Click, mouse-over, scroll

In Melbourne, more than 4,400 kilometres away from Denpasar, Bali, I am moving through one of Queer Indonesia Archive (QIA)’s three digital exhibitions.

Faded and slightly grainy photos transport me back to a time 30-40 years ago, to clubs and party spaces that sported names such as ‘Moonlight’, ‘Stardust’ and ‘Topaz’. Everyone is dressed in costumes that effortlessly blend global disco aesthetics with a particularly camp appropriation of pan-Asian fashion. Sequins. Silk. Batik. Pageant participants compete and partygoers dance together under fluoro pink party props, mirrorballs and glitter.

Displayed alongside glamorous images of queer nightlife, though, are the struggles.

Scans of newspaper clippings and old Tempo (Time) magazines from the late eighties and early nineties move across the screen as I scroll, remnants of coverage pertaining to queer life that hovered in the shadows of Indonesia’s mainstream media and discourse. Newspaper scans show historical struggles for recognition of queer people, their experiences during the AIDS epidemic, and the hard work of activists who sought representation and awareness.

The online exhibition I am moving through—featuring both the English language and Bahasa Indonesia—is ‘Queer Jakarta in the 90s’. The subtitle reads: ‘An Incomplete History’.¹ 

History is built up in layers 

Or: in its ‘incomplete’ness, history is rebuilt and remodelled. Layered up as spreadsheets, in the open database that stores the QIA collection’s digitised holdings.

Archives are seldom neutral spaces, as their contents are shaped by distinct geographic, political, nationalist and historical forces. When there are gaps and missing pieces in Indonesia’s largely Jakarta-based national archival collections, amateur archivists have often been quick to find various do-it-yourself ways to fill the cracks in historical records or collecting practices. In 1975, filmmakers Misbach Yusa Biran and Asrul Sani established Sinematek Indonesia as the first film archive in Southeast Asia, based in Jakarta.² In 2007 the Cemeti Art Foundation in Yogyakarta founded the Indonesia Visual Art Archive (IVAA).³

Sinematek and IVAA are two discipline-specific attempts at establishing archival repositories. They are private yet have operated as quasi-‘national’ archives in their reach and remit. Over time generational shifts have highlighted the pronounced gaps between stories collected in Indonesia’s archives—national and private—and those yet to be included. To counter these gaps, the archival focus of a younger generation has turned attention towards more specific histories. Including, as is the case with QIA, to queer histories.

Queer Indonesia Archive are an online archive founded in 2020 by a core group of voluntary and collective members, many of whom are based in Bali.. Their work involves documenting and scanning ephemera from community members and community organisations—including films, oral histories, websites and photographs—and media preserved and presented in digital form.

Michael Ewing has observed that the mainstream Indonesian press often frames LGBTIQ+ experiences as a new concept—a foreign import, or intrusion.⁴ In this context, Kirsten Kamphuis has argued that looking to the past, and to QIA’s collection specifically, ‘can be used as a tool for resisting these narratives’ to show a longer, continued presence.⁵

In a social landscape where queer networks are often intra-generational, QIA’s work seems to expand this network, stretching across time along intergenerational lines. Rather than concentrating on traditional forms of queerness (such as the bissu, the androgynous fifth gender in Bugis-Makassar culture of South Sulawesi), which have already received coverage from anthropologists, the collection records of QIA largely span modern media dating from the late 1960s to the present.⁶ The emphasis on mass media provides a solid base to stretch back in time, and forward to connect with present experiences.

Digitality grounds QIA’s archival practice. In part because QIA were founded right before the onset of COVID-19, but also for security purposes in a national, social landscape of intense homophobia and hardline attitudes. The primary reason, however, is accessibility. QIA’s digital archive aims to be both digitised and decentralised in distributing content; therefore it has the capacity to extend its reach both across the archipelago and beyond these boundaries. This is a crucial point. Historically a large percentage of Indonesia’s archival and history infrastructure has been concentrated on the island of Java, at archives such as IVAA, and university art schools in Jakarta, Bandung and Yogyakarta. The centralisation of resources, education, and technology on Java has created ongoing problems for the process of documenting and researching histories outside of Indonesia’s main urban centres.

Subverting these ‘centralised’ perspectives, a digital, archipelago-wide view in archiving queer Indonesia can create a practice of both uncovering marginalised stories, and re-layering the archive with new perspectives; recuperating some of what has been lost to history. QIA has aimed to challenge erasure and historical amnesia: through tactics of archival resistance, and as the website states ‘celebration’. It is an attitude of re-remembering. A methodical, diligent recording of fragments of queer past(s, plural), excavated and brought back into the present moment.

The archive becomes a living space, a sikap

By sikap, I am referring to a Bahasa Indonesia noun that explains an embodied attitude: a way of behaving, positioning oneself, and thinking.

A sikap embodied as an archival ‘attitude’ can be understood as a viewpoint and practice rooted in historical awareness, and resistance. This attitude drives QIA to pursue better visibility, accessibility, and foundations for storytelling. In this context, it is a way of positioning the QIA as an intergenerational network that bridges the past and future, and contends with the gaps of the archival record to recognise a community’s continued presence.

Decentralised digital archives allow the collection of ‘uncollectable’ things: keepsakes, mementoes, memories. Objects once kept intensely private amongst community members are, with consent, made public. Digitisation becomes a way to preserve history without losing possessions or items of value. Archiving-as-action here becomes a practice of care for privacy and the ethics of documenting and sharing memories. Through this vision, QIA’s work could be understood as a relinking of historical relations. As members work with queer Indonesians to—as they state— ‘have their histories recorded on their own terms and in their own words’ to create a record shaped by and for community. As well as digitally collecting the living artefacts of queer Indonesia, the efforts of QIA volunteers have also turned to recording interviews and life histories.⁷ These recordings—as well as the archive’s multimedia collections—become a form of living media and archive, which embody a wide spectrum of emotions, stories and experiences.

If mass media and commentary are largely concerned with presenting one blanket narrative for queer histories in Indonesia, QIA aim to reframe these perceptions into a perspective shaped by a recognition of multiplicity through a practice of empathy. It is not about shaping one definitive queer history but settles into an ‘incomplete’ness. As an archive QIA gives space—physically, and metaphorically—to many-voiced perspective shaped by a lived-in community that shifts. Their process and approach allows for more diverse narratives to be woven from and through the work of the archive.

Queer Indonesia Archive’s stance bridges generations to make visible and expand the historical record to include Indonesian queer history. This is a practice that reveals a greater understanding and builds dialogues about queer experiences, to build a place that facilitates better recognition of queer histories. But Queer Indonesia Archive’s work is also about looking forward. This stance, this sikap, simultaneously looks to the past and future and reflects the ultimate impact of Queer Indonesia Archive’s work, to envision your history and your community’s story as part of something much larger and ongoing. Their archive provides the foundations to write new narratives and histories into being that are capable of contending with the archipelago’s pasts and futures.

The author would like to thank the Queer Indonesia Archive for their assistance with this article.