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?