Neon lights, paper lampions, cigarette smoke, clinking beer bottles, and the slow, confident walk of men in dresses: for several decades in postwar Singapore, Bugis Street nightlife was one of Southeast Asia’s most notorious and fascinating urban spectacles. From the 1950s to the early 1980s, the old Bugis Street area — not today’s sanitized shopping strip, but the dense cluster of lanes near Rochor Road and Queen Street — became internationally famous for its after-dark scene, where food hawkers, sailors, office workers, tourists, sex workers, and flamboyant transvestites mingled in a nightly ritual that was at once illicit, commercial, and strangely communal.
Bugis Street emerged at the intersection of transit and tolerance. Its proximity to seamen’s hostels, cheap hotels, and bars made it a natural nightlife zone, while its semi-marginal location allowed activities that were quietly discouraged elsewhere. By dusk, makeshift tables appeared, beer flowed freely, and crowds gathered not only to drink and eat but to watch. The stars of the street were the transvestites — a term used at the time — many of whom would today be described as transgender women or gender-nonconforming performers. Dressed in tight cheongsams, sequined dresses, wigs, and heavy makeup, they paraded openly, laughing, flirting, and negotiating with clients in full view of the public.
Their lives were shaped by contradiction. During the day, many lived discreetly, some working in factories, kitchens, or informal trades, hiding their femininity to avoid harassment or family shame. At night, Bugis Street became a rare space of visibility and relative safety. Among themselves, they used Hokkien, Malay, and Singlish slang, joking loudly and forming tight social networks that provided protection against violence and police trouble. The street functioned as a chosen family, a place where being ah kua (a dated Hokkien term referring to effeminate men or trans women) was not only accepted but celebrated, even if often through a voyeuristic lens.
Sex work was woven into this ecosystem, though not always in the blunt, transactional way outsiders imagined. Some transvestites sold sex directly, negotiating prices with clients — sailors, tourists, local men — using coded language and quick assessments of risk. Others earned money through drinks, companionship, or tips simply for posing, teasing, or being photographed. The line between performance and prostitution was fluid, shaped by personal boundaries and nightly circumstances. For many, the street offered better earnings and more autonomy than hidden brothels, even as it exposed them to ridicule and exploitation.
Local reactions were complex. Many Singaporeans disapproved publicly but came anyway, drawn by curiosity and the carnival atmosphere. Bugis Street was famous for its mix of discomfort and delight: men who claimed to be “just watching,” couples giggling nervously, office workers on late-night suppers pretending indifference. The transvestites were mocked in jokes and tabloid stories, yet they were also familiar figures, greeted by regulars and protected by hawkers who depended on the crowds they attracted. This uneasy coexistence reflected broader attitudes toward sexuality in mid-20th-century Singapore — conservative in principle, pragmatic in practice.
Tourism authorities were not blind to the appeal. By the 1960s and 1970s, Bugis Street appeared in travel guides as an exotic must-see, marketed for its “colourful characters” and “outrageous nightlife.” Western journalists wrote breathlessly about the “men who become women at night,” often reducing real lives to spectacle. This attention brought money but also intensified scrutiny. The performers were tolerated as long as they stayed contained within Bugis Street; visibility elsewhere invited trouble. Gender nonconformity was acceptable only when framed as entertainment for others.
The end came gradually, then decisively. Urban renewal, moral campaigns, and the construction of the MRT transformed the area in the late 1970s and 1980s. Police crackdowns increased, licenses were revoked, and the informal economy that sustained the scene collapsed. The transvestites dispersed to bars in Orchard Road, Geylang, and later to more private venues, while some left sex work altogether. What had once been an organic street culture was erased in the name of modernization, replaced by air-conditioned malls and regulated nightlife.
Today, old Bugis Street survives mostly in photographs, oral histories, and nostalgic retellings. It is remembered with a mix of embarrassment and fondness, often stripped of its harsher realities. Yet its legacy matters. For a generation of gender-nonconforming Singaporeans, Bugis Street was a rare space of visibility and income in a hostile world. It exposed the contradictions of a society that condemned difference while profiting from it, and it reminds us that queer history in Asia did not begin in clubs, apps, or pride events, but on streets where survival, desire, and performance blurred under flickering neon lights.
I was a bit too young to actually enjoy the nightlife of old Bugis Street, but I remember it vividly anyway. Memory is funny like that. It doesn’t always need alcohol or lipstick or bad decisions to lodge itself in your bones. Sometimes all it takes is one evening, one old aunt, and a street full of people who refuse to make themselves small.
An auntie — not my mother, of course, but one of those aunties who smoked, laughed too loudly, and didn’t explain herself — took me to Bugis “to see the ah kua.” She said it the way people did then, casually, without apology, without theory. I didn’t know the politics, the risks, the economics. I just knew that the street was alive in a way nowhere else in Singapore felt alive. Loud. Messy. Glittering. A bit dangerous. Deliciously confusing.
The ah kua stood out immediately. Tall, proud, painted, padded, unapologetic. They didn’t hide. They paraded. Dresses clung where they were meant to, wigs were brushed high, voices were sharp and teasing. They laughed at men who stared too long and flirted with men who pretended not to stare at all. They weren’t asking permission. They were taking space. For a child growing up in a society that prized obedience, modesty, and silence — especially from girls — that mattered more than I could have known.
Was it a show? Of course it was. But it was also work, survival, performance, and community layered on top of each other. I didn’t understand sex work then, but I understood courage. I understood that these were people who had decided that if the world was going to look at them anyway, they would control the terms of that gaze. There was power in that. There still is.
Looking back now, I wonder how much of my own queer imprinting happened right there, between hawker tables and beer bottles, watching gender behave badly. Watching femininity refuse to be polite. Watching desire exist in public without a wedding ring, without a future plan, without shame. Nobody told me, “This is possible.” But Bugis Street showed me that it was.
Of course, Singapore eventually erased it. Cleaned it up. Sanitised it. Packed it away as an embarrassing phase, a tourist curiosity, a moral inconvenience. We kept the mall and lost the memory. We gained air-conditioning and lost audacity.
But some of us remember. Some of us were quietly changed. Old Bugis Street didn’t give me language, or theory, or a rainbow flag. What it gave me was much more dangerous: the knowledge that pride can exist before permission, that queerness doesn’t need to be respectable to be real, and that sometimes a street at night can raise a child better than a classroom ever could.