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7 Comments

  1. The concern is that nobody really understands what it means to be gay and the likes. Somebody tells them its wrong so its wrong, they dont really care to use their brain, and they strictly dont want to stringing it with culture, family, values, etc, they are comfortable living vulgar lives in their heads and to hide their own guilt pose a very pure picture. Even to be straight and honest… or even to be a person of your own to express ideas is not acceptable to those conditioned minds, to India this will be accepted only in certain sections. sa

  2. Very well written! I get so tried of typing up rebuttals to the rants I see on reader response columns. Now I can just paste the link to this article wherever I see a flood of hate!

  3. Excellent article. Don’t know whether I should congratulate you for writing it or Orinam for publishing it. I thought the “My Son is Krishna” article excellent too.

    Thank you for pointing out some of the salient facts of the case. As so often is the case, people accuse others of what they do themselves. Beautifully brought out in this article.

    Send it to the New York TImes!

    Cheers,

    Ranjan

  4. The article is very well written.

    More often than out, homophobia arises due to lack if understanding and individualistic thinking. I have had people tell me that, they support gays and such but not in public, because it against the norm and they don’t want to classified as a “queer”. hmm. maybe they are the worst kind. But there is hope. There always is. Someday, people will wake up it. Once india and indians become open about Sex. Once they stop classifying sex as a taboo, then slowly but surely people will open up. Well acceptance is long way behind, but fear can be curtailed sooner.

  5. Well written article shri.

    But i wouldn’t personally care about the internet hate mongers.

    reason,

    well because it’s the internet and it filled with people who argue for the sake of arguing.

    This is not something specific to LGBT issues alone. Even if i make a post about nightwish changing their lead singer there would be 100 negative comments and the worst part most of them don’t even know what genre of music they play.

    The Final lesson learned from all this: Most negative comments are not worth our time and effort to be perturbed. since most of them are clueless about what they are talking about and the best part they don’t really care about the original issue.

  6. Well said Shri, i just wanted to share one of my personal experience when i came out to 2 close friends…Before that whenever there is a topic on homosexuality these 2 friends made some homophobic comments which took me a while to come out to them.

    But when i did, they took me to a beach started asking plenty of questions, they even wanted me to pass comments about guys who are passing by us. Finally they said ‘We cant believe you have kept all these feelings to yourself all these days when we talk about girls and sex etc and we are sorry for that…from now on you can talk whatever you think to us, as a friend we are here to listen to your true feelings.’

    Friends like them are very rare, when i came out to remaining people including my family…they wanted to remain ‘Dont ask, dont tell’ policy.

    cheers
    Vikranth

  7. Shri, I posted elsewhere, in another context, that perception counts more than facts in the real world. Gay people have to deal with all the misperception that has built up among the straight community over the centuries. When you tell the average straight person that you are gay, his mind immediately starts to recollect everything that it “understands” about gay people. He then views you from that light, and starts to re-interpret your past actions with this new knowledge about your being gay. So, for instance, if you used to put your arm around your friend in the past (something which is very common among Indians both gay and straight), after you tell him you are gay, he may “understand” that you were “hitting on him” in the past. And that is what we really worry about: “if I tell my friend that I am gay, in what way will he understand it”.

    Your friend may not question and reject his own past perceptions of gayness based on what he knows about you as a gay person and a friend. Instead, he may try to re-interpret the facts to match his (mis)perceptions of gay people. That is, instead of thinking, “My friend is not at all like what I used to believe about gay people, and so my past beliefs about gay people are wrong”, he could think, “Oh, so this is why he was doing all those things: he is gay, and so he was trying to convert me”, etc.

    Now, there will ALWAYS be a number of straight people that cannot accept gay people under any conditions. We need not waste our energy on them. Rather, we should first target those large numbers of straight people that are ambivalent in their attitude towards the gay community, and help them re-form their perceptions.

    What I would like to suggest is, instead of spending your energy providing explanations and justifications, just ask simple questions in a non-threatening way. You can try to help your friend understand the inconsistencies in his own perceptions, by making him explore the issue in different ways.

    For example, regarding the point that gay people “convert” straight people — Instead of trying to refute this allegation, you can ask questions such as:
    “Can you explain how this conversion takes place?
    Is there a conversion ceremony, some rituals, etc.? Have you attended any such conversion ceremony?
    If I ask you to lose interest in girls and be attracted to guys, will you do it? Can you do it?
    If I ask your father to become gay, will he do it? Can he do it?
    How about other men that you know? Which of them would agree to get ‘converted’?
    So, when you say that gay people ‘convert’ straight people, which straight people do you refer to?
    What makes YOU so special that you think you cannot be ‘converted’ but that other straight people can be converted?” And so on.

    Regarding the spread of HIV and AIDS, you can ask your friend if he knows how these diseases spread so rapidly across India. It has been researched and determined that the main reason for this rapid spreading was that heterosexual lorry drivers had unprotected sex with prostitutes at their rest stops along their route. Since these drivers travelled all across India in their trips, they managed to spread the disease very effectively. Ask your friend why those victimised women and their children are stigmatised by our society when it is the heterosexual male who insists on unprotected sex and is therefore responsible for spreading the disease.

    What about gay men working as teachers in a boys’ school? You can ask your friend to explain how it is different from straight male teachers teaching in a girls’ school. Ask him to tell you from newspaper reports who faces greater sexual abuse in India: girls or boys. Ask him about the proportion of female rape to male rape in India. Ask him to explain to you what level of female rape he would consider “acceptable” and “normal”, and whether he considers the current levels of female rape in India as “acceptable”.

    What about gay men “choosing their “filthy lifestyle” because they want to “enjoy more”? You can ask your friend to explain why you are not seeking sex with BOTH girls and boys if you just want to “enjoy more”. Why would you reject girls and only be interested in boys? If he thinks that “enjoying more” means rejecting girls and having sex with boys, why is HE not doing it? Why doesn’t HE want to “enjoy more”? What makes him different?

    And so on. Help your friend explore the issue in depth, from various angles. Let HIM provide explanations; let HIM trip over his own inconsistencies. What you achieve here is planting the seed of doubt in your friend’s mind regarding his own perceptions. When your friend is forced in this way to articulate (put into words) his vague feelings, he moves from emotion-based right-brain thinking to fact-based left-brain thinking, which makes it easier for him to understand where he is going wrong. Whether he likes it or not, these questions will churn around in his head every time he thinks about or meets gay people, thereby helping him re-shape his own beliefs over time.

    However, we need to be aware that some straight people do NOT want to change their perceptions at any cost. Some of them play the “Yes, but…” game very well: they pretend to be very reasonable, apparently agreeing to what you say, but then sucker-punch you by adding “but” followed by a vicious and unjustified attack from a competely unexpected and unjustified direction: “Okay, I understand you saying that gay people don’t convert others, BUT why are so many of them having sex with dead bodies”, etc. You need not waste too much of energy on such people. You can just toss a few questions at them and walk away with a smile.

    All we need is for the majority of straight people to feel comfortable with us. The minority of homophobes cannot attack us when the majority of the straight community will not tolerate it. It is the indifference or latent hostility of the majority that encourages the minority. We need to target our messages at this majority and help them get rid of their latent hostility, even if they cannot come around to actually loving us. To achieve this, we have to help them understand that while we may be different in many ways, we are also similar in many ways. Differences can appear threatening, causing fear, which in turn leads to hatred. We need to understand that much of the hatred comes from fear, which again comes from ignorance.

    To eliminate their sense of fear, we need to demonstrate our similarities; it is not enough to just talk about it while showing them something that is completely different. We need to find ways and venues through which we can create this sense of oneness.