Rainer, 39, and Eka, 40, met in Jakarta at an underground LGBTQ+ film festival in 2010. They now live together in Toronto, Canada
In the summer of 2010, Rainer was volunteering at an underground LGBTQ+ film festival in Jakarta. “I was born and raised in the city and had been part of the festival for a while,” he says. “There are some anti-LGBTQ+ laws and a lot of prejudice towards gay people in Indonesia, so we never told the authorities exactly what we were showing when we asked for permissions.”
During a screening at the Centre Culturel Français (CCF), now known as the Institut Français d’Indonésie, he noticed that another volunteer was having trouble getting the film to start. “I went to the control room and found Eka struggling to get the DVD player to work,” he says. “I thought he was a hunk straight away.” After Rainer helped him to get the film started, they began to chat. “He seemed really intelligent and sexy,” says Eka. “I had a good first impression of him but I didn’t expect it to turn into anything.”
