Thoughts on the 377 judgement, collected from Facebook.

This one has been doing the rounds, but I'm stealing it right now from Varta:

Six things you should know after the Supreme Court verdict on Section 377, Indian Penal Code:

a) On December 11, 2013, the Supreme Court reversed the Delhi High Court ruling on Section 377, which means this law is back in force, as it was till before July 2, 2009.

b) Section 377 criminalizes any sexual act that does not involve penile-vaginal penetration. It applies to all people, irrespective of their gender identity or sexual orientation. That means straight people are also affected by this law, and not just those who are homosexual, bisexual or transgender in orientation.
c) Section 377 in itself does not mean that you can be arrested for simply being or saying you are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, Hijra or Kothi. Your freedom of expression is not under threat.
d) Arrest under this law requires medical forensic evidence of specific sexual acts having taken place - oral, anal or other non penile-vaginal sexual acts.
e) You cannot be arrested for being in a declared or undeclared same-sex relationship. Strict material evidence of specific sexual acts will be necessary for arrest.
f) Community, family, workplace or police harassment, blackmail and extortion may take place under threat of Section 377 or even because you appear or are known to be “not straight”. But more than anything else, it is these acts that are illegal and they can be tackled with a dose of courage and sound legal action

If you feel more points need to be elaborated, please do let us know here or at vartablog@gmail.com.

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There are protests, petitions and places where you can say your say all over the place. You don't have to do anything. You could stay at home and rage in quiet, as I have been doing for the past few days. But you might be feeling like taking steps that might help make a difference (which is a nicely optimistic step, for those of us capable of it). 

 You could start here:

(If you're not in Bangalore, the same protest is happening at different cities across India and the world, so look here: 

https://www.facebook.com/events/1374294672825321/?fref=ts)

Or you could call a news agency, and tell them what you think:

Please participate in the Times of India campaign against 377.
1] Call  +9/11 Memorial 80 6700 6443.2] The call will get disconnected.3] You will get an sms :
Thanks for joining the Times Campaign: Repeal the Section 377 IPC provision that criminalises homosexuality. See campaign details on http://zpdi.al/74565419

Or you could sign an online petition:

Love is Not a Crime! Protect Our Right to Equality - #Repeal377

1. 1. 
    
   2. Petition by
      Jhatkaa.org

The Supreme Court has upheld Section 377 which calls for imprisonment of anyone who "voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature". This is an outdated 19th century law that is against freedom of choice, right to equality and right to privacy.

Our constitution protects the “right to equality before the law”, and this judgement does the complete opposite. Such clear discrimination is absolutely unacceptable and we must not tolerate it in our country.

Everyone is affected - this law does not apply only to those of a different sexual orientation - the vague and outdated wording is open to interpretation and violates the right to consensual sex in privacy. If we thousands of Indians speak out, theParliament has power to vote to overturn the Supreme Court.

Sign the petition asking parliament to immediately decriminalise consensual adult same-sex relations.

The Delhi High Court had on July 2, in 2009 decriminalised gay sex as provided in Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and had ruled that sex between two consenting adults in private would not be an offence. But today the Supreme Court today overturned that order in one quick judgement.

The good news is that many Members of the Parliament have come out saying that the Government should decriminalise homosexuality. If more MPs know that this is something the public cares about, we’ll be able to ensure Section 377 gets amended.

Raise your voice to the government to make sure consensual adult same-sex relations is legal. Please sign now.

To:
Government of India 

Our constitution protects the “right to equality before the law”, and this judgement does the complete opposite. Such clear discrimination is absolutely unacceptable and we must not tolerate it in our country. Please amend section 377 and decriminalise consensual homosexual relations immediately.

Sincerely,
[Your name]

You could party:

I suggest a nice combination of all of the above, plus extra chocolate. 

WHaQ! meeting 11th September

 

So  it's been a month since we had a proper meeting and yesterday I trudged up to the garage door. IT ALMOST DEFEATED ME. But since I am the heroine of my own story, I prevailed! 

One or two people came and left early. Three or two arrived late, just in time to come with the rest of us for coffee. Two new faces - Hi, guys, it was good to see you! Eight all told, I think.

What did we do?

• Slutwalk Bangalore - is this a good idea? A bad one? Are we taking part, not taking part?
• Coming out stories. Always and always, support is always such a lovely surprise, even when you know you're going to be getting it. And sometimes even the people who do not support you, who do not like the life you're going to live, can surprise you. They can detach, let go, even learn to accept. I'm a cynic. I think the world is fulll of horrible things and that even good people can show little chinks of crulty and insensitivity - we're all humna. But sometimes, it is nice to appreciate what some of us have, and hold onto a little hope.
• Coming out requires a great deal of honesty. But honesty in and of itself is context-specific virtue. Our sexualities are one aspect of our lives, as with everything else. All of us are out there sacrificing one honesty for another, whether we're out or not.
• Children. Ours. Having them, keeping them, loving them. And vice versa!
• Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of 9/11. 
• Underground gay bars around the world. You'd be surprised where you find them.
• Next's Sunday is games day! The event pages will go up soon.
• How to tell someone who's just told you he thinks homosexuality is unnatural that you're queer: it's a bad idea. But do it anyway!
• Lavender Nights. Nothing much has been going on there lately, and probably won't until after November. 
• Smoking. Apparently queer women smoke more than queer men. The smokers in our group were all, WOOO about this. I was, like,  aw, no! My sexual target demographic is smeely and will die young!

Then we went for coffee. Coffee, as always, was awesome.

"Writing our own history - Finally!"

So this wound its way onto the WHaQ mailing list, and it seems like a good idea to pass it around as much as possible. 

Hello Queer People!

A recent chat, actually let’s say a recent comment thread on Facebook
led Udayan Dhar and I to a realisation that we’re sure most of you
would agree with — something that should have happened by now, but
hasn’t! So we took it upon ourselves to get this idea into action and
here’s why you’ve received this mail.

It’s been a good, super-happy and challenging 2 years since the law
‘came out of the closet’. Yes, we’re legally gay and how! But what
seems to have been missed in all this celebration or the lack of it,
are the wonderful stories of people who were involved in or affected
by the movement — personal narrations of varied individuals who were
most actively involved or affected by the high court ruling that week.
From the high spirited celebrations of the multi-city pride, news
stories of which, still elicit a tear in anyone involved in the
struggle in the smallest of ways, to the country erupting in joy over
the final high court order — we hope to capture and re-live those
moments, those nail-biting hours and those euphoria filled festivals
from the mouths of the very people who made it happen.

We’re looking for 15-20 stories and 15-20 nominations of people who
you think should make it to the book... and then we shall contact
these people and get them to share their story.

As they say, “Only when it is written, will it be known to have
happened”, and hence, this is our very own, small yet much-required
step towards writing our own History.

Please send us nominations and broad areas in which you think your
nominees can represent that wonderful week.

For example: Someone who worked on the legal front could be nominated
to write his/her experience with a legal perspective — personal, yet
legal all the same.

Get in touch with either of us, before the 23rd of July.
Udayan Dhar — udayan@pink-pages.co.in
L Romal M Singh — elromal@gmail.com

Looking forward to hearing from you.

P.S. Please mail us all your nominees. Comments on the social network
service will not be accepted — only to avoid confusion.

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Gurl in the World has already blogged this, but please, take a look, pass it on: Children have been separated from their mother, kept captive in a foreign country. Their mum has legal custody, their dad kidnapped them anyway. Sign this petition, please? Help reunite a mother with her children.

Minal Hajratwala at Swabhava

photo credit Bob Hsiang

Minal Hajratwala is in Bangalore for a few weeks – we mostly know her as the editor for Queer Ink‘s forthcoming 2012 Queer Ink Anthology (also here). I cannot currently remember who took dreadful advantage of whom, but Vinay (the guy who runs-manages-GrandViziersSwabhava/Good As You ) spread the word and a bunch of us gathered to meet her today (actually, by the time this gets posted, yesterday) at the Swabhava office.

Hajratwala’s Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages To Five Continents explores her family’s

Excerpts from *Leaving India*

multigenerational movement across the world, contextualising her self against this century of transplantation and settlement. It’s won at least four awards (one of them a Lammy!). Hajratwala is currently in India for research for her next novel and for her poetry – more on those later.

It rained quite spitefully on the latecomers today, but we began (mostly) on time. Hajratwala read out an excerpt from Leaving India, a section pertaining to herself and her early adulthood – Feminism, Queerness (“Feminism is the theory, lesbianism the practice.”) and the like. She’s not my favourite sort of reader – her tone remains too even – but she has a clear and soft voice. All in all, very pleasant.

Questions! Answers! :

• Hajratwala spent eight years (instead of the projected two) researching and writing this book. Her extended, very close-knit family is spread out over nine countries. She has thirty-five first cousins, and knows all their names – an impressive feat in and of itself. The book, in some senses, is her way of understanding the sheer scale of diaspora and finding a place for herself within it.
• Writing the novel changed her; it rebuilt her relationships with the family, allowed her time, conversation, communication with an older generation that would not necessarily spend time taking a young woman and her questions seriously. Diasporic narratives and histories have to encompass an extraordinary amount of movement: “It is the central trauma of our lives.” In some ways, it is the role of the queer family member, to have that displacement away and reconciliation back to the traditional family home – it gives the writer a dual, insider/outsider perspective.
• The section in Leaving India which is about herself was written first, and partly as a response to the “naked honesty” she was getting from the people she talked to. She came out to her extended family on a case by case basis, and for the most part all is well. (She did remind us that it’s easier to be proud of a “famous lesbian” in the family rather than a boring old “regular lesbian”.)
• Blogs! She likes blogs. (Who doesn’t?) They give you a personal space to write anything you choose, without an editor overseeing the process. You can control who sees your words and who doesn’t. It can be a space to have your private, intimate voice “connect to some bigger thing out there”. (She had contact with the damascusgaygirl hoaxer: See this and this.)
• The Queer Ink Anthology! Queer Ink is going to be one of the first queer publishing houses in South Asia, and this anthology is going to give us stories that haven’t been heard before. About ten percent of the submissions were in vernacular languages. (Queer Ink is looking for people interested in editing, design, writing, the like. Contact them! Say you want in!)

After, there were cookies. After after, we went to Koshy’s. Life was good.

(originally posted at my reading blog)

Gays and Mahatmas Not Allowed (and women don't exist)

There's been a lot of hoohaa about this book:

Joseph Lelyveld is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. To be precise, he won the Pulitzer in 1986 for Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, which Amazon USA tells me is an examination of South Africa's racial policies in a (very) critical light. Lelyveld was foreign correspondent for The New York Times, stationed at Johanesburg, at this point - and apartheid in South Africa continued till 1993.

Five minutes of Wikipedia and Google, ladies.

Those of us who've been indoctrinated in the Gandhian fairy tale - which removes much from the grittier, uglier, more human and courageous story - will remember that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi went to South Africa in his early twenties. Any biography of the man will cover this period, and I daresay Lelyveld looked at this period with an especial interest, or at least a more educated interest, steeped as he had been in South African culture for however many years. (I'm going to throw in Nelson Mandela here, and suggest that South Africa is where Lelyveld access Gandhi for himself in the first place.)

Anyway. Lelyveld writes his book, publishes it, and the Daily Mail gets hold of it. Wikipedia describes The Daily Mail as a "middle market tabloid", which is code for "sensationalist stuff written mostly for entertainment value rather than information sharing or truth seeking".

As far as I can make out, it was The Daily Mail which first decided that Great Soul chronicled Gandhi's love affair with Hermann Kallenbach, his racism, and his lifelong bisexuality, though generally reports finger both the US and UK newspapers without naming any.

You should read the entire article, because it is interesting in a certain way, but here are some excerpts, included ere because they are BEAUTIFULLY funny:

At the age of 13 Gandhi had been married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Makhanji, but after four children together they split in 1908 so he could be with Kallenbach...

...Although it is not clear why, Gandhi wrote that vaseline and cotton wool were a ‘constant reminder’ of Kallenbach....

...As late as 1933 he wrote a letter telling of his unending desire and branding his ex-wife ‘the most venomous woman I have met’.

I'm being very mean to The Daily Mail here, and I would apologise if the image of the venomous Kasturba Gandhi, evil hag, ex-wife who for some reason still tagged along with the Mahatma, was not dancing around in my head.

In today's patchily enlightened world, it is a big deal with Mahatma Gandhi gets "branded" bisexual. The Maharashtra and Guajarat governments have banned the books*. Lelyveld is getting not-so-veiled death threats.

The book hasn't even been released in India yet!

So, with absolutely nothing to go on, it's hard for us to be sure if Gandhi did in fact have a torrid romance with Kallenbach. Gandhi did tend to write extraordinarily emotional, frighteningly frank letters. This man did not hide his vulnerabilities. (Though apparently he hid his male lover? Or didn't make a big deal about him, the only time Gandhi downplayed someone important to him?) He wrote of love, of connection, of yearning. During his lifetime people were throwing scandalised fits at this business of sleeping with naked young women - because he did it all where people could see, and discuss. He presented it as a philosophical principle of living. (Some people, I am sure, were throwing fits at the business of sleeping with naked young women and not having sex with them. Such a waste!) We're still having to read all about his sex life, alleged or otherwise, decades after his death. A mere letter of love is not enough of a tell-tale for an affair. So we shall put aside this issue and move on to actual questions of interest to us.

(This is an article that seems to summarise reviews rather than have anything of its own to say; it's much more informative than I expected it to be.)

Do we want Gandhi to have been bisexual? (If you hate the term/category, rephrase that as "Do you want Gandhi to have had homosexual/homoromantic relationships?") Do we, as LGBTIQ people, as a collective formulating our own icons and writings and histories and cultures (and integrating at will into mainstream society), want Gandhi the man on our team?

You know, he has never struck me as a very happy man. He inherited, adapted and refined a strong set of values from his parents and in general from his childhood environment, and seems to have been the sort of child who took badly to having to hide things, to not earning his parents' love and respect. Just look through the chapter headings of his autobiography, especially in the first two sections. This is not a man who is proud of his younger self, and I have always personally felt like those younger failings drove him farther than any positive ambitions for his Self did. He was shamed of his youthful sexual drives, he was ashamed of his lies, his thefts, his small betrayals of his father. (And of course, that last, horrible one.)

In a time when homosexual activity was a crime, was socially condemned, was considered wrong - the Manusmriti is not fond of it either, so we can't wave around Hindu accepting happiness - for Gandhi to have desired, wanted, loved men would have just one more thing for him to be ashamed. He'd have done a fairly decent job of hiding it, too - or at least, everyone around it would have done it for him. To be so dishonest - I can't see him being happy with that. I can see him being more ashamed, more disgusted. One more canker in his already abraded soul.

And really? Really? Gandhi was an amazing man, yes, and a strong personality, yes, but he was married (which for me complicates things) and celibate in the most tortuous way possible. He was a skinny man who kept starving himself. His fashion sense was non-existent and his glasses were dorky. He was always hanging around with other people, not having sex, discussing matters of "greater import". If you weren't his minion, you were both at loggerheads. He did a lot of walking, talking, arguing. He'd travel to England and not bring back any souvenirs.

If this man was bisexual, he didn't live as bisexual, he didn't express love physically and was so wrapped up in his own personal goals he had very little time for other people's. (Jinnah and Ambedkar had some very valid reasons for wanting a separate state, quotas, reservations, what have you.) People either bent to his way of life or they left.

I'm not running around screaming Gandhi is bad and anti-gay! Some of the flaws we point out now were part and parcel of the force, the natural charisma of the man. These have led to some very good things, some very beautiful things. And homosexuality was, in many ways of necessity, an invisible absence in colonial society, so the fact that I can't find him saying anything about homosexuality at all tells me he was just too busy to ferret out new things to take care of.

Mind you, I am so going to read that book.

[Edited to add clarity] SO TO VEER OFF ON A TANGENT:

In all this hoohaa about the desecration of Gandhi's memory, no one speaks about the women in his except as vehicles for his celibate-sexual antics. A (male) friend who read this post told me he thought that was perfectly valid. But it does make me wonder. If we recast a man as queer, we need to address the people around him, recast their relationships with him. Not much. There's no need for venom. But just a little. Don't we? [/edit to add clarity]

What woman do we know, which Indian historical figure, would create nearly as much controversy if someone did hir research and declared her gay? Or "really" a man? Are there any (female) historical figures we'd like on the team? (Many of my arguments re: Gandhi do not apply!) It seems like every second historic male is declared gay, repressed or a pervert these days. Represent, people, I want us wymmyns to have some love too!

(What did Kasturba do when Mohandas was apparently cavorting around with his paramour? Stay at home and feed the children?)

Why do we examine, so very closely, the sexual relationships of our historic men, while it seems like our women get, at most, called a "slut" and confined to boring extra-marital heteronormativity? Why do angry Hindus (male!) stop at "Sita is sitting on a monkey's tail and masturbating, and this makes me angry!" without going farther to "Sita's only contact at that point was with Raavana's demoness minions and THEY GOT IT ON and this makes me angry?"

I've run out of thoughts to think.

* This paragraph was edited to remove an egregious error.