Gay like Us

Now, twenty years later, the earring is gone, and the flagrant pink shirts have been packed away; age has mellowed the rebel, taught him that while what he does in his bedroom is no secret, it isn’t a public statement either. I once asked him when he guessed he was gay. ‘‘Oh, before I could recite Georgie Porgie’’ he said, with characteristic black humor. ‘‘I always knew I was different.’’

Last week, at the country’s first official gay rally in Mumbai, a section of his misunderstood species protested that ‘‘different’’ does not mean ‘‘criminal.’’ After all, in a world where babies are butchered because they belong to another God, and hatred is the official foreign policy of nations, surely no love between two consenting adults can possibly be a crime?

Yet, almost six decades after India pledged herself to liberty and equality, section 377 of the Indian Penal Code says it can — on the same grounds as child abuse and bestiality. While every other democratic country in the world has legalized homosexuality, our Government, which almost never addresses the issue of public morality — how can it, when corruption is as intrinsic to governance as the so-called ‘‘crime’’ of sodomy is to gay sex? — seems almost passionate about enforcing its own brand of personal morality on private citizens.

Recently, replying to a petition filed in the Delhi High Court by Naz Foundation, an advocacy, AIDS control and gay outreach organization, the Government claimed that Indian society was ‘‘not ready’’ for the practice of homosexuality. In fact the 42nd report of the Law Commission opines that society’s disapproval was ‘‘strong enough to justify it being treated as a criminal offence, even when adults indulge in it in private.’’ The penalty? Imprisonment for ten years or even life.

How ironic that in a country where criminals seem to go scot-free for roasting 14 people alive in a bakery, national leaders are acquitted for abetting the carnage of 3,000 Sikhs, scores are maimed or blinded because they belong to a ‘‘lower’’ caste, women are wantonly assaulted on city streets, and many, many marriages are alibis for legalized violence and rape, our government wants to ‘‘protect’’ us from law abiding citizens, whose only ‘‘crime’’ is their sexual preference!

Worse, its absurd contention that legalizing gay sex will encourage paedophilia is like saying heterosexual intercourse encourages rape or incest.

As for society not being ‘‘ready’’, 55 years ago, when the Constitution was being framed, were we ready for a ban on sati, equal rights to women, and concessions to backward castes? I think not. The joke is that for all our gratuitous prudery, Indian society provides the model for Sigmund Freud’s gay archetype. According to Freudian psychology, homosexuality is caused by faulty child rearing, typically an overprotective, fawning mother, and a distant, autocratic father who the male child fails to identify with. But if the Freudian theory was indeed true, nearly all Indian men would be gay!

The scientific truth is that homosexuality is not a social crime; its a genetic fact. In other words, gays are born, not made, and persecuting them for their sexual preference is like persecuting someone for having a weak heart, poor eyesight or a crooked nose. This is hardly a new concept. Way back in 1948, the famous Alfred Kinsey report on human sexuality estimate that about 10 per cent of any given population across the world is homosexual.

Why, then, are Indians so homophobic? One hypothesis is that, as a nation, we are not comfortable with our own heterosexuality. Its a well researched fact that the human sexes are not mutually exclusive, but fall along a continuum; we all have masculine and feminine hormones, masculine and feminine traits, masculine and feminine orientations, in varying degrees. But try explaining that to our average male chauvinist! Only when Indian men understand, accept and even celebrate their own feminine side, without feeling threatened or insecure, will we be free from sexual fundamentalism.

Moreover we are a nation of moral hypocrites. We ban legal dance bars, while illegal prostitution flourishes. We censor on-screen kissing, but gleefully lap up every smutty detail of our filmstars’ lives. We police what college girls wear to prevent ‘‘indecent exposure’’, but can’t seem to get enough of Baywatch.

That’s why when a sizeable gay society wants to come out of the closet and demand its fundamental right to equality (Article 14), freedom (Article 19), and personal liberty (Article 21), it has to find a more ‘‘respectable’’ reason: AIDS prevention and control. A petition filed in the Delhi High Court pleads that if homosexuality is legalized by scrapping Section 377, high risk gays will be encouraged to seek medical intervention, instead of hiding for fear of prosecution. But surely AIDS control is the corollary, not the postulate!

If gay Indians want to be recognized, they need to stop hiding behind the AIDS purdah, and demand to be treated first as sexual minorities, on par with religious and social minorities. If that is against our so-called ‘‘cultural values’’, so be it. Or as a gay friend once remembered, ‘‘Feel proud to be a faggot. And leave culture to the bigots.’’

Email the writer at: farahbaria@expressindia.com