidemic and to fight for change, blessed by representatives of ten different faiths from the Inter-Religious Organisation.

These days, however, the date often passes unnoticed. We’re living in an age of PrEP and antiretroviral therapy, with promises of vaccines and cures on the brink of the scientific/economic horizon. AIDS no longer defines gay life: instead, we’ve access to a socially acceptable homonormativity that includes the centrist politics of Pete Buttigieg and the cultural hegemony of RuPaul’s Drag Race. And that’s progress, right? Better to have a culture of compromise than a culture forged by disease and death. 

Still, I think it’s vital to remind people, especially younger queers, of the role AIDS played and continues to play in our community, especially gay men’s community. I’ve been working on a project on Singaporean queer theatre history,[1] studying landmark plays like Haresh Sharma and Paddy Chew’s Completely With/Out Character (1998) and Alfian Sa’at’s Asian Boys Volume 3: Happy Endings (2007). And I’m moved to recall how we used the arts so powerfully to explore our grief and fear, while also demanding our fundamental right to dignity.

So here are five literary works that speak, in some way, to the legacy of HIV. They hail from four continents, some three decades old, others mere months old. All are authored by queer men,[2] which is a little unfashionable—after all, it’s a community that includes Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and allegedly Donald Trump himself! 

But what the hell: this is my community. Despite all our corruption, I wanna use this column to celebrate the fact that some of our writing really is bloody exquisite.

Act Cute, by Andrew Sutherland
Fremantle Press, 2025

I’ve previously reviewed this Australian poet’s first collection, Paradise (point of transmission).[3] This follow-up can be read as a sequel, still dwelling on the trauma of being infected from HIV as a LaSalle College of the Arts theatre student in the early 2010s, losing his scholarship and visa, being forced to abandon his beloved community of artists in Singapore.

While Andrew’s first book dwelt on metaphors of monstrosity and horror, this one works with themes of travel: journeys to Singapore and Prague for friends’ weddings and the memories they evoke (time travel!), the lust and loneliness of flying solo, fantasies of leaving it all for Antarctica, reunions with ex-lovers, queer takes on speculative chick flicks The Lake House (a holiday home that exists in two eras) and Sliding Doors (a subway ride divides life into two paths). Also consistently invoked: time (he’s thoroughly conscious of getting older) and theatre—the words “time” and “act/actor” consistently appear in strikethrough, together with “viral” and “cute”.

The whole book’s divided into five acts, some of them made up of untitled verses (are they all bits of an extended poem?). Of these, Act Three: [twink death in Europa!!] appears to be the heart of the text, recording a trek through the continent, visiting gay bars with aspirations toward the havoc-ness of the poet’s twenties, but also consistently thinking about privilege and colonialism—the observation of Australia Day in “on Invasion Day 2024”; heartache and helplessness over the Israeli genocide in Palestine. It reads like a moment of decolonisation, perhaps contrasting with a tradition of Antipodean authors like Randolph Stow and Katherine Mansfield furthering their careers in the motherland of the UK. In this case, going to the West makes you aware of how thoroughly you don’t belong.

As much as I’m sure Andy’s writing in a tradition of Australian queer literature, I can’t help reading him in a Singlit context: not only does he have the droll bitterness and lyricism of Cyril Wong and Jerrold Yam (whom I know he’s read), but his inventiveness and willingness to name specific individuals (there’s a whole elegy for the late Timothy Nga, “an inflatable bird fills the theatre”) recalls that other great poz poet who studied in Singapore, Justin Chin. 

When Andy identifies himself as a “writer and performance-maker from between Boorloo (Perth) and Singapore”, I believe him, because he wears the memory of this city so visibly, like a facial tattoo, like a scar. Bittersweet to think this is how my country ends up influencing global literature, as a site of cruelty as much as charm.

Sex-Charge, by Perry Brass
Belhue Press, 1991

Picked this up at the Rainbow Book Fair at the LGBT Centre in New York from the hands of the author himself! He’s more famous as a member of the Gay Liberation Front, an editor of the seminal newspaper Come Out!, and co-founder of the Gay Men's Health Project Clinic. He’s also written queer SFF novels like Angel Lust and Warlock, plus loads of articles for the Huffington Post.

This, however, is his first book: a poetry collection celebrating gay life and culture without censorship, describing the thrills of sex in the city and the everyday tragedies of the HIV epidemic. The latter pages are filled with elegies and contemplations of mortality: “Miss Thing Has Finally Died”, “The Death of My Friend Tom”, “Walt Whitman in 1989”, and the wryly humorous “Do Assholes Get Into Heaven?”.

I’m kind of shocked to realise this was published when he was forty-four, literally my age when I read this. Written mostly in the 80s, these pieces represent a middle-aged, half-jaded perspective on queerness, often reflecting on lost youth and beauty (see “Young Men and Their Stomachs”; “For Old Men Who Suck Cock”), yet also celebrating the joys of living in the present (“That Zero Feeling”; “A Drowning Man Attacks My Genitals”.)

Is this a perfect book? Nah, the rhymes are a little silly (see “Puerto Rican Preppy”) and the rage is sometimes a little on the nose (see “Faggot”). But the way Brass has immortalised this vanished era of queer America makes this precious—see his screed against Ronald Reagan in “The Bloody Flag”; see his portrait of Marsha P. Johnson on the Hudson Pier in “A Regular June”, along with her reassurance against the oblivion of epidemic: “just remember—gay men never die.”

Love in the Big City, by Sang Young Park
Translated by Anton Hur
Tilted Axis Press, 2021

I’ve heard the translator speak about this work: how he loved Park’s short stories in Korean but knew they wouldn’t sell internationally, so pleaded him for a novel; how he was delighted by the then-unpublished manuscript with its details of Seoul nightlife and nihilism, realising he'd probably danced in the same Itaewon clubs and hung out at the same restaurants waiting for public transport to resume at 5am.[4]

But a word of warning to tenderqueers seeking queer-affirming literature: this is more of a bitter exposé of what being a gay male millennial is/was really like: burning through boyfriends and one-night-stands, hating family and respectable society, camping it up with close friends and butching it up for sexual prospects, finding what might be the love of your life and living in that perfect imperfection until all the frustrations add up and realising it could never really have worked out.

The book comes in three parts, each told from the POV of Young, the author’s alter ego: “Jaehee”, about a bad-ass straight girl university friend with whom he forms a symbiotic fag/hag roommate relationship till he loses her to marriage; “A Bite of Rockfish, Taste the Universe”, about dating a guy 12 years older, a 37-year-old frustrated former student activist, while managing his super-religious mum's cancer; and the titular “Love in the Big City”, about a long-term relationship with Gyu-ho, a working-class guy from Jeju Island, tainted by the persona's struggle with HIV. (He nicknames the virus “Kylie”!)

Honestly, the book’s kind of messy, the way first novels are. It’s patently formed from the fusion of three separate stories, and though there are cross-references—Young is always a semi-successful author and a loser in the corporate workforce who hates his mum—there are also fuzzinesses, apparent contradictions—even a testimony in the final section that he’s turning Gyu-ho into myriad other characters in his stories, male and female, gay and straight, dying over and over again.

Yet I like this book, with all its rough edges, with its familiar self-hatred and youthful angst (he feels old and hopeless in his early 30s!), with its utter disregard for respectability politics. And guess what: it’s got a Singapore connection too, with one of his hookups being a Malay Singaporean he calls Habibi! Alas, that character got turned into a Korean in the 2024 Netflix adaptation.

My Night with Reg, by Kevin Elyot
Nick Hern Books Limited, 1994

I got this from a garage sale of the late theatremaker Jonathan Lim's possessions.[5] It’s a classic West End play—this edition appears to be from the début production!—dwelling on libidinal London life during the height of the AIDS epidemic.

It’s all set in a single apartment in the late 1980s. Guy, a 30-something single, is throwing a party for his friends—Cambridge-educated campy men who keep reminiscing about a production of The Bacchae they did together when they were undergrads. And it’s gradually revealed that almost all of them have slept with, and in some cases deeply loved, a friend named Reg, who has blithely made promises and broken a million hearts—and in Act 2, that Reg isn’t present because he's only just passed away from AIDS.

Shades of The Boys in the Band, but without the confrontations and explosive anger—and instead of a rent boy, there’s an 18 year-old house boy, Eric, who appears naked in Act 3, having become the lover of John, whom Guy loved but never confessed his feelings for until he lay on his deathbed. (I think that’s Eric on the cover. People aged differently back then.) Which means there’s a strange optimism to the conclusion: the young working-class guy who’s vigorously having sex instead of simply regretting it, and with actual plans for developing London night life, becomes the inheritor of the property.

This Is How We Come Back, by Cyril Wong
Rosetta Cultures, 2024

This is Cyril’s first poetry collection to be published in Singapore since 2015. And though he claimed at the launch that this is a difficult work—it’s 64 pages of untitled prose poems, after all—I find it frickin’ gorgeous, and a pretty smooth read, as long as you don’t stop to try and make logical sense of every single line.

I’d actually argue that this may be read as a novella, telling the story of lovers meeting, loving, dying and finding transcendent form. That’s why it’s not broken up into titled poems: because the whole thing is part of the same narrative, moments surfacing and resurfacing, e.g. the loss and discovery of a detached nipple, images of beaches and bread, even the clear historical moment of Singapore going into lockdown in 2020 (which Cyril said was the period when this was written, when he actually dallied in supermarkets, just to be out of the house). Sure, it’s made up of mysterious segmented utterances, but they’re basically brief paragraphs. Nor are the references especially obscure—he quotes Judith Butler and the Swami Vivekanda, but also, more poignantly, the ending of Thelma and Louise.

So what’s the HIV connection? It’s tenuous, I guess, but there’s something very old school about the way Cyril portrays queer love as fundamentally doomed to extinction—he did the same thing in Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light (2007), which was much more explicitly AIDS-coded. And though it may be morbid, or even distasteful to other critics, I cherish this beautiful gloom, for it makes love all the more precious in its viscerality when it’s present. As Jeanette Winterson said in The Passion: better to burn than to marry. 

Endnotes

[1]The project’s called Mundur Singapura: The Second Wave of Queer Singaporean Theatre, commissioned by Wild Rice and Centre 42. More info here: https://www.wildrice.com.sg/event/335954-trc-mundur-singapura/

[2] “Men” is a bit of an over-generalisation. Andrew Sutherland uses he/they pronouns.

[3] Ng Yi-Sheng. “#YISHREADS October 2022.” Suspect. 28 October 2022. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2022/10/28/yishreads-october-2022

[4] I feel duty-bound to explain that Hur shared the first bit at a workshop, but the second bit can be found in his afterword.

[5] For more on the life of Jonathan Lim, see Clement Yong. “S’pore playwright Jonathan Lim, who wrote Chestnuts parodies, dies at 50.” The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/life/arts/spore-playwright-who-wrote-chestnuts-parody-jonathan-lim-dies-at-50

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Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.

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