[7] In March 1941, a Tan Ah Yiow was sentenced to nine months imprisonment after he was found with a "European client" in a "low down quarter", where he was discovered by F. J. C. Wilson, head of the local Anti-Vice Branch, following a tip.
[9] In April 1941, Captain Douglas Marr, the Deputy Assistant Provost Marshal of the Singapore Fortress Command, was accused of having committed "an act of gross indecency" with a male Malay youth, Sudin bin Daud, who denied being a "catamite".
Sudin claimed that on 13 March or 14, he was walking along Stamford Road, a supposed "area for male prostitutes", at night when a car driven by Marr stopped, picked him up and brought him to his boarding house in Tanglin Hill.
In his defence, Marr claimed that he had wanted to get "at the root of the homosexual type of vice and I thought, as it transpires very foolishly, that it would be a good idea to question a catamite and to try and find out to what extent soldiers in different regiments were involved".
[16][17] In July 1941, a blackmail case prosecuted by Mr. Griffith-Jones for the Crown; a Mr. 'X', as he was christened by the newspapers, admitted "he had been addicted to homosexual practices" had been extorted by more than two Chinese locals, Tan Ah Lek and Lim John Chye.
Encouraged by this precedent, homosexuals started to patronise other, mainly straight, discos in the city area such as My Place, Black Velvet, West End, El Morocco, The Library, Studio M and even the NCO Club at Beach Road.
On the silver screen, cinema goers enjoyed a Chinese language Shaw Brothers production entitled Ai nu (Love Slave) which starred actresses Lily Ho [fr] and Betty Pei Ti as a lesbian couple in a period setting.
Cruising continued in areas like Hong Lim Park, Boat Quay, back alleys in the Central Business District, Raffles Place MRT Station and Tanjong Pagar, swimming pools, Fort Road Beach and public toilets.
Lesbian couples who held hands in public, while not officially persecuted, report that they were frequently the target of verbal, physical, and at times sexual abuse from passers-by and gang members.
This, along with cruising activity at nearby Ann Siang Hill and the surrounding back alleys would eventually come to give Tanjong Pagar Road the reputation of being Singapore's gay quarter.
The most revolutionary factor which surfaced to facilitate the development of a sense of community amongst Singaporean gays was the widespread availability of the Internet and start of affordable access to the World Wide Web from the mid-1990s.
LGBTs could visit foreign websites to remain updated on gay news from around the globe or even view and download pornography, thus effectively bypassing Singapore's Undesirable Publications Act.
The pair were amongst the first wave of more than 1000 homosexual couples to take advantage of the civil partnership law which grants gay unions almost all the legal rights and obligations which apply to heterosexual marriages.
In August 2004, just days after being sworn in as prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong had promised a more "open and inclusive" Singapore, saying, "The police have now decided to exempt indoor talks from licensing requirements, unless they touch on sensitive issues such as race and religion.
"[48] In a wide-ranging interview conducted on 24 Aug. 2007 at the Istana with Leonard M. Apcar, deputy managing editor of the International Herald Tribune, Singapore correspondent Wayne Arnold, and Southeast Asia bureau chief Seth Mydans, Lee said, "we take an ambiguous position.
"[49] In October 2007, a parliamentary petition to repeal Section 377A Penal Code was jointly organised by Fridae founder Stuart Koe, human rights lawyer George Hwang and housewife Tan Joo Hymn, garnering thousands of signatories for an open letter to the prime minister.
[52] Senior minister of state for Law and Home Affairs, Associate Professor Ho Peng Kee, said that Singapore was generally still a "conservative" society and that the majority of its people still found homosexual behaviour "unacceptable".
Launched with a campaign video titled "RED + WHITE = PINK", this was Singapore's first public, open-air, pro-LGBTQ event and drew an estimated crowd of 2,500, breaking the record for the greatest turnout for a gathering at Speakers' Corner in Hong Lim Park since the venue's inception.
Lawrence Bernard Wee Kim San, then 40, claimed to have been harassed into resigning from his position as assistant general manager for cards and corporate sales at Robinson's department store because of his homosexuality.
The Attorney General's Chambers, in a statement, said Wee's "real grievance of alleged discrimination is against his former employer, and not the Government", and described his claim as being "not sustainable in law", "frivolous and vexatious" and "an abuse of the Court process".
[65] To protest against the annual Pink Dot SG, a group of Muslims led by Ustaz Noor Deros, a theology graduate of Al-Azhar University who was employed at the En-Naeem mosque in Tampines, started a "Wear White" campaign, calling on people to return to "fitrah" – or purity – and "sunnah" – the way of Muhammad.
[67] In December 2015, when it was announced that Adam Lambert would be performing at a Countdown 2016 New Year's Eve event, anti-gay groups sprang to action, petitioning the government to have the openly gay singer removed from the line-up.
An open letter which gathered more than 20,000 signatures said "Singaporeans can enjoy a good show without their consciences being affronted by lewd acts in the name of entertainment" and that Lambert was "well-known for his active promotion of a highly sexualized lifestyle and LGBT rights".
"[71] In the first case of its kind, a 36-year-old man Bryan Lim Sian Yang was charged in June 2016 with inciting violence after he logged on to an anti-gay Facebook group "We are against Pinkdot in Singapore" and wrote: "I am a Singaporean citizen.
[74] As a result of amendments to Singapore's Public Order Act, which was decried by human rights group Amnesty International, foreigners trying to attend the 9th Pink Dot SG event now faced arrest and if found guilty, could be fined S$20,000 or jailed for a year.
[81] In a landmark case in December 2018, the High Court allowed a 46-year-old gay man to adopt his five-year-old biological son who was born through surrogacy in the United States, and then brought to Singapore on a long-term visit pass.
[84] In the 2019 amendments to the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act, an Explanatory Statement to the new section 17E which deals with religious-based violence clarifies, "The target group need not be confined to persons who practise a certain religion.
The civil suits were brought by three gay men: disc jockey Johnson Ong Ming, former executive director of advocacy group Oogachaga Bryan Choong, and retired general practitioner Dr Roy Tan Seng Kee.
[91] State broadcaster Mediacorp sparked outrage when their Channel 8 drama series My Guardian Angels starring Zoe Tay, featured a basketball coach with sexually transmitted infections who was eventually imprisoned for molesting teenage boys.
The statement from the Archdiocese stated that the Catholic Church's stance on marriage remains unchanged and the comment is not an official papal teaching"[96] On 21 August 2022, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced Singapore would repeal the British colonial-era law banning gay sex between men, Section 377A.