The strain expressed in many of the poems in Sergius Seeks Bacchus reflects the negative impact of family disapproval. The poet exhibits great courage and fortitude in being prepared to speak in the face of objection. However, for him, there remains hope in the very act of writing and in his ability to disseminate the work and aspects of his life into a wider world that is more accepting. Indeed, despite intensely felt family pain, Pasaribu’s own writing has become companion, reward and solace all at once. We see this:

... when he realised something odd about
the text that was his life and hoped sometime soon
the Publisher would print an erratum
to restore the lost lines, wherein
he'd know he was everything and also nothing
was wrong with him

While this extract evidences a curious awkwardness of expression, nonetheless, family rejection of sexual difference (Pasaribu’s ‘lost lines’) remains a powerfully negative force for the poet and for many gay people, causing much suffering and alienation. If the poetry is a little strained at times, so be it.

He again makes this case with passion and force in another deeply felt engagement with the issue of social rejection in the poem ‘What the Dead Ask from the Departed’. Here, he relates the story of a young gay man, known to him, whose life ends in desperation and suicide after acting on his sexuality. Pasaribu writes:

You refused to come home in a cab with me
because you wanted to stay out and have fun.

That guy, the parlente one, bought us G&Ts and surprisingly
	
[…] 

didn't hustle you into a toilet stall.

‘That guy’ is more than just someone after quick sex. However, while the start is promising, problems arise for ‘you’:

you began skipping class. You were never in your kos
I remember thinking, is this happiness?

A kos is a boarding house that caters for people forced to work far from home, with individual rooms, some with full facilities, some without. They are filled with mainly young people seeking work and often act as a kind of refuge for people wanting to escape family prohibition. This is particularly true for young gay people. Indeed, Bali being mostly Hindu and so more tolerant, has become the preferred refuge for thousands of gay workers who seek jobs in the tourist industry and live, relatively cheaply, in the many kos on the island.

In ‘What the Dead Ask from the Departed’, the suicide of the poem’s addressee happens around Christmas time, when Christian Indonesians normally head home for the celebrations:

Just before Christmas I heard you were dead:
the blood from your wrists flooded your parents' bathroom floor

There is shock but also resignation here, perhaps even fatalism as well as guilt. Pasaribu’s alter-ego knows he might have neglected his friend, at a time when perhaps he should have been more accessible. However, he was having his own parental difficulties at the time, having to:

… (tutor) rich kids every day
so I could afford food, I moved to a cheaper kos,

where everybody shared one toilet. What can I say?
I had to save my own skin first. But once I had fled

far from the abyss I lost sight of your trail.
It was swept away by strangers shuffling by.

Pasaribu knows firsthand the experience of parental rejection and the anguish this can cause: ‘[o]nce his father kicked him … His mother said all / the trouble in their house flowed from him. (‘Curriculum Vitae 2015’). This is a lot for any young gay person to suffer, and worse is to be alienated then blamed for that very alienation. He also knows the pain for those who attempt to deny their sexuality, like his friend in the poem as they try to ‘pass’ as straight. More broadly he understands that death by suicide is troublingly prevalent for gay, male youth across the world, including in Indonesia (and indeed in Australia for that matter, especially in the regions). In this and many other poems, Pasaribu movingly recounts just some of the tragedy within his own orbit. In so doing, he relates stories that, while rooted in his own life, remain emblematic for many more that remain untold.

In ‘On a Pair of Young Men in the Underground Car Park at fX Sudirman Mall’ Pasaribu ponders another situation that represents the everyday plight for two anonymous young men in the capital, forced to meet clandestinely in order to hide their sexuality, a circumstance made necessary, indeed imperative where exposure often leads to serious consequence, family rejection perhaps the least of it. The ‘young men’ of the title represent all gay young men and there is no need to name them. Nonetheless, there is a kind of musing tenderness expressed in the poem that balances the broader political point being made. The poet asks almost beseechingly:

Is there anything more moving than two young men
in a Toyota Rush parked in the corner of level P3,
stealing a little time and space for themselves ... (?)

The sadness of this story is captured effectively in the very anonymity of the pair, combined with the careful particularity of the place and even type of car, the ‘place’ being a car park where the two men ‘exchange kisses wide-eyed’ because they need to watch for security guards or janitors as they attempt to escape ‘the loneliness of another week living / someone else’s life.’ Despite this, Pasaribu claims for these two a tender space where the same feelings ‘that made Sergius and Bacchus one’ are made manifest.

He goes on to suggests that:

... the loneliness they feel in their vacant rooms 
is no different from John Henry Newman's from 1876 to his death,
and isn't it this world that has everything wrong,
that has no clue about who they are?

If this notion of a shared human suffering is somewhat awkwardly expressed here (a problem poets often face when being discursive and where the imperative to make narrative sense sometimes disallows the poetic) Pasaribu’s intent and ambition is clear. Further, he appears keen to link the anonymous, ordinary young men seen in the car park with a lineage of important Christian theologians who have themselves been at odds with their world generally and suffered loneliness, isolation and doubt as a consequence of either sexual difference or their fervent questioning of Christian orthodoxy. In lauding Therese of Lisieux for instance, Pasaribu reminds us that she was ever vigilant to the idea that God ‘played favourites’ and that ‘blessings’ were not equally distributed, so sinners could sometimes more easily be blessed than non-sinners. The poet puts his two young men unequivocally in the camp of the latter, as he should. In doing so, he posits that St Therese herself would have done the same because she too followed a ‘Christian’ teaching that put love before all else. That the world might not be ‘ready for us’ is not the fault of the two young men.