Space and Queerness in Jakarta
Sondre Siddhartha
→BFA PT 2029
The Center for Arts & Language’s annual Redefining Writing Essay Contest continued its lively tradition of uplifting varied languages, styles, and voices for the third year, and here are the results! Introductions to each essay are by Meredith Barrett, founder of the contest and Associate Director of A&L.—eds.
The 2026 Redefining Writing Essay Contest Winner Sondre Sidharta’s “Space and Queerness in Jakarta” starts with a gouache and ink drawing. A blacked out, blotchy figure sits in a room full of people on prayer mats. The figure is at once central and missing. Outlined and uncontainable. The essay that follows takes us through ways the author is seen, ignored, spoken about, and spoken to in different spaces. It employs narrative and poetics to analyze what it means to be gay in Jakarta, in Providence, in a high school bathroom, at the family table. The author focuses on the details of his own life and in doing so, speaks to a shared lived experience, building genuine relatability, rather than relying on false universality. The essay is beautiful and heartfelt and honest. The drawing and the text are about the same experience, but they say different things—illuminating new meanings in each other.—Meredith Barrett
Sondre Sidharta, Astaghfirullah, gouache and ink, 2025, 24 x 18 in.
The boy’s bathroom,
family reunions,
sermons in the mosque,
and choosing teams in PE class.
Being overtly gay in Jakarta makes you overaware of the space you have to yourself, and often that space is very limited. You can feel when it’s caving in, the tightness in your chest, the breaths you take suddenly take all your attention, and your eyes are stuck to the floor. It’s not just the fear of being judged; it’s that even if the people are tolerant towards you at the moment, you have to be extremely careful that you don’t take up too much space. Every time you mention it, every time you make it too obvious, it becomes more of a reason to hate you. Because any small way you upset them finally gives them ample reason to hate you without it being solely about your sexual identity. Because then you’re queer and annoying; you’re queer AND you make it too obvious. No matter how aware you are of your own space, they will make you feel like you are the one who’s taking up too much space. They will act as if giving someone basic human respect is a burden that eats away at their own time and effort. Every seat at the table is a seat they allow you to sit at; every time they are tolerant towards you is a gift that they expect something in return for. The discomfort eats up your space until your school, your house, the living room, your bedroom, your body, your lungs, your heart, and your brain are caved in by invisible walls.
In high school, I was the only guy to have no male friends. Every single one of my friends was a girl. I used to have male friends in middle school, but I would get tired of them talking bad about me behind my back. The walls of the school became a giant site of anxiety. In freshman year, a group of guys sent me mass spam messages of Quranic verses about why gays are going to hell. Instead of reporting them to teachers, I started spam messaging them back images of gay porn in retaliation. In junior year, a group of guys thought it would be funny to follow me on my walk to the car park every day for a week. Even after I shouted at them or I ignored them, they still found it entertaining to follow me, call out my name, and hide when I turned back. Like they were playing a game of red light, gay guy. I took a video of them in secret and reported them to my principal. In senior year, my friend told me her entire extended family had a loud debate over my overt queerness. Her male cousin, whom I have never met or talked to, started ranting about a flamboyant gay guy in my friend’s year whom she had to defend, sparking a huge debate over homosexuality and my right to be as obviously gay as I am. It stunned me to my core how even in spaces I have never been in, or with people I have never talked to, the amount of space I take up is such a site of outrage and controversy. As if the city itself were watching my every move. My phone, the pathway to the school carpark, and my friend’s family dining room—throughout my school years, I had to cross these places out as places of comfort. School was always a place where I had to share my space with people who did not enjoy my presence.
At home, I had my own bedroom, but I wasn’t allowed to lock my door. When I was 15, my parents walked in abruptly on me applying eyeliner in my bathroom. They screamed at me for what felt like an hour, and at the end of the night I couldn’t tell if my eyes stung from the makeup remover or my own tears. When I was 16, I was watching RuPaul’s Drag Race in my living room when my mom walked in and told me to shut it off because it was too gay. By the time I was 17, I had learned to keep my eyeliner hidden in my pencil case, watch Drag Race in incognito mode on my laptop, fold my crop tops in between my cargo pants, and put on my makeup in school after they had dropped me off. Even at home, I was always worried they could walk in or hear what I was watching from outside my door. Scared they would see my eyeliner on the edge of my eye and start another fight. Weirdly enough, we never talked about me being gay; I never came out, but they knew. They thought that never directly saying it out loud and getting mad at me for it was some sort of service to me. But in fact, it just forced me to be in a constant sense of anxiety, having to guess how much they hated me, how much of their love was conditional, and how much of the affection we shared was temporary. Yes, I had my own room, my own bed, a desk, a chair, a window, and a bathroom, but how much of that space was mine when my parents could walk in any second?
And you think leaving will make it better. You could take a one-hour car ride to Soekarno-Hatta Airport, take an eight-hour flight to Haneda Airport in Tokyo, stop for a three-hour layover, then take an eleven-hour flight to LAX in Los Angeles, get on a five-hour flight to Boston Logan Airport, drag your two pieces of luggage to a one-hour Uber ride to Providence, and open the door to your dorm room.
But no matter how far you are, home will always be home. Come time for Christmas or summer break, you will have to do the whole journey in reverse, back to the same bedroom where you spent eighteen years of your life crying in. The same thoughts ruminating by the corners of each wall. The same places crossed out of your list of comfort spaces. The same invisible walls carving the path for the city, by the sidewalks of the streets, marking a giant map of places where I could not be myself.
But the city isn’t a cage. Rather, it is your own mind that decides which space is yours. Throughout the years, the walls you create by yourself start to break down. Every day you wake up, go to school, have a nice day, and come back home okay, it makes it better. Then when you start feeling more comfortable and wear makeup to class, your teacher compliments you. And the classroom suddenly becomes a new space to be yourself. Then it’s your lunch table full of friends who you talk to every day, the art room you work in, the café you go to talk shit at every weekend, and the mall you wear your best outfits to. The same bedroom you cry in becomes the place of earth-shattering laughter. The makeup in your pencil case suddenly sits in a makeup bag open on your bathroom counter. The same school where you get followed in is the same place you strut confidently in tight low-rise jeans. Allowing yourself to breathe and take up space opens a million doors. Suddenly there is room for your parents to compliment your outfit and buy you lipstick for your birthday. Suddenly there is room to have a cute guy ask you to dance on the prom dance floor. Then your body, your bedroom, your house, your neighborhood, the school, and the streets of the city all become your space to be who you are. Jakarta isn’t a space of hate, but there will always be hate in Jakarta. But you shouldn’t ignore all the love the city gives, all the rooms where no one has judged you and you feel intense security. There will always be space for gays in Jakarta; the map of carved places where you can’t be yourself is a self-invented trap of self-guilt and insecurity. Wear that lipstick to religion class, cross your legs like a girl in PE class, and raise the pitch of your voice around a group of guys. Make your way to the front of the DJ table because you deserve to be there as much as anyone else. Jakarta is a shared space just like any other space, and although it might feel like you have to feel that discomfort for the good of everyone else, sometimes you have to let yourself be comfortable.
Every breath of fresh air,
every motorcycle ride,
every laugh,
every bit of sunlight.
every hour-long shower.
Every seat,
sidewalk,
and room
is yours to take.
Nathan Petree wrote his artist statement (manifesto).