Boring Singapore to get saucy
NZPA-Reuter Singapore Stung by charges that Singapore is one of the world’s most boring cities, tourism officials plan to recreate a seedy red-light district which was frequented by transvestites, prostitutes, and pimps. Bugis Street, demolished two years ago to make way for an underground railway, was a popular rendezvous for tourists and soldiers and sailors on leave from the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Taped music blared from open air cafes and stalls sold beer and food.
What attracted many to the area were the beautiful and friendly transvestites who mixed freely with the crowd offering their advice or company
to whoever wanted it.
The highlight of the evening at Bugis Street was a fashion show where transvestites and prostitutes competed goodnaturedly against each other.
The Singapore Tourism Board plans to resurrect the 200 m long street in a central business district using bricks, doors, and windowframes salvaged from buildings demolished during the subway construction.
“We plan to restore the rustic scene, the spontaneous and gay street life,” said an official of the Tourism Board. The four-million dollar project scheduled for completion in early 1989 will include all the finer points of the dimly-lit,
narrow street, including a 100-year old public toilet whose flat roof provided a makeshift stage for boisterous drunks. But even before work has begun a row has erupted over the plan to restore some sleaze to squeaky clean Singapore. The president of the Singapore National Council of Churches, Geoffrey Abisheganaden said: “Apart from providing an obvious catchment area for A.I.D.S. and related diseases, I tremble to think of the potential damage to the thinking of our youth and the consequences thereof.”
In a letter to the masscirculation “Straits Times” he wrote: “While the transvestite and his ilk ought to be truly loved,
protected, understood, and rehabilitated, he should not parade as in an open zoo, somewhat like the pathetic Elephant Man of Victorian London.”
Singapore is keen to remove the impression that its booming capitalist economy has little else to offer the three million tourists who visit the citystate each year except shopping, and a few expensive night clubs and discotheques.
The “Straits Times” quoted a recent report by London’s “Economist” magazine’s intelligence unit describing Singapore as the most boring country among 48 nations surveyed.
The “Economist” said the countries deemed con-
siderably less boring than Singapore include the Soviet Union, China, Iran, Iraq and Libya. The average stay of a tourist in Singapore is just three days, mostly spent shopping. Singapore’s Tourist Promotion Board chairman, Lim Chen Beng, said the rebuilt Bugis Street, new public gardens, and a cultural museum “should help to increase the length of stay of our visitors.”
“Give Bugis Street a chance,” pleaded the “Sunday Times.” “The place was popular with the tourists because it offered the queer and the quaint, fulfilling the kind of Far-East fantasy image on which common
imagination had been long nurtured.”
A reader signing himself as “doctor” warned: “Bugis Street will draw the wrong type of tourists. When you facilitate contacts with homosexuals you will inevitably increase the pool of A.I.D.S. carriers.”
Undeterred by the controversy, the board is going ahead with awarding the contracts for the project. A spokeswoman said: “Much will depend on the people running Bugis Street. It could well turn out to be a place for family entertainment with outdoor eating provided by 50 open-air restaurants and professionals staging Wayam (Chinese opera).”
Boring Singapore to get saucy
Press, 19 December 1987, Page 39
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