The North Jakarta Police has released 126 people who were previously detained during a raid on a “gay party” in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta, late Sunday evening.
“There’s no indication that they performed pornographic acts,” said the head of the North Jakarta Police’s Crime Investigation Unit, Nasriadi, as quoted by Tempo today.
Police arrested 141 people at the party, which was held at a men’s-only spa called Atlantis Gym and Sauna, including two Malaysians, one Singaporean, and one Briton. Ten people, including the spa’s owner and a few alleged strippers, were charged with violating Indonesia’s ambiguously worded anti-pornography law.
Homosexual acts are not illegal in Indonesia (except in Aceh), but the anti-pornography law is often used to target people at homosexual gatherings (in this case, a strip show being the criminally pornographic aspect of the case).
131 people were identified as attendees of the party, dubbed ‘The Wild One’. Out of that group, the police are still detaining 5 people who tested positive for drugs.
Earlier this month, police in the city of Surabaya nabbed 14 people for allegedly holding a ‘gay party’ in a hotel. Eight were detained and made to take HIV tests, which showed that five of them tested positive. That information was released to the public through the media, despite mandatory HIV tests being deemed a threat to privacy by the World Health Organization.
Last week, two Indonesian men in Aceh, the only province in Indonesia to enforce Islamic Sharia laws, were sentenced to 85 strokes of the cane after being found in bed together during a raid by vigilantes. The two men would be the first to be flogged in the region for allegedly having same-sex relations. Activists have called on President Joko Widodo to make good on statements in support of basic rights for LGBT Indonesians by preventing the caning from taking place.
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