14th Feb 2008
By AMMU KANNAMPILLY
"You can get away with murder if you are funny," the skinny man sitting across from me in a Singapore bar says on a wet February afternoon.
Kumar, as he likes to be called, is very funny. And although he hasn't turned his attention to crime or violence, he certainly manages to get away with a lot in Singapore's conservative culture.
Kumar (the name means "young man" in his native Tamil language) is gay and the country's first and reigning drag queen.
But most remarkable of all for this straight-laced nation, he is astonishingly popular in a country where cross-dressing is not exactly in vogue, and homosexuality remains illegal.
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