la nausée

Ah, so Mr. Otto Fong of my alma mater (I recognize the name and face, but little else) has come out about his sexual orientation on his blog, and then has rather abruptly deleted that post.

• Hear ye! Hear ye!: “A salute to Otto Fong”
• theonlinecitizen: “Gay teacher deletes his ‘coming out’ article”

It’s a pity, but hardly a surprise really. I posted yesterday about long-standing, elite school traditions, and how they effectively constrict the range of one’s life experiences (see here). Well, if I may say so, the RI tradition strikes me as in-your-face, swaggering male heterosexuality. Take a historic school tradition with the patriarchal overtones of a bygone colonial era, and add to that a bunch of testosterone-ravaged male teenagers eager to prove themselves as “sons of Singapore”, and you begin to see the picture.

Predictable then that a gay teacher will not easily fit in within such an environment, and may be ostracized, even.

But I digress…

TOC says that a press statement from MOE / RI is forthcoming. Already, though, we can pre-empt what the authorities will say. A teacher, as a professional, should keep his professional life separate from his private life. By posting about his sexual orientation publicly on his blog, he has crossed this professional-personal line. As such, he will be ‘reprimanded’ accordingly, but no further disciplinary action will be taken.

Such an explanation of course involves a non sequitur, which centres around the word “publicly“. Even if you ‘come out’ in public, you may not do so in your capacity as a secondary school teacher. We all have various public roles, of which only one, or at most a handful, are professional roles. For instance, we could be teacher, citizen, blogger, playwright, comic artist, political critic, and so on, ad infinitum. How does one’s blogging life (admittedly public) affect one’s teaching life, really? To put it more technically, the professional-personal dichotomy cuts across with the public-private dichotomy.

And by interfering with Mr Fong’s other public, non-professional roles (e.g. as blogger and as citizen), it would instead be the MOE / RI which have overstepped the boundaries between professional life and personal life. Ironic.

And hence the parodied line from RI’s school anthem in my post title: why is there felt to be a need to intrude into every sphere of our lives? Does the fact that someone is gay warrant such intrusion? Or the fact that he has blogged about it?