VICE: Catching Up with Malaysia’s Renegade Sex Bloggers

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http://www.vice.com/read/catching-up...ex-blogger-777






As a couple, you've got to have a bit of notoriety to earn yourself a portmanteau. While they might not be a Kimye or Brangelina quite yet, the Malaysian sex bloggers known as Alvivi—Alvin Tan and Vivian Lee—certainly caused enough of a hot and sweaty scandal in their hot and sweaty homeland for Tan to consider it prudent to jump bail and flee the country. In her erstwhile lover's absence, Lee awaits trial under Malaysia's notorious Sedition Act, a sort of catch-all device to induce compliant, self-censoring passivity.

It would be tedious here to recount all of Alvivi's many ins and outs, but the whole affair is as much indicative of Malaysia's starchy discomfort around freedom of expression (sexual or otherwise) as it is about an exhibitionist young couple who opted to have sex in a metaphorical glass box in order to stimulate debate as well as each other. Either way, it is very much a story of the social media age (the pair met on Facebook), a sort of bottom-up approach to fame.

Alvivi started in 2012 as a low-key Tumblr called Sumptuous Erotica, where they posted their homespun porn to a handful of friends and a few international followers. Lee has said she merely wanted an outlet to be her true self, but their near-anonymity vanished when Tan—either to connect to likeminded swingers or simply to promote the "brand"—started to post links on Singaporean tech forums, after which a local newspaper, the Star, broke the story in October that year. As the Tumblr was shut down, Lee's family spurned her, and Tan (who has also lost touch with his own family) was stripped of his ASEAN scholarship to read law at the prestigious National University of Singapore

Undeterred, the outcasts launched a YouTube channel and Facebook page where devotees could keep abreast of the soap opera's comings, not to mention its threatened goings. Those grainy, fixed-camera skin flicks were abandoned for "a more conservative path": swinger party call-outs; tongue-in-cheek posts about breaking Annabel Chong's world gangbang record; casting calls; a theory of how to reduce rape; competitions in which the best finish to the sentence "I love sex because..." won you a pair of Vivian's G-strings; merchandise offers, including $12 T-shirts announcing "sex is good"; and "Sexcussions," a series of talking head pieces covering such matters as foreplay tips and ways to get laid (a sort of Southeast Asian Dapper Laughs), as well as vox-pops in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore on homosexuality, vaginas, balls, and local sexual fantasies and preferences. Panorama it was not.

Nevertheless, their notoriety grew (so much so that Malaysians, fearful of "haters," became reluctant to participate in Sexcussions) and local media became interested in these "YouTube personalities." Vivian was interviewed by the local Marie Claire ("V Is for Virtue"), while the pair of them reprised John and Yoko's famous Rolling Stone cover for a feature with Esquire Malaysia. They were hot, the establishment was bothered.

Having aroused a throbbing anger in their homeland (Vivian was even involved in a knife attack), what really brought the Malaysian authorities down on them was an injudicious Facebook post on the eve of Ramadan depicting Alvivi eating bak kut teh, a Chinese pork soup, with the slogan "Selamat Berbuka Puasa" ("happy breaking fast") and a halal symbol. A calculated insult of Malaysia's 62 percent Muslim majority—and, more particularly, of the ruling National Front coalition's tendency to cloak its diktats in the name of religious observance—it was a provocation too far, and the pair were promptly arrested and jailed.

It was while in prison in July of 2013 that Alvin claims to have begun to think about absconding. The pair were bailed a week later for 60,000 ringgit (about $17,000), and while writing his memoirs, Sex, Pork and Persecution, Tan started to research asylum in the USA. Then, last May, he persuaded the presiding judge to temporarily return his passport so he could go to Singapore to film a documentary. He never returned. Instead, he fled across the Pacific to Mexico, crossed into the US, and spent three months at the San Diego Correctional Facility. The duped Malaysian authorities were irate and clamored for his extradition, but he was one step ahead of them: Not only did he know that he could only be extradited for an act that was a crime in both nations, he realized that the more they called for the American authorities to return him, the stronger his case for asylum would grow.

Meanwhile, back in Malaysia, Vivian was left to face the music alone. Unsurprisingly, Alvivi's following were appalled at this, calling him a coward, a charge he has vigorously denied. After a few months of keeping a low profile, during which time Alvin accused her of working as an escort, Vivian, in her "final act of love," took to Facebook to chastise "ALVIN TAN THE ALMIGHTY" for the callousness of abandoning her and for not replying—either to her or his mother—to any of the attempts to find out if he was OK. It was all lapped up by the local media.

Anyway, with the star-crossed lovers thousands of miles apart and no longer speaking, it seemed the storm of controversy had blown over, and that would be that. The final chapter would simply be the Malaysian court's verdict. Not so. After a short hiatus Tan has been more active than ever on his own Facebook page (URL: alvintan.yolo), regularly regaling his 20,000 or so followers—roughly the same amount as Vivian—with tales of his uncharacteristically orthodox take on the American Dream: living in LA, waiting tables, and pursuing a career in acting, "pure survival of the fittest." Indeed, he has described his Facebook postings as "a manual" to help fellow emigrating Malaysians follow in his footsteps.

Only last month, while Lee was back in the dock and facing a potential five-year sentence for sedition, her erstwhile lover was ever so helpfully aggregating tips on how to black over the tiny swastika at the center of a large iron cross tattooed on his chest because he had an audition to play a gay Asian in a condom ad. Ah, the American Dream.