I attended this conference on gay people by Nivedita Menon, Pramada Menon, Gautam Bhan (prominent activists, took the initiative of decriminalization of sex between homosexuals under 377) as a part of my law studies. The first thing that this name brought to my mind was hours
of cribbing about gay rights and equality. I guess others in my batch shared the same
instinct, because as soon as the word of going to the conference broke out,
everybody started thinking of excuses to give for missing it. “I am Homophobic”
was my personal favourite. I anyways followed the crowd and attended the
conference, and it blew my mind. Their main argument was not how gays are
discriminated against, their argument was how the simple identity of being gay
overshadowed rest every identity. So if a person says “I am a lecturer at
Harvard, CEO at Apple, oh and by the way, I am gay” subconsciously the way you
will categorize him is not as “teacher at Harvard” or “CEO at apple” but as “a gay.”
As soon as I left the conference, I
ostentatiously started telling people how great the conference was and how deep
and insightful the discussion was. I expected looks of acknowledgement and
questions about the details about the seminar; instead, I got looks of
suspicion and questions of whether I was gay. However, that didn’t bother me.
What bothered me was that the first time I was asked this, I felt offended.
This forced me to question that why do people name the supporters of gay
movement as gays and how and when exactly did the term “gay” become an insult.
I guess that people in support of
the gay movement, with the idea that moving around, interacting and living with
them are rare. And straight people with the same ideology are rarer. It is a
bit odd for the society to hear things like “I support gays and will fight for
them till end” from the mouths of straight people. So impulsively, the first
thing that comes to their minds is- “oh, is he one of the gays?’ Because there
is no way they can know for sure; they have to ask, and then most of the times,
their attitudes towards gays change, which brings me to my second concern; the
reducing of the term “gay” to an insult.
To summarize the happenings in the
society and precisely in India in a layman’s language, I would say that there
are two kinds of people in the society. One, who have sexual and romantic
relationship with humans who are totally different from them, mentally and
physically. and the other who have the same with humans who are the same
in every aspect,. The first group is justified in feeling strange living around
and in insulting the other group, whereas, the mere co existent of the second
group with the first is unacceptable for some people in the society. Since childhood, loving people of the same
gender has been strange, odd or “queer” for us without any pragmatic
explanation. We feel weird because they have sex with people of the same
gender, for all we know, they might be feeling strange because we do the same
with the people of the opposite gender.
Boy after a talk on queer identity in the class by a homosexual- but mam,
with all due respect, I would still feel insecure leaving my boy child alone
near a gay.
Lecturer- Oh that’s good, we feel insecure leaving our girl child near
you!
In a society, the practice of the
majority is normal and that of the minority is queer. This is the only reasonable
explanation I can give for this discrimination. But we have to accept the homosexual
identity as a way of life. Some people like the opposite gender, some like the
same. Period. Let’s move above the queer identity and start recognising those
people for different ones like a successful feminist/lecturer/student. Let’s
get over the mental block and queerness.
P.S- I am not gay- to answer the
question that might have popped up at least once in the minds of some people
while reading this article.
Thank you for proving my point.
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