Not So Gay After All

Some days ago I received a letter from Arjun, a friend who lives in Delhi.

He had been strangely silent for several months despite my frequentpost-cards to him. That was most unlike him and, as I tore open the letter,I knew he had bad news to tell.

In three pages of his familiar scrawl hewrote of how a policeman had found him loitering in a public park oneevening arm-in-arm with another man, and how he had been threatened that ifhe did not pay up he would be taken to the police station and his parentsinformed that he was a homosexual or, worse, a hustler.

Arjun, timid andgentle as he is, caved in at once and yielded to the policeman, giving in tohis demands for money.

Then, he had walked home, and as he was ascending thesteps, a firm hand grasped his shoulder. Turning around, he found, to hisshock, the same policeman, who had followed him to his home.

Now that heknew where he lived, he said, Arjun had better comply with all his demandsif he did not want his parents to know of his secret, dark life.

From thatday onwards, Arjun would meet him every evening in a shopping centre, closeto his home and ply him with money and a bottle of beer to buy his silence.

Life had become a veritable hell, Arjun wrote, and he had even thought ofsuicide. And that was why, he said, he had not written for so many months.

Arjun's is by no means an isolated case, and I myself know of dozens of gaymen who have been through similar agonising, hellish experiences. Some ofthem have been reduced to nervous wrecks, one eventually landing up in amental asylum, so searing was the torture of being black-mailed for him.

Hatred against gays is deeply entrenched in heterosexual, patriarchalsociety, and as the Indian gay movement grows increasingly assertive, thereare growing reports of gay-bashing, black-mailing and the like.

Because fewIndian gay men are open about their sexual orientation for fear of rebukeand persecution, this remains a little-known secret that they closely guardfrom what they perceive, and rightly so, to be a hostile hetero-patriarchalsociety around them.

What accounts for 'mainstream' society's pathetic and unrelenting hatred ofhomosexuals?

If homosexuality is just as 'natural' as is being left-handed,as gay activists insist, why do many heterosexuals, particularly men, reactwith such undisguised hostility whenever the issue of homosexuality israised?

This is a question that has often exercised me, and I am convincedthat much hatred of homosexuals, which is buttressed by appeals to religionand morality, is rooted principally in two factors: ignorance and fear.

Notmany heterosexuals know gay men or women personally, and even if they knowthem few would know that they are indeed gay, such is the great secrecysurrounding the phenomenon.

Ignorance breeds the worst sort of prejudice,and ignorance of gay people thus leads to all the many negative stereotypesthat underlie heterosexual discourse about homosexuals -- of gay men beingperverts and child-molesters, sex-starved maniacs with insatiable sexualappetites, women in men's bodies and so on.

These stereotypical images,which have no basis in actual fact, then, serve to legitimise an alreadydeep-rooted homophobia.

Equally crippling is the fundamental fear that many heterosexual men haveof gay men. Any digression from the conventional forms of heterosexuality,based as it is on male superiority and female subordination, is, at asubliminal level, perceived as challenging the structures of patriarchy andmale privilege.

If males begin to behave, as many gay men do, like 'females'are seen to, not just in purely sexual terms, but also in lifestyles, inhabits, in dress, in speech, in emotional expression and so on, thecarefully cultivated, yet fragile, edifice of male superiority, structuredon male difference, begins to crumble.

For, if men behave no different fromwomen (or 'the way women are supposed to'), then the very rationale for male superiority is forcefullychallenged.

In this way, homophobia can be seen to be, in a very real sense,a reflection of a hatred, and worse still, of a fear of the feminine thatlies behind the structures and ideology of patriarchy and male supremacy.

It is, in that sense, propelled by a subliminal realisation of how flimsythe structures of male domination actually are. And that is why anydeviation from the rigid norms of heterosexuality are punished so severely,why gays are stamped with an irremovable label of criminality and sin, andwhy people like Arjun and countless others continue to be made mute victimsat the altar of patriarchal 'morality' and 'normality'.

As I see it, male liberation is equally urgent a project as femaleemancipation is for the emergence of a truly human society. In this questfor humanisation, gay men have a key role to play, stripping off the layersof centuries of imposed and carefully cultivated normative rules for malebehaviour that are based on both the control of women and the denial of thefiner, feminine side to every man, for androgyny is a universal condition.

In other words, the gay liberation movement has a dual task ahead of it:freedom for the Arjuns of the world, who continue to lead haunted, maimedlives for no fault of their own; and, what is more, rescuing heterosexualmen from the heavy, crippling iron chains of patriarchy that blunt theirsensitivities and bludgeon their ability to express emotions, and in theprocess, challenging the stifling strictures of patriarchal oppression ofwomen.