Pooja Desai Malik | Friday, July 8, 2011
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"Shush!” she hissed when she saw him enter. I stopped mid-laugh, eyes brimming with mirth. We had been snickering over a “gay joke”. The colleague whose arrival had caused the panicked silence was homosexual. Earlier, a friend had been dissing a “slut” he hated.
“The disease of MSM (men having sex with men) is unnatural and not good for Indian society,” Ghulam Nabi Azad said at an HIV/Aids conference on July 5. “This disease has come to India from foreign shores.” As Union minister for health, Azad must know that the Delhi high court de-criminalised homosexuality two years ago by repealing Section 377 (the anti-sodomy law) of the Indian Penal Code. His comments belittle the spirit of the judgment.
But despite protests from the LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender) community, the minister knows he is backed by the majority, which mourns this second great “Western” incursion.
We Indians aren’t equipped to tackle sexuality — of any orientation. We can’t talk about it, except crudely. Ignorance is coupled with an intolerance of minorities in general and homophobia is the more obvious manifestation of this unease, but women’s sexuality also falls under its purview. Our choice of invective, both indigenous and adopted from other cultures, bears this out.
Faggot, queen, sissy, homo, pansy, fairy are pejoratives straight people use for effeminate homosexual men. Dyke is used for masculine-looking lesbians; AC/DC is a derogatory term for bisexuality.
The vicious ingenuity of these insults is startling but routine. However, such literary innovation is not reserved for homosexuals.
The labels slut, bitch and nymphomaniac are used to punish a woman for the crime of being female. They allude to her sexual appetite and imply promiscuity. A woman who does not return a man’s advances is “tight-assed” and “frigid”. And a successful one is said to have “slept” her way to the top. Sexual virtue is the only moral benchmark.
But a hyperactive heterosexual man is ribbed affectionately: he is a Casanova, a charmer, a ladies’ man. He is suave, a flirt. But flirting is art. It needs calibration, timing, decorum and protocol; a code. In a culture where awaiting one’s turn in a queue is considered delinquent behaviour, there aren’t many promising exponents.
When a man is abused, he is called an illegitimate son, one who has had sex with his mother or sister, or been “buggered” by another male. In all these expletives, it is the ‘character’ of his mother, sister or homosexual lover that is ripped apart.
Are homosexuals and women merely sexual beings? Don’t they have facets — personality, intellect, interests — distinct from carnality? Yes. Do all women and gay men exist in a state of perpetual sexual arousal? No. Then why does their sexuality define them?
Homosexuals come out of the closet, participate in gay pride parades, organise queer film festivals and produce rainbow literature out of a need to be accepted. This is necessary, to a point. Women have fought for suffrage, for the right to education and livelihood, for centuries. They, too, seek acceptance.
But gay activism can be subversive. The very clamour for approval marks these people as different because it reduces them to carnal creatures in the eyes of a society they are desperate to merge with. Creativity, sensibility, industry, qualities that homosexuals pride themselves on, are waylaid.
If I had a son and he announced he was gay, I’d say: “Are you? Okay. What have you been reading lately?” If he grew into a homophobic male chauvinist, however, I’d look for a big, fat stick.
Is my colleague reading this?
— Pooja Desai Malik is a Mumbai-based journalist
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