Accounting for the future: masculinity, sex and work in urban Indonesia

During the course of PhD fieldwork in Jakarta and Yogyakarta in 2014 and 2015, I met many brondong similar to those depicted in the film. Certainly not all brondong sell sex, but I did understand it as a category used to refer to attractive male-bodied adolescents. The term is not used to describe oneself, like gay or waria is, but rather one that is used to describe others. Brondong seemed to be an ubiquitous feature of urban life in Indonesia; young men, no older than twenty, always unmarried, sometimes studying, often working in poorly paid jobs in the services and informal sectors. They almost always had migrated from a smaller city to a larger city in order to study and work. I met brondong most often in the course of fieldwork with older waria (roughly male-to-female transgender or male-bodied femininity).

My interest in Arisan Brondong thus stems from the rare insights it offers into markets for transactional sex and forms of intimacy which are often rendered invisible. There are various reasons for this, but the most important one is the way that gender serves as a code for directionality both of desire and, in the case of transactional sex, payment. This unqualified assumption is that masculine individuals buy sex, while feminine individuals sell sex. While I have no doubt that this is certainly one type of exchange that takes place in markets for sex, the presumption that this is the natural order of things upon which all others are based tends to obscure other forms of desire and gender. During my research, I observed complex and variegated modes of economic exchange for sexual services in which the same person might buy sex as often as they sell it.

In Arisan Brondong, the sexual aspects of the film are opaque, and the boys are represented as adroitly avoiding having sex. During ethnographic research I found that brondong skillfully and willingly engage in transactional sex. They do so not as their sole occupation, but as one mode of making money, among others. Most often, brondong I met during fieldwork told me that they started transactional sex in the context of other kinds of work. For example, one brondong from Sumatra explained to me that he had moved to Yogyakarta and had started work as a tea seller on a major intersection. There, he met a number of other young men who sold sex to gay men for approximately 300,000 Indonesian rupiah (approximately USD$30). As a result, he started to concentrate on sex work economies; after all, selling tea only brought in 50,000 Indonesian rupiah a day. He asked me: Which would I choose? Even as he makes this comment, however, it is not enough to see this young man in terms of instrumentalist or rational decision making. As he entered this market, he grew to realise his attractiveness and in turn his relationship to gendered subjectivity and desire shifts with it.

The category brondong thus becomes meaningful only when placed into its context with work, migration and ageing. This allows for a perspective that understands that after a particular age, brondong are no longer attractive. In line with this, most told me that they were looking forward to the day that they would be able to marry — in many respects, become an adult and a normative citizen in Indonesian society. They called an aspiration to belong to the ‘normal world’ [dunia normal]. However, some brondong delayed this occasion in favour of commercialising their attractiveness for “just one more year”. As a result, they had become old brondong. What was especially poignant about these men was the way that waria would care for them; in fact, sometimes older waria were the only friends that they found they had. Like waria, they had become members of Indonesia’s growing underclass, even as they aspired to belong to its middle class.

Benjamin Hegarty is a PhD candidate with the School of Archeology and Anthropology, Australian National University (benjamin.hegarty@anu.edu.au).