To
The Editor
Times of India

Dear Editor,

This is to call your attention to gross misrepresentation in the title and contents of the article “Banker murdered by gay lovers”, published in the Chennai edition Oct 21, 2013 (URL here).

While we do not condone the murder by any means, we find the circumstances that led to the murder to be one of childhood sexual abuse, and the coverage misleading and inaccurate on multiple counts:

• Despite the lurid title, the young men who murdered the banker appear to be neither gay nor lovers of the deceased. ‘Gay’ implies exclusive or pre-dominant same-sex attraction, which cannot be inferred from the reported incident, where the young men appeared to have been lured or coerced into sex as children. ‘Lovers’ implies reciprocity of sexual attraction or love, which is clearly not the case.

• Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) needs to be called out for what it is: sexual abuse of children, incapable of giving consent to an adult. That the children may be male, female or transgender is irrelevant: all such acts of CSA are crimes. CSA is not to be confused with adult homosexuality just because the victims are of the same sex as the perpetrator, any more than heterosexuality, rather than abuse, is the crime when the victims are of a different sex than the perpetrator.

The Times of India has a strong track record of covering lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues in a sensitive and inclusive manner. We are appalled, therefore, to note such egregious conflation of homosexuality with childhood sexual abuse, and hope that this will not recur.

Orinam editorial team

Orinam thanks Tulir, Centre for the Prevention and Health of Child Sexual Abuse, Chennai, for drawing our attention to this case. For information and resources on child sexual abuse, see here.

tender lips
that had forgotten, momentarily,
the taste of mother’s milk and
couldn’t tell the silence of the womb
from the darkness of sins
knelt, panting,
to sooth with their tender warmth
the spineless erection of an old man.

to believe that
the sweat, stink and grime
were not its own
the tender body washed all day
the hollows of its mind
in the bathroom.

eyes
that struggled to forget
in the privacy of night
the desires of day
were wetting the pillows
with tears of unripe dreams.

Translation credit: Aniruddhan Vasudevan and Raghavan