Last year, while we were all in the first wave of living under the spectre of a pandemic, I embarked on an aggressive media campaign to publicly ‘come out’ on every platform that would have me – as part of my own little influence campaign to try and combat ridiculously outdated 80’s-era attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people that are apparently very much alive and well and living within the South African Indian community (and other communities of colour).
And a big shout out to MambaOnline, Gay Pages, the late Naufal Khan and Indian Spice as well as Afternoon Express and The Insider SA for helping me to get the word out.
To my delight, the editors of Gay Pages were kind enough to let me contribute an entire article to their Winter/Spring 2020 edition, so I could megaphone closeted LGBTQ+ Indians (in India & South Africa) with my message.
I’m posting an extended version of the article below, peppered with some lighthearted and informative LGBTQ+ related videos, so scroll down to the Gay Pages cover to read the piece and laugh along with the videos.
But before you do, I’d like to make a brief but impassioned case for why it’s so important for LGBTQ+ individuals to accept and embrace who they are.
If you’re reading this as an LGBTQ+ individual or as someone who knows one and cares about their wellbeing, then this should interest you.
Because being part of a minority, particularly a culturally and socially undesirable one, comes with its own mental and physical health implications.
If you’re not already familiar with it, allow me to introduce you to a phenomenon known as…
Minority Stress (Yeah, that’s actually a thing)
Though little known of and seldom discussed in the mainstream discourse, the Minority Stress Model could not be more germane to the crossroads, age-defining moment that’s being written into the history books (as I write this) by the intersectionality of the righteous rage of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as the ongoing fight for gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights and dignity around the world.
The term Minority Stress was coined after three decades of study that sought to explain the observable mental and physical health disparities between minority individuals (e.g. African Americans & LGBTQ+) as compared to their peers in majority groups.
I invite you to do some more reading on the Minority Stress paradigm as it’s really quite fascinating, but in a nutshell…
Numerous scientific studies have shown that stigmatized minority individuals experience a high degree of prejudice, discrimination and exclusion – which causes chronic stress responses that accrue over time and can eventually lead to serious health problems such as heart-disease, anxiety, hypertension and stroke.
Now, when that prejudice is internalised (as is so often the case among LGBTQ+ individuals), it has been found to lead – in addition to the aforementioned health issues – to higher rates of depression, suicide, self-harm, body issues, substance abuse, risky sexual behaviour and cancer.
Now imagine, if you can, the compounded pressures, effects and ramifications of being a stigmatized minority within an already marginalized and oft-times discriminated against ethnic minority – that also tends to be traditionalistic, hyper-patriarchal, socially-conservative and paternalistic?
And then you’ll begin to grasp the enormity of the anxiety and stress that’s brought to bear on LGBTQ+ individuals of Indian origin in South Africa.
This one is for them…
Gay While Indian : A Minority Report
Contrary to what the title of this article might suggest, I do not traffic in essentialist identity politics. For the record, when I meet someone for the first time I assess him, her or them (if that’s their preferred gender pronoun) on the quality of their character, the contours and intricacies of their individual personality and ultimately what he, she or they stands for. Race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation or socio-economic status are merely extraneous data points – that while certainly noted – do not colour (no pun intended) my perception of who an individual is at their core. And I expect, nay, demand the same in return.
The fact that I am a proud gay man of Indian extraction is merely incidental or ancillary to my identity. Meaning that while I’m both supremely comfortable in my queerness and appreciative of my ethnic heritage, neither of those two intersecting descriptors singularly define who I am as a person. I will not allow the depth and complexity of my unique character and set of attributes to be distilled and neatly summed up in a couple of superficial epithets like “gay” or “Indian” for the sake of expedience or intellectual laziness.
So writing this article presented me with the dillema and challenge of having to simplify and pigeonhole my nuanced, hyphenated identity into a couple of narrow, one-dimensional archetypes, all in the service of specifically addressing a very unique and oft-overlooked segment of the LGBTQ+ community: my gay and bisexual brothers and sisters of Indian origin.
As a long-time television host and broadcaster I had always chosen to keep my personal life very purposefully private for many complex reasons that I recently unpacked in a candid and vulnerable post entitled “WTF Took You So Long?” on my personal blog. But an avalanche of outreach from young, deeply-closeted gay and bi Indian men via my Instagram in 2019 precipitated a fierce “urgency of now” moment that compelled me to come out in a very public and vocal way – to kick-start a much-needed conversation around why so many young men in the Indian “community” continue to internalize outmoded and harmful patriarchal and colonial-era homophobic propaganda in this age of ostensible “wokeness”.
I put “community” in quotation marks because Indian people in South Africa and indeed around the world are no more homogenous or monolithic a group than the LGBTQ+ community. We’re capable of putting up a unified front in times of strife (for example, during the apartheid years), but some Indians also tend to sharply divide themselves along linguistic, religious and even class-based lines in times of peace and prosperity.
In the follow-up to my first coming-out article on my blog I explain that I am perhaps uniquely positioned to speak to the lived experiences of all my queer Indian brothers and sisters because I grew up in Durban to a devout Hindu Gujarati father, a deeply-religious Muslim mother and Christian and Hindu Tamilian in-laws to boot, so I’ve been exposed to all facets of Indian cultural, social and religious life in SA.
We were a working-class family that briefly ascended to middle-class status before tumbling back down to living hand to mouth, when my dad lost all his savings in an ill-judged investment. So the notion posited by some of the men that reached out to me, namely that I come from “privilege”, grew up in a “liberal” household and have lived the charmed life of a “celebrity” (and therefore couldn’t possibly understand what their day-to-day realities are like) simply doesn’t hold water.
Furthermore, my work on shows like Eastern Mosaic and its successor, Mela, afforded me further grassroots-level insights into diverse pockets of Indian communities of all socio-economic realities across the country.
So if you’re reading this as a queer South African Indian person – or person of colour – and you’re struggling with coming to terms with your sexuality, I have a message for you:
I used to be you.
I see you. I feel you. I love you.
But if you want to fast-track your journey towards self-acceptance you may want to start with ‘decolonizing’ your mind first.
If you do your research you’ll soon come to realize that there’s nothing “unnatural” or counter-cultural about your sexual or gender expression. You’re really just the latest victim of one of the most egregious and oldest, yet stubbornly enduring con-jobs of our time : Patriarchy and European imperialism, more specifically, British colonialism – and its priggish, prudish Victorian-era attitudes towards sex and sexuality.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Commit it to memory for your next debate with that homophobic ignoramus in your circle. And if they happen to be Black or Brown tell him or her to stop clowning themselves by carrying water for racist dead people.
Because when hateful, ignorant assholes in India and Africa whine, bitch and moralise about how homosexuality is a “Western” fad or construct, it’s like their mouth-farts were genetically engineered in a lab to make my blood boil!
Homosexuality isn’t a Western import, homophobia is!
(The following videos skew heavily towards politics and social attitudes in India, but India’s unprecedented influence on the cultural values, morals and mores of diaspora Indian societies, like South Africa’s, cannot be overstated. This anti-gay sentiment was only reinforced and further entrenched by South Africa’s own criminalisation of homosexuality under an amendment to the Immorality Act during the apartheid era. The legacy of both these regressive dogmas continues to be a smelly turd that just won’t flush!)
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3-IHNtJjIc[/embedyt]
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9y4h7YYpvs[/embedyt]
In pre-colonial India (and Africa for that matter) same-sex love wasn’t just accepted, it was part of the culture.
The practice of homosexuality and lesbianism, for instance, is well-documented and preserved in ancient temple carvings like the Khajuraho Monuments – a cluster of Hindu and Jain Temples in Madhya Pradesh, India. I should know. I filmed an entire feature on the UNESCO World Heritage Site and let me tell you, some of the explicit scenes depicted in their relief carvings made even this sex-positive guy go…“Whaa?”
And don’t even get me started on the Kama Sutra, the original manual to how to live your “best life”, that’s further testimony to ancient India’s age of enlightenment and sexual permissiveness.
In fact, India was seriously “woke” back in the day.
For example, in ancient Indian texts, they practically invented “gender fluidity”. In the Mahãbhãrata, one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, there is the story of Shikhandi, who was born as female and later undergoes a sex change to become a man and fight in the Kurukshetra war alongside his father.
Or how about Lord Vishnu’s beautiful and seductive femme fatale incarnation, Goddess Mohini, who enchanted Lord Shiva and bore him a son, Maha Shasta, or Ayyappa/Aiyanar to South Indians? I’m not implying that theirs was a homosexual relationship, but it does suggest to me that Hinduism embraces the transcendental and non-binary nature of the immortal soul, which is neither male nor female. And I think that’s fabulous!
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1gO8Xl10tM[/embedyt]
To my Muslim brothers and sisters, are you aware that the Qur’an doesn’t explicitly condemn homosexual orientation, only sexual impropriety? The Qur’an even acknowledges the possibility that some people are not attracted to members of the opposite sex, by making mention of men who have no desire for women.
For Muslims, Jews and Christians alike, the story of Sodom, or the people of the Prophet Lut in the Qur’an, is often cited as a condemnation of male homosexuality, but upon scrutiny it’s not a story about consensual sex between men, it’s a cautionary tale about rape and inhospitality.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBWD3cr1pC8[/embedyt]
Take comfort in the fact that the global Islamic community is gradually changing its attitudes to be more inclusive of its LGBTQ+ members – with the notable exception of certain Arab countries that were once colonized by…wait for it…Britain! Are you detecting a pattern yet?
Did you know that there are actually 12 openly gay Imams in the world? One of our very own, South African Imam Muhsin Hendricks (who is in a sanctified “nikkah” or marriage to a Hindu man by the way), is part of a growing movement that is challenging archaic notions of gender and sexuality within Islam. In an interview with “The South African”, he soberingly reminds us that “the Qur’an is not obsessed with gays”, but the traditional “patriarchy that sits behind Islam” is. “For if gender becomes fluid, where does the patriarchy ground itself?” he adds.
And so, in summing up…
Every time you, my Dear Young LGBTQ+ Person, allow yourself to succumb to fear, shame, guilt or self-loathing around your queerness, know that you’re actually doing the bidding of paternalistic old men and dead White colonialists and bigots. If my “Gora” (Hindi for White) common-law husband can express routine outrage and condemnation over the harmful legacy of his ancestors, then so can you.
So the first step is to decolonize your brain and kick those joyless, frigid prudes out of there.
Think of it as housekeeping. You’re cleaning house, rearranging the furniture and throwing out the trash.
Then, beautiful creature, you can begin to live your truth.
In the immortal words of the lovely ladies of En Vogue, “Free your mind…and the rest will follow.”
Unashamed
And finally…
If you’re reading this as a cis heterosexual Indian or POC who’s a champion of LGBTQ+ rights, then I salute you for being such a badass.
But if you’re not down with the LGBTQ+ cause, then chances are you fall under one of two camps: You’re not super comfy around LGBTQ+ people or you’re strongly opposed to LGBTQ+ people and their rights.
If you fall into the former school of thought, I hope that this blog post has given you pause. I can totally understand if the thought of two men getting it on grosses you out. Heck, the first time I saw two men kissing I found it to be so incongruous and weird that I actually recoiled from it. And I’m gay! But I think that’s because it was such a foreign, unfamiliar sight that my mind needed time to adjust and become accustomed. Queer PDA’s in my time weren’t as normalised in the media as they are today. When I see young LGBTQ+ holding hands in public today my heart swells with happiness (and envy). What I wouldn’t give to have grown up in this age!
And while I get your discomfort, I hope you realise that there’s a distinction between your personal feelings about a group of people and your intellectual and moral imperative to acknowledge the fundamental human rights of that group. Perhaps you also now recognize how we’ve all been brainwashed into an irrational fear and hatred of homosexuality by repressive propaganda and an archaic and imperialistic system of beliefs that continues to stubbornly persist from beyond the grave of power and relevance.
Better yet, maybe you’ll become an ally and take the opportunity to school others about the historical context and the facts.
Now, if you’re one of those Indian people who fall into the latter group, who go out of their way to hate on and bully LGBTQ+ people (and are not moved to question your indoctrination after reading this), then I’d like to bid you namaste with a line of verse from one of my favourite hip-hop songs, “It Takes More”, by the aptly self-titled Ms. Dynamite:
“You’re talking like you a G,
But you’re a killer killing your own,
You’re just a racist man’s pussy”
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXqH7_dYM_k[/embedyt]
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQV1o88p54I[/embedyt]
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK_kc2IhcLE[/embedyt]
We’re all bros, bro!
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZBsY-ii7aE[/embedyt]
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsmMXjYmAA[/embedyt]
