I remember the conversation like it happened minutes ago. At a family event, a relative exclaimed ,”All this homosexuality business is for attention. God created man and woman differently for a reason and only a relationship between the two results in the expansion of the human race. Can that happen between two men? No. This is all humbug for attention.”
The context for this monologue was laid by the outburst of a story where a young man had revealed the story of his child sexual abuse and expressed pride in his gay identity. He used the medium as a stage for his vulnerabilities and shared the anguish of not having the best relationship with his father and brother after coming out. His mother, on the other hand, was his pillar. The story was spreading like wild fire, and this was in an era when social media was only a budding fire cracker, in India. Youtube hadn’t become a means of income yet and people still used Facebook walls to communicate with one another. I was 19 and deeply moved by the courage this young man has displayed, because only at 19 did I learn that men experience sexual violence too.
My relative proceeded to voice his discontent on how the young man had used his sexual trauma as a path to gather fame in the media. “These youngsters will do anything for two seconds of the spotlight,” he said. I could feel the barf making its way to expulsion and I couldn’t be silent for any longer.
‘Why must we judge someone for the choices they make? And how can we assume that they used their painful history to conjure a story that would give them fame?’
‘Exactly, it’s a choice. Why must they make that choice in the first place and disrupt the natural balance of the world?’
I was dumbfounded and I didn’t have a response. Maybe because I didn’t know why someone would make that choice, till I grew a couple of grey strands of wisdom to understand that homosexuality isn’t a lifestyle choice. It isn’t something that’s listed under recreational activities - yoga, meditation, reading, video games, gay sex. It is as natural for a man to love another man as it is for one to love a woman.
Growing up in a society where sex is a censored syllable, a muted noise and a terribly taught subject can be extremely harmful. I learnt about it as a mechanical activity done by two individuals to have children, when I was in 8th grade. That’s it. I wrote the word coitus in my Biology exam but I had absolutely no idea of how the organ enters which part through what opening till I had crossed 18. How is a child supposed to recognise sexual violation while being raised in a culture that won’t even acknowledge the activity of sex? More importantly, how is a child, a young adult, or even a fully grown adult supposed to understand that sexual activity is most definitely possible and normal between individuals of the same gender? The validity is established by education and for others like me, who grew up in the 90’s and early 00’s and had minimal access to the internet, our sources of education were disgustingly poor.
“Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code dating back to 1860, introduced during the British rule of India, criminalises sexual activities "against the order of nature", arguably including homosexual sexual activities.
The section was decriminalized with respect to sex between consenting adults by the High Court of Delhi on July 2009. That judgement was overturned by the Supreme Court of India on 11 December 2013, with the Court holding that amending or repealing Section 377 should be a matter left to Parliament, not the judiciary.”
“Section 377 of the penal code in 42 former British colonies criminalizes anal sex between men and other homosexual acts. The provision was introduced by British colonial authorities in the British Raj as section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, and was used as the model for sodomy laws in many other British colonies, in many cases with the same section number.”
So essentially, colonisation is the gift that keeps giving. I kid you not, there were pages in my History textbook dedicated to the goodwill of the British Raj and how their welfare measures are what gave India its train transportation system and the ability to communicate with one another via post. I have learnt these lessons and in Grade 10 to pass my board exams and even internalized the benevolence of white supremacy, as a child. It’s disappointing to see that our schools are trained to only teach us about manipulated History or colonization as a ‘matter of fact’ thing that happened without allowing us to think and reflect on its implications then and now. We are the land of Kamasutra but I can guarantee you that it is not even mentioned as an ornament of India’s history in any book. Maybe that’s what centuries of sexual violence and rape committed by the white man does to a country that’s still growing accustomed to its freedom - it breeds a culture of shame, ignorance and fear around the act.
But on a day like today, while I am constantly conflicted by my emotional upheavals in the see-saw of regressive and progressive India, I am filled with so much hope. The Indian Supreme Court has ruled that the privacy is a fundamental right for the citizens of the country. Although the trigger for the fight and victory was a completely different subject, this guarantees privacy for Indian citizens as an intrinsic right, laying a stronger foundation for the decriminalisation of homosexuality a.k.a Section 377. Without mincing any words, the Supreme Court highlighted that sexual orientation is an essential attribute of privacy and that discrimination against an individual is deeply offensive to the dignity and self worth of the individual. WHAT A WIN!
I am a straight woman who recognises her privilege because no one has asked me to justify my straight identity in the years that I have been alive and breathing, but I am also a believer of equality being universal. Often, I have been confronted with confused expressions on people’s faces when I say that I am a trainee therapist at an LGBTQ+ centre; even more often, I have seen fear in the eyes of older individuals in close family circuits who are worried that I might bring a woman home one day and call her my wife. It’s silly for me to fight for my gender kind’s empowerment, embody my values as a feminist and to not advocate for another marginalized community’s rights. It’s like doing the most difficult hiking trail, seeing that the one beside me is struggling with thirst and not offering them a sip of my water. Each of us are unique, each of us belong to the same human race, each of us deserve the same equality.
It’s taken me decades and being an immigrant in a foreign land to understand that critiquing my country and shaming it are two different things. Critiquing is asking questions, challenging authorities, strategising welfare in whatever individual way possible; shaming, on the other hand, is discounting nearly 200 years of abuse and 70 years of ongoing recovery. Maybe I am an eternal optimist, but for change to happen, you have to believe that it will. What roads this will open and which direction we will proceed in, is yet to be determined, but you can only measure how far you’ve come when you look back to see how far you were. Meanwhile, today is a day for celebration and a day to ready the flag pole that will hoist the rainbow.