If you go to any large online Indonesian forum these days, it is very likely you will find a section dedicated to nightlife.

In many online forums’ nightlife sections, discussions are usually about more than just cool hangout places but also
feature information about the underground sex industry.

Forum users often share reviews of “plus-plus” massage parlors through a subculture activity popularly known in the forum as “free report” or more commonly shortened to FR.

Long before FR became a thing in online forums, there was a man who is now considered the pioneer of this subculture, Moammar Emka. Moammar is a journalist and writer, who specializes in reporting everything about Jakarta’s nightlife and adult entertainment hedonism.

He started writing in-depth reports of Jakarta’s nightlife and its underground adult industry when he was a columnist for men’s lifestyle magazines Matra and Popular in the mid-1990s — a time when the internet was foreign to Indonesians, even for those living in Jakarta, and when not many people knew about the sex industry.

“I did not consider my reports on the Jakarta and adult lifestyles as a job. I was just trying to blend in and hang around to see what was up. If I got a great story to write about as a report, I considered that a bonus,” Moammar told The Jakarta Post.

“To be honest, I was happy reporting and writing about the nightlife and sex scene in Jakarta.”

After several years of writing articles for Matra and Popular, Moammar decided to chronicle all of his reports in a book, Jakarta Undercover: Sex In The City.

Due to the controversial content of Jakarta Undercover, Moammar said many big publishers refused to publish it. He managed to secure a deal with a small publishing company and Jakarta Undercover was officially published in 2003.

The book became an instant hit due to its blatant, no-holds-barred exposure of the wild nightlife and sex scene in Jakarta.

Since its first launch, Jakarta Undercover has been reprinted more than 50 times and has been translated to numerous languages to cater to international readers.

Moammar followed up the book’s success with Jakarta Undercover 2: Night Carnival, Jakarta Undercover 3: Forbidden City and a compilation of the best stories from those books in Jakarta Undercover 4 in 1: The Party
that Never Ends.

A movie adaptation of Moammar’s Jakarta Undercover was made in 2006 and another one is set to be released this February.

“I was not very involved in the first movie adaptation. But in the new one, I am directly involved,” Moammar said.

The main character in the new movie adaptation, titled Moammar Emka’s Jakarta Undercover, is a fictionalization based on Moammar’s real life persona and experiences as a journalist and writer.

Sex, according to Moammar and director Fajar Nugros, will not be the film’s main focus. Instead, it will only serve as a backdrop to tell a much larger context of struggle, friendship and betrayal in the jungle of metropolis Jakarta.

Moammar’s success with the Jakarta Undercover series, however, does not always equal fun.

During the early years of Jakarta Undercover’s success, Moammar said there were some objections from the adult business owners whose establishments were being covered in the book.

“They never thought I would write about their businesses. I never gave out any names of people or places in the book. After a while, they were cool with me [...] I still receive invitations and updates from them if there is anything hot going on in Jakarta,” he said.

The owners might have realized that Moammar’s book had become a great promotion for their
businesses. After Jakarta Undercover was first published, the public’s curiosity over Jakarta’s nightlife grew and the adult entertainment industry reaped the benefits of this curiosity.

“As you can see today, anyone can write whatever about anything that takes place in Jakarta. The online
forums are filled with provocative discussions. The internet has developed so much from what it was in 2003 and
information about the Jakarta nightlife and sex scene is available everywhere,” Moammar said.

“I still feel proud that I was once an exclusive writer on the nightlife and sex scene during a time when most people were still too embarrassed to talk these topics.”

Another thing that remains a burden for Moammar following his patron-status persona of nightlife and sex topic writer is the fact that he graduated from an Islamic boarding school.

“Due to my background, Islamic boarding schools often invite me to discuss my books. These discussions, well, let’s just say, can be very colorful. Some will judge me for what I wrote and some will ask questions,” he said.

“I love the discussions and invitations from Islamic boarding schools because it shows the books open up
a room for discussions on topics we often push under the rug.”

Nowadays, Moammar said he had reduced his nightlife activity significantly due to old age and the fact he wanted to present the undercover story of Jakarta through a different style of writing.

“I hung around the nightlife scene intensively from 1996 to 2010. It’s kind of tiring at my age now,” the 42-year-old writer said.

“I also face a new challenge as a writer in my niche. Now that everyone can write about the stuff that I wrote about in Jakarta Undercover, I need to use a different approach in my storytelling. My next book series will be novels, whereas the Jakarta Undercover series was a compilation of reports.”