I loved my cousin brother Raghu*. I liked to think I was the one in the family he was closest to, the one he would confide in, seek advice from.

Well, not close enough, evidently.

One morning, three years ago, Raghu called me on the telephone. Without preliminaries, he announced to me that he loved men, not women, and hung up just as abruptly. This, just weeks after he had become father to a baby boy, and a year or so after his marriage.

Later that day, Raghu, all of 26, ended his life in the south Madras flat where he and his family lived.

I wish I could say I had suspected something like this was brewing when he made that call to me, the call that was to be our last conversation. I hadn’t.

Love and forgiveness. I wrestle with these each day. Through love, one can overlook others’ faults, however significant they may be. Through forgiveness, one seeks peace.

Raghu, I wish I could forgive you easily for ending your life, leaving your wife and infant son behind, casualties of the choices you made. Forgiving you remains a struggle, though I try. Questions race through my mind all the time. Why could you not have thought about your preferences beforehand, and avoided drawing her into your life? Did we, as a family, make it so difficult for you to admit your different orientation? Or, was it your desire to conform, to not hurt your parents, that drove you to consent for marriage in the first place? What of the hurt that engulfed everyone when you chose to depart?

Raghu, wherever you may be now, I still love you, my brother. Your difference did not matter to me then, nor does it now. I wish you happiness wherever you may be. And I continue to try to forgive.

To the readers of this note, I ask that you live and let live. If you have a sibling, child, friend or other loved one who has a different orientation, please do not let this difference come in the way of your love for them.

And if you are yourself differently oriented from the so-called mainstream sexuality, be strong in your convictions. Going against family expectations may cause some grief, but that is nothing compared to the devastation resulting from the choices that Raghu – and I fear there have been many like him through the ages – felt compelled to make.

*name changed

This piece is based on a note submitted by an Orinam reader, and is being posted on Sept 10, World Suicide Prevention Day. If you or someone you know is depressed or suicidal, please seek help. Some crisis support resources are here.

Queer Madras, and sundry musings on sexuality
True, if you scout the city with the eye of an amateur ornithologist looking for a distinct subspecies called the homosexual, you are likely to conclude that it’s a rare bird or at least an elusive one. There are no bars or yuppified clubs in whose smoky recesses gay-identified men gather for an evening of dancing or cruising. Then again, Madras is hardly as exuberant as Bombay or Bangalore to begin with.

What I would include under the rubric of queerness is more subtle and far more pervasive than any institutionalized lesbian or gay identity. It’s like those flakes of tomato pulp nearly dissolved in steaming peppery Madras rasam, lurking below the surface, gratifyingly tasty yet barely palpable, and threatening to vanish if you attempt to define them or pick them out from the matrix of which they are a part and which they help constitute.

Some recollections.

All the schools and colleges I attended in Madras had queerness so amply represented that for the longest time I firmly believed that the Indian Kinsey Zero was a mythical creature. The Catholic boys school: where the gorgeous Malayali boy in my French class missed no opportunity to make salacious body contact and out of whose notoriously clumsy hands the pen would invariably fall into my lap, affording him scope for a leisurely feel.

Even that arts-and-science college that was the bastion of Mylapore middle class conventionality may have been straight-laced but was anything but straight. Encounters between day-scholars and hostelites were all too frequent, eroticised by a sense of otherness in both parties and enacted in late afternoons in decrepit hostel rooms with windows wide open, as the coconut fronds rustled in conspiratorial bemusement.

The hip rival college west of Gemini was no repository of heterosexual virtue either. A friend and study-partner resided in its hostel: this fellow was plenty smart, witty, a debating team rival, and big crush of mine. On one particularly memorable occasion after we had finished taking an competitive exam practice test in his room, he pulled out his stack of straight porn to show me, a common gesture of male bonding. Of the momentary wordless debate that ensued on the issue of who would initiate what with whom, I fondly recall there were two winners…

Inter-collegiate literary, music and art competitions, especially those in which out-of-town colleges would participate, were incubators for sexual exploration. It was in one such event at a co-ed college that I met the woman with whom I was to have my first “all the way” experience, one that left me starry eyed and gazing vacantly into space weeks after she was long gone. The intercollegiate festival of a prominent engineering college had immensely popular light and Western music competitions to which the hip crowds thronged while the more paavam-fied junata stood around the periphery in their rubber chappals and gaped at the unabashed revelry. Drawn to one such event by the hype, but finding myself out of place in both of these demographic strata, I opted instead for a walk through the campus woods, where, having left behind the crowds and the smattering of boy-girl couples making out or getting stoned behind sundry bushes, I chanced upon a vigorous scene of what the French describe so delicately as soixante-neuf, involving, yup, two guys who were audibly having the time of their lives.

But queerness wasn’t confined to the classrooms and grounds of academic institutions in Madras. The PTC buses, especially the 23A and 4G routes that serviced several colleges, packed in warm horny bodies like vegetables in aviyal stew. As the guys huddled and jostled in clumps to letch at the gals yonder, displays of homosocial bonding slid seamlessly into sexualized contact, all ostensibly catalysed by the sight of one “deadly babe, macchi” or the other. Tales of nocturnal travel on Thiruvalluvar inter-state buses are beyond the scope of this article…

How can I forget the venerable music auditorium, where, at an evening concert during the 1984 December cutcheri season, I was groped by an elderly gentleman in a fine pattu veshti (silk dhoti) as his wife sat on the other side resplendent in Kanjivaram sari and oversized nose stud, blissfully unaware of what her husband was up to as she noisily and inaccurately kept time to the ongoing keertanam.

As dusk fell on the corporation playground opposite the park on Venkatanarayana Road in T Nagar, bodybuilders would trickle in to pump iron and occasionally more. At the now defunct music school operating out of a dinky garage near GN Chetty Road: while young girls were sent to acquire credentials that would enhance their future marriageability, the boys usually went of their own accord, and not a few lingered after the school closed for the evening, the mridangams and violins were stacked away and the lights turned off.

I remember the strip mall in Besant Nagar where, on one of my visits home in 1995, a former classmate whom I was meeting after a long time proceeded to demonstrate his recently acquired skills at seducing even the straightest of guys. As I looked on in wonderment, he licked his lips, fluttered his eyelashes, ground his hips, and girded his loins as he minced over to a strapping specimen of Mallu masculinity, gave him a deliberate once-over that said it all, and walked on forward and around the block. In moments, the cruisee stubbed out his cigarette, glanced furtively around, and hastened to catch up with my friend. That was the last I saw of them that evening.

The more cynical or jaded reader might inquire: what relevance do these admittedly lurid anecdotes have to our contemporary (1990s) discourses on queer identities and movements in India? Everything, in my opinion. Bear with me as I detail my argument. See, some people would be wont to dismiss the above examples as opportunistic or situational homosexual behavior that “regular” heterosexual guys would readily engage in when testosterone surged and female companionship was unavailable. To yet others, these instances would illustrate the tyranny of a society that invisibilizes gay people and allows them only such fleeting encounters devoid of emotional substance. Both these views may be partially correct, but, in my opinion, are overly simplistic as they refuse to acknowledge the inherent complexity and fluidity of desire.

Mixed in there with the libidinous teenagers and adults are individuals stuck in unhappy marriages, some male “friends” whose relationships remain invisible to most of the rest of society, not to mention the single women who deliberately acquired enough educational or professional credentials that they made themselves over-qualified for marriage in the eyes of prospective in-laws. Some of these “spinsters” live with their parents. No questions are asked about their sexual lives, of course, because it is assumed that women have no sexual desires, only sexual duties. Even parents who know what their daughters really want would prefer not to know.

There are untold tales of boys from conservative families who choose the spiritual track, sometimes leaving their homes to join ashrams or becoming vadhyars/pujaris because these options are queer enough in their unconventionality that they can allow them to escape the trappings of heterosexual marriage.

There also tales of men and woman who have unquestioningly acceded to their wishes of family and society and are not too unhappy with their heterosexual lives, but may have chosen other options had they been available.

Sure, we need gay and lesbian people to come out and identify as such, gaining acceptance within their milieux. But what about the countless others whose sexualities are more complex or fluid? By subscribing to the rigid binarism of sexual orientation most often prevalent in gay rights discourses, we deny some of the richness of human erotic experience. We also run the risk of pathologizing sexual orientation by presenting gays and lesbians as that minority that are only “that way” because they could not help it. While intending to elicit sympathy for their cause, such “born that way” arguments only serve to distance gays from the rest of society. They shove the bisexuals into one of two closets and further vitiate bipartisan politics.

Such rigid identity politics also have serious public health implications – HIV/AIDS awareness schemes that only target gay-identified men are going to exclude a large subset of the population that is not exclusively homosexual or is not gay-identified.

I am pleading for a more inclusive movement that recognizes the heterogeneity within our communities, that instead of creating “us” versus “them” polarities that only alienate, points out that some of us are also them, some of them are also us. A movement that challenges the gender inequality and heterosexism that’s at the root of not just homophobia but also institutionalized misogyny – brideburning, domestic abuse and rape. A movement founded on the premise that we have the right to choose who we love, and that it does not matter if we are guided by our hearts or politics or DNA.

Any takers?

To reach the author, please leave a comment on the Orinam website.

One of my straight friends recently asked me “Why do you guys need a gay pride, when we are not parading on the street announcing our heterosexuality?”. I could have replied “we don’t follow the so-called social norms defined by the majority of you people”. Instead I took him to one of my favorite beaches, Besant Nagar, where there were plenty of heterosexuals doing all sort of romantic things openly…

Read his essay on the CD blog here.

but
when you
gather me
effortlessly
in your embrace
and we make
confident
tender
fierce
love

it’s so
utterly
gloriously
powerfully
unmistakably

Queer

that
exploitative
male gaze
falters
then
withers
dejected
into
detumescent
nothingness

and
we have
our world
all to
ourselves

at long last

(c) 1999 desinorse/jaya from the khush list. Reproduced with permission

Dear Queerdom

The Gossip Fund raiser party was held last night in Metro Lounge in Oshiwara. Gossip had a QAM fundraiser wherein every entry contributed Rs.100 towards QAM. The party had revved up enough numbers and people seemed comfortable in the disc area and the terrace above. At 11.45pm Vivek and I were about to leave the party when Sibi mentioned that there was an issue downstairs.

As we walked towards the exit we had venue staff telling us that we could not leave since there were police outside. A guy with a ponytail, beard, kohl-eyed and wearing a vest was standing there instructing the police to go and check on the party. He said his name was Haji Ahmed Sahab Bawa (HASB) and he claimed to be a member of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). He also was showing videos that he had clicked inside the party. He was threatening the venue staff that he would raise complaints against them and that seemed to have freaked them. There was confusion for some time as to whether we could leave or not. Some of us stood at the gate asking the cops what was the exact reason that they were there for. The cops mentioned that they were checking on the venue’s permissions and seeing if everything was in order . Although the cops were not being very aggressive, HASB was giving directions to the cops as to what they should do . He kept talking incessantly on the phone shouting “Media Ko Bulao”.

Sibi tried to speak to the cops and HASB by mentioning that we are doing nothing illegal and that section 377 reading down clearly states so. HASB mentioned that his party has ordered a stay in the Supreme Court against reading down of section 377 (factually incorrect). He kept threatening the police and the venue staff.

Vivek and I tried to understand from the police , what exactly was the issue and we were not getting any clear answers. We asked the police that we would like to address the issue at the police station and understand what is the reason that the party is being stopped. They mentioned that they were from Oshiwara Police Station. We ensured that all party goers be safely allowed to leave the venue and police co-operated. As we walked out there was a huge crowd that had collected on the street outside. HASB came out and I yelled out to him that we want to see him in the police station and understand his issues. He did not hear me out and ran towards the car as I ran behind him yelling at him to come to Oshiwara Police station. He was accompanied by a guy who held me and pushed me away, I asked him if he was police , since he was in plainclothes. I told him that he has no proof that he is the police. He pushed me away again, I told him that he has no business touching me. This guy also dashed along with HASB to the car and said that they were going to the police station. I told him that I do not believe that he is going to the police station and what if he gets away. I went close to his car and started taking pics of HASB. By this time a crowd of 10-15 had collected from the party and had surrounded HASB’s car and refused to let him drive away. We took more pictures. We finally let him drive away when we were assured by the uniformed police that the guy with him in the car was a policeman.

We went to the Oshiwara police station and saw HASB’s car waiting outside. A huge crowd from the party of 30 people collected outside Oshiwara Police station. Vivek, Praful, Sibi and me were allowed inside to talk to the police station. It was a long wait , HASB sat with the police inspector Shirsat of Oshiwara Police Station and gave his complaint in written. While HASB was with the police , the policeman in plainsclothes got into an argument with us. He said that he will make an official complaint that he was attacked by the partygoers. We calmed him down and explained that we were all homosexual men and we see nothing wrong with that. We have a Pride March on the 28th which has valid police permissions and we are only fundraising for it. Post that he calmed down and said that he was on duty and we are free to present our point of view to the police inspector.Post That the police discussed the issue with the Venue manager and asked him to kill the issue. The manager was extremely worried about his venue being in trouble and did not wish to make a big issue about this. He kept on asking us to back out. We refused saying that it was not about the venue but an issue about our identities being attacked and due care would be taken that the venue does not face any problems. We insisted that we speak to the inspector Shirsath. Sibi, Vivek and I presented ourselves to Shirsat’s table and we discussed the issue. Shirsat mentioned that he had no problems against the party and there is no illegality with being gay. He quoted HASB and mentioned that he has asked HASB to produce documentary evidence that says that gay parties are illegal. Shirsath mentioned that ideally when a  party is being organized there needs to be an intimation to the local police station about the party , they did not have it and hence they were obliged to act on a complaint by HASB. On the whole Shisrath was very cordial and apologized if on behalf of his police team there was any inconvenience caused to anyone.

Shirsath mentioned that there would be a meeting in Oshiwara Police station on Saturday along with HASB and someone either Vivek or me maybe called to present our point of view. HASB has filed an NC of damage to his car.

We left asking Shirsath how we can file a complaint against HASB , he mentioned that he would give us his details and we could do the needful.

Outide the crowds were yet on the street till 2.30 am . We went out and apprised them of our conversations with the Police. Mid Day and Time Now. Reporters were outside for the story and the crowd of 30 faced cameras to say that we are fundraising here and we are not scared anymore, we will fight this harassment and ensure that QAM 2012 is a success!

Back in Vivek’s house and I could not sleep until I wrote this out!

Interestingly there are 64 words that start with “Ex” among the top 5,000 most commonly used words in English. When dictionaries can accommodate an Ex, why can’t we?

Some Ex-es survive the break-up tempest to become friends, while some completely vanish as if into the Bermuda Triangle. Do relationships ever really vanish, though, or do they experience a transmutation?

Why is that we keep looking for Ex-es even after the relationship has disappeared? Is it because Ex-es make us feel guilty for letting go, or are we jealous a Harley kind of new boyfriend will replace us? I secretly searched for my Ex on Google, Facebook, Orkut, and Linked in, and prayed I would run into him on the street corner, at a traffic light, or at the grocery store. But why? For atonement or attainment in the unrealized dream turned nightmare?

After spending six months with tissues, issues, and searches on the World Wide Web, I finally thought I had climbed out of the emotional dumpster and gotten over the rocky terrain. But the cell phone ring that morning made me fall right back into the dumpster. The call was a familiar voice from the “Don’t call” registry. Obviously the Ex-orcism didn’t work; my Ex was back. Now I felt as if I were being chased and possessed again.

Sleepless nights and a re-hash of our relationship – tender moments and haunting memories – followed the phone call. And I bought a few more boxes of tissues to sort out my issues. Was this call an act of kindness or an act of cruelty? Was he back so soon to again teach me more lessons? I badly needed a class on “Ex 101”.

Back at the bottom of the dumpster again, I was swamped by questions weighing on me like a mound of earth over a grave. It’s not that easy to transmute an Ex into a friend. For that matter, it’s not even easy to move an Ex from the (almost) blocked list back into the “accept incoming call” list. Aren’t rules of engagement different between an Ex and a friend?

Equations change when that special someone gets downgraded to Ex. Families on both sides are instantly forgotten and abandoned; friends are torn apart and left hanging clueless; anniversaries and birthdays are like Friday the 13th; and gifts and pictures are packed in cartoon boxes, labeled with a skull and crossbones and put in the attic.

Are expired relationships dangerous? Should they be quarantined or disposed in outer space? Can they cause an “Ex”plosion if handled carelessly? A friend of mine was outed to his parents by a spiteful Ex, but not all Ex-es are nefarious and vengeful. Some are kind, caring and humble – just not to their Ex-es.

So, there he was. From the phone call I knew he was living my dream happily in the US with a boyfriend and making plans for a union ceremony after eight months of being together. Eight months! Could someone erase my three years of hard work in just eight months? Could I be happy for someone living my dream or was I going to turn green with envy and plot sabotage? Should I extend ex-gratia in the form of kindness, unconditional love, forgiveness, and moral and financial support? I happily mutated into a protector, and took on a new avatar as friend, philosopher and guide – all in one.

Do Ex-es come back looking to pay the accrued interest from our earlier deposits in their emotional bank account? Yes they do!

There I was in the red after a few family emergencies. My cell phone cried out again. Another forgotten ring tone from the Do Not Call registry. Well, it was my ex-gratia! He was offering me a relief package and rope to climb out of the hole that I was in, with a no-interest loan. Maybe we can extract more from an Ex as a friend than a partner? I didn’t take up the loan offer, but nevertheless I upgraded him from the “Don’t call” to “Occasionally call” registry.

Do Ex-es come back to remind us of our past (mistakes!) or do they come back to express their regret and rebuild the burnt bridges? I thought this was one question that I would never be able to answer, but then Newton seems to have the perfect explanation for why Ex-es keep coming back into our lives. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and it always reappears in another form. I’m just glad my Ex is now a friend.

Thanks to Chandra D. for permission to reproduce this essay from his blog.

Historically, lesbian women and gay men have often been traumatized by  probing questions about their personal lives. This was and sometimes still is due to a perceived or very real threat that came along with these questions... does every new generation of gays and lesbians need to start from scratch over and over just because there is virtually no information about previous generations because they have been too discrete ? – LGBT archive http://www.fondssuzandaniel.be/

The LGBT ‘movement’ in india is about 15+ years old, has spread beyond the handful of metro cities, is staggering in its diversity of peoples who are accommodated within, and, the frequency of LGBT related events and happening around the country is increasing exponentially. Also, certain LGBT experiences which were ubiquitous a couple of decades ago, have all but disappeared. Hence it might be time to start thinking about an LGBT archive in India.

During an initial discussion, we (Arvind, Namita, Danish, Deepa, Jayashree, Lawrence, Niruj and others) came up with the following ideas about such an archive. We would like to make this a collaborative projects between everyone in the country who is interested, so please do email your ideas.

• Everyone is a part of the archiving process, i.e., any one should be able to decide what they think should be archived.
• There cannot be a central archive but multiple archives spread across the country, both physical and online.
• If you and your friends think something in your region/state/town should be archived/documented, please go ahead and do so, and let us know about it.
• We would like to set up a group which collates information on what material is archived/stored where, by whom, and its nature. This list of material should then be online so everyone knows what is where.
• This collection of archives would obviously be heterogenous (see below for an example list)
• Issues of safety, privacy, misuse etc need to be sorted out.
• It would be great if groups took up projects to collect, create, preserve and archive material locally. Can those people willing to offer help for such projects (technical, material, financial etc) let us know?
• It may be useful to explore collaborations locally with other archives, museums, institutes etc for physical space, help etc.

We would like to have a very broad and diverse range of material which would be worth archiving – some examples which came up during the discussion were oral histories, video interviews with older LGBT people, digitising newspapers records, love letters, personal letters, photographs, event flyers, protest pamplets, t-shirts, video footage of events and protests, posters, reports, catalogues, notes, etc .. as you can see, this would be a very diverse collection of archives indeed!

So if planning, creating and supporting such an archival project excites you, please get in touch. Ideally we would like to set up a nation-wide group of people who can take this forward.

Some of the online LGBT archives we managed to find:

http://www.onearchives.org/
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/out-there.htm
http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/handle/1808/5330
http://www.laganz.org.nz/
http://hallcarpenter.tripod.com/
http://www.gaycenter.org/community/archive
http://www.wrhs.org/index.php/library/Archive/LGBTArchives
http://library.umkc.edu/spec-col/glama/index.htm
http://www2.mtroyal.ab.ca/~canderson/home.htm
http://www.waygay.org/programs/cultural.asp#archives
http://www.glbthistory.org/
http://www.uwo.ca/pridelib/subjectcollections.html
http://www.clga.ca/
http://www.ihlia.nl/english/english
http://www.fondssuzandaniel.be/Newsiteen/index.php

This unfortunate incident just reveals the latent homophobia in society, something which we can choose to ignore at our own peril. Anyone with an ear to the ground will be aware of how exactly gay people are perceived by the rest of our society.

In life, perceptions can count more than facts. You may see yourself as a liberated spirit; society may see you as a lustful pedophile busily engaged in converting young boys to “your filthy gay lifestyle”. This is especially reinforced by the gay community’s unfortunate and reckless use of words like “pride”, “choice” and “lifestyle” when talking about themselves. We convey the impression that not only have we deliberately chosen this “filthy western lifestyle”, but we are even proud of it.

The general Indian public is very confused about what the gay community is, something that is further exacerbated by the range of people that come under the term “gay”.

Lack of any formal educational inputs regarding sex and sexuality leaves them ignorant and prejudiced. At the same time, various religions are aggressively pursuing their personal agendas by denouncing the gay community and promoting and provoking violence against them. And, our usage of words like “choice”, “pride” and “lifestyle” reinforces the public’s wrong perceptions about us and induces them to accept the lies told to them by their religious leaders. That’s the power of words.

If you look at a problem of motion of a physical body in physics, you would plot all the various forces and counter forces and arrive at the net resulting force. That’s how we manage to send satellites and space explorers into space; by understanding and working with every force that will act on the object that we are sending out, all along its path. When we choose to ignore any of those forces, out of ignorance, out of arrogance, or simply because we cannot “accept” the existence of those forces, our satellites and space explorers will end up in quite different places from where they were intended to be.

The same applies to the forces in society. You may choose to ignore certain realities simply because you want to don’t accept their existence. But that does not make them disappear. They will act on you whether you like it or not.

Here’s a thought for you: It is logically a fallacy to talk about being proud of something that is not your personal achievement. For example, wouldn’t it sound ridiculous if you said, “I am proud to have 5 fingers on each hand”? Obviously so, since you did not create those fingers with your own effort, right?

The word “proud” AUTOMATICALLY implies that what you are talking about is your personal achievement. You will sound like a retard if you said you are proud that the sun sets in the west and not in the north. Yet, we people say we are “proud to be gay”. So, what does that AUTOMATICALLY imply? It implies that being gay is something we have attained or chosen ourselves. So, you cannot say in one breath that you were born gay and did not choose it, and in the next breath say that you are proud to be gay (and thereby directly imply that it was your personal choice).

At this point, kindly don’t give me your tired old explanations about Stonewall and all that. You can argue on the semantics of the usage with me till the cows come home. What you need to think about is: does all this explanation sell with the rest of society? Was it something you could have used with those guys at the Empire?

I said right at the outset that perceptions can count for more than facts. The truth is that we have chosen this word “pride” without even thinking about its implications; about the power of words. It is time to let go of this word.

Another question for you: when you say you are “proud to be gay”, are you also implying that you would have been “ashamed” if you had not been gay? Can you see how meaningless this usage of the word “proud” is? Stop aping the west mindlessly. Let THEM follow us for a change.

Then, while the gay community wants to tell the world that it is as “normal” as anyone else, for some reason it is too “shy” to actually demonstrate this in practice. Thus, the only time the general public sees the gay community as such is when gay people are marching through the streets in their annual parades, dressed up in freakish attire or in almost nothing, disrupting the traffic, banging drums to add to the already hellish noise pollution on the streets, carrying strange and provocative banners saying things like “Main gaandu hoon”, “Proud to be gay”, and so on. Other than this, the only real contact between the straight and the gay communities is when hijdas clad in sarees go about their business harassing and intimidating the public. As for “normal” gay men, they go about their day-to-day business while keeping their nature hidden, and the public does not even know that they are gay. So, when the public looks at these men, they just see “normal people”, not “gay people”.

That means, the public rarely gets to see men who openly call themselves gay and yet look and act “normal”. Why then are we surprised that the public sees us as decadent pedophiles who have deliberately chosen “filthy western lifestyles”? Isn’t that the perception that we are ourselves creating about ourselves?

Here’s a question for you: HOW OFTEN DOES THE GAY COMMUNITY MARCH THROUGH THE STREETS IN AN ORDERLY MANNER, WEARING “RESPECTABLE CLOTHES” AND CARRYING RESPECTABLE-SOUNDING MESSAGES?

NEVER; right?

Why not?

Why does EVERY SINGLE GAY PARADE have to be a display of freakish attires, crude messages and boisterous behavior hardly likely to command respect? Why are we only TELLING people that we are “as normal as anyone else”? Why not SHOW it to them? Is that too much to ask?

What we need to work on is changing the perception of the general public regarding the gay community.

Here’s what I’d like to see in a gay parade: I’d like to see gay people DRESSED NEATLY in NORMAL clothing–which could include anything from business suits to your own traditional attires–walking quietly together through the streets in an orderly and dignified manner, without being accompanied by raucous banging of drums (something that is normally associated with some communities carrying dead bodies to the cremation ground), without disrupting the traffic; handing out leaflets and messages to the general public with a smile, and treating every such interaction with the general public as an opportunity to change their attitude towards the gay community by acting “as straight as they are”. I think I would be happy to be part of such a parade.

In my opinion, the current parades only serve to reinforce the low opinion that the general public has about the gay community. I want no part of that, and have never marched in one of these whether in India or outside.

What would you say about a person who keeps feeding sugar to a diabetic and then wonders why the patient does not recover and whether he needs to be fed even more sugar?

It took every ounce of my energy and will to write this mail without being overtly emotional though the entire experience was an eruption of emotions.

Never in million years would anyone of us have thought that our regular weekend pub hopping would end up in such disheartening and humiliating experience. Being able to glide through in and out of the lounges and bars for many years we never would have imagined that something like this will happen to us. Assuming being well educated and being in the cream layers of the society will make things easier for queer men was shattered.

What can be merrier and joyous than being with bunch of gay men who could just see everything on a lighter note???

That was the state of mind we were in when we started out on 23rd October Sunday evening. As we were getting ready we got a call from couple of our friends who were already in a bar (The Zodiac bar at The Accord Metropolitan) to come and join them. Since this is one of the bar we have frequented we went inside and after the usual greetings and hugs couple of us placed the orders and others started looking through the menu.

One of us was carrying a man bag and the waiter sort of whispered to the bartender pointing him. When our friend asked the bartender about our order he didn’t answer. The manager I presume told him that there is no service for our group and we are not allowed and asked him to leave the bar.

Since he couldn’t talk Tamil and the manager couldn’t respond well in English, we, who were busy going through menu sensed something was wrong as our friend started looking perplexed.

The entire scene unfolded in the lounge outside the bar when we asked why there is no service. One of the service guys said they allow only men and women. We were shocked by this response. It was a blow to our pride and we were completely taken aback.

Incredulous as it sounded one of us asked him again what he is trying to say, he said that “men and women only sir, gays lam allowed illa”. We shot back that there is no such rules listed in entrance and we have every right to be there and they are unreasonable denying service. Then came another guy who started talking in Tamil said “ungala ulla vidradellam asingam. Kelambu kelambu” (it’s a shame for us to let u inside. Move move).

We were addressing him with respect till then and he started addressing us in a disrespectful way, tone and body language.

The argument got heated and we asked them if they have any rules against letting gay men in the bar and if so they should put that in sign board and or give it to us in writing stating so. When we were inquiring on the regulations this guy became abusive and told “naalu aalungala kooptu thorathunga ivangala” (Bring four guys and chase them away).

We were so shocked and stunned by the way the management was handling and we demanded we spoke to their higher authority stating that’s they aren’t managing the issue well. He said that “adhellam mudiyaadu. Ungalukku yellarayum kooduvaangala”. (We can’t call authorities and all).

Though I had every intention of making a protest in the lounge we realized that we could do nothing about it and decided to leave the place before things got uglier.

The entire experience was so humiliating, though we all stood up against the discrimination, it dint fail to leave a deep rooted scar. I couldn’t imagine how worse the same would have been if we weren’t a bunch. When I look back at this entire scenario, I realized how feeble legal and social support is towards the queers.

Though we couldn’t do much on the issue, sharing it in this space might make us realize that we don’t have to put up with everything. At the least we could voice our protest.

Thanks
Srivath

coffee table
tv stand
suitcases with
airline tags
still on
cardboard boxes
from many moves
rajasthani bedspread
covers them all
to make a
three tier shelf
our golu padi

we display
your guitar
my brass lamps
souvenirs from travels
barbie now stone butch
star shaped candle holders
christmas gifts from your mom

it doesn’t matter
if i can’t
offer you
betel leaves
coconuts
blouse pieces from raasi
little mirrors
in plastic frames
malli flowers
strung dense
and fragrant

we will still
celebrate
this navaratri

draw kolam
with corn flour
light oil lamps
redden our foreheads
with sindoor
exchange bangles
and pray to
our goddesses
that we may
remain
sumangalis
together
always

(c) 1999 desinorse/jaya from the khush list. Reproduced with permission