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. 

Story of a modern disease.

You are going to read about a girl. Can we address her as ‘she’? Oh yes, I think you can.

Call her ‘ she’ or actually, call her whatever you want, she just want to know that you are listening.

She likes feeling good, just like you do, but sometimes it’s impossible. She still manages somehow. She will love you a lot but that can’t evade a major problem she has. She is suffering from a bizarre disease and has been picked on for it, ever since she spilled into her mother’s womb.

She likes to be herself.

Disgusting, right? She has been told that.

Wherever she goes, she bares herself. She talks she like would, she spews out thoughts in cups, she lets her tongue wring on papers, she wants her mother to see her disease. You should understand how disappointed her parents are with this deformity. Clearly, she has no morals or sensibility to understand them. She is outrageous and has dared to love too. A man. A strange man. Skank, did that too.

Loving, desiring someone while being ‘yourself’, she is in a desperate need of therapy. You must agree. So on a sunny day, her parents took her to a hospital to remove that ‘yourself’. People in her family thought that she stank of ‘yourself’. She started hiding it in longer shirts and drab shoes, people say it would help her become better but still, how sad, ‘yourself’ sprung over her face like fire.

Worse, she stopped hiding it.

It had a distinct smell that her house hated, people questioned and only a very few people, captured it in tiny bottles to store in their heads. Doctors frisked her pants for the cause of her ailment. She writhed on the stretcher.

It leaks through the skin like puss, her mother thinks. Being ‘yourself’ is the worst thing a good child should do. It's mortifying, Oxford dictionary can add-flabbergasting, blasphemous, horrendous. It's so fucking obvious and why can't she choose something better? Earn money and let this down die down. Walk freely on streets and let this die down.

She is still ‘yourself’ after countless storms in hospital rooms, therapy rooms, family rooms, rape rooms, doomed rooms, class rooms, temple rooms, roomless rooms and she has to be helped.

If you have any constructive feedbacks or numbers of helpful doctors, please inbox her parents.

They will acknowledge your effort.

(Want more of this- Winks, poems, whispers and doodles like the one of top? Come over at, sootahwords.blogspot.in)

Three rings (stop me if you've heard this one)

I've been thinking about marriage a lot lately - not for myself, but as a concept, an institution. For the purposes of this post, I'm not talking about two people (or more!) deciding to spend their lives together, I'm talking about two people (or more? usually just two at a time, though) deciding to spend their lives together and telling the government about it. For the purposes of this post, we're talking about a union of which some government, somewhere, has a record.

Since I'm not a romantic, or at least I'm not unspoiled idealist - the first bitch who comes along and reminds me that I'm a cynic I'mma cut - I have trouble as it is understanding a long-term commitment. The faith, the optimism, the promise - it's all a bit intense for me. I like the idea, don't get me wrong. If you are in a long-term relationship of the romantic kind that you intend to be in till death do you 'part, then yay for you. (I suppose.) I can say, well, I hope this works out.

I understand the above as a universal process - anyone who is capable of forming deep emotional bonds is hypothetically capable of finding someone or some people s/he wants and decides to bring into their circle of "me".

I get confused at the point where the commitment gets formalised in some way. (For the purposes of this, and every post, I am a Stupid Hermit Who Does Not Get People. Don't ask me why I'm asking the dumb questions. I'm dumb.) When two people who want to spend their lives together go to a priest, arranger, ordainer of some sort in order to make vows/promises/be wedded together - with witnesses, sometimes many, many, many witnesses, I am bewildered by the necessary, inevitable spectacle. The process is simultaneous show, celebration, and validation-from-spiritual/other authority; there's a part of me that says, your lives together don't in and of themselves need that.

Yes yes, it's a social institution, and traditionally, alliance-wise or romance-wise, there're social pressures, and sometimes pleasures, to the pubic spectacle. The ceremonies act as a public, communal, community milestone. I don't get it, emotionally, but I can talk my way through it.

I'm not confused by this social ritual because it's not necessarily open to all people capable of informed consent - even if it's often open to people who do not give consent at all. I'm not wandering around going, why do heterosexuals do this when so many places have LGBTIQ people who can't? I'm a little bewildered why anyone would do it, period. This is because I lack empathy and religion, and decidedly do not want to go the horrors of a Hindu Brahmin wedding for myself.

For the people who want to live together forever and not have a social, religious, wedding but still want to live together forever as a unit, there's "marriage" as defined, allowed and rewarded by the state they live in. In India, while most states did not until recently require that marriages be registered, the various marriage laws did. [In case you didn't know, we have the Hindu Marriage Act (under which the Sikh, Buddhist and Jain marriages have been categorised, for reasons of bureaucratic laziness), Indian Christian Marriage Act, Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, the Special Marriages Act (for inter-religious/caste unions), Muslim Personal Law. The Hindu Marriage Act does not require that the wedding be registered. Hooray for democracy.]

I am not going to argue that LGBTIQ people should be allowed to marry and have that marriage recognised by their governments. Okay? I do not need to, it is perfectly obvious and right. If anyone is allowed to marry - and make no mistake, government recognition is permission, validation and reward, just as societal celebration is - then anyone should be allowed to marry.

Nepal is currently redrafting their constitution - actually, it's nearly done by now, and by July, if the people vote in the majority for it, all people of adult age regardless of sex, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, what have you, will be able to marry. Brazil passed its same-sex law just a few weeks ago. Various American states are arguing yay and nay, and I link you to this lovely moment from the Minnesotan debates on the subject - just that moment, since the final results were not happy.

So. In our perfect world where anyone capable of informed consent is allowed to marry - and I mean, specifically, in the sense where said union is registered with the government, is probably licensed, recorded somewhere, is legal... why do we want to marry?

Well...

1. It would be nice if everyone who is in a committed relationship is allowed to bloody visit their loved ones in the hospital. Or in prison. Or when they move to family-specific zones, which does happen in some nations still, I think.
2. Tax breaks! Insurance breaks! Inheritance breaks!
3. Regulated break-up! Division of your stuff by someone else so all you need to do is fight about it!
4. Nationalities and visas!
5. Specifically for those of us who have to fight for it - respect, recognition. (Which is why we're only sullenly accepting "civil unions" as a sort of "marriage" for the purposes of this post.) This means the government doesn't say, Ew, icky, and put us in jail, or separate us against our will.
6. Comment at will, I am out of ideas.

I am going to beat the dead donkey now: 2, 3 and indirectly, 4, are about property. 1 and 4 are about acceptance, and permission, and mobility. 5 is acceptance, recognition, permission. As a practical woman, I get that these are very good reasons to have your government accept that you are married, and recognise, permit you that right, with the obligations involved.

I just... really do not see how it is the government's business. I find it incredibly creepy that people submit something so important to a only hopefully benevolent, definitely, actually impersonal authority. This is not a "someone" who loves you. Or has a plan for you and humanity as a whole. This is... THE MAN. Shouldn't this be private - or at lest just between you and your god/s?

We grant our governments too much responsibility.

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Gurl in the World has already blogged this, but this is a reminder: sign here, if you're from the States. Help a family get back together.

And Today I Shall Celebrate

And today I shall celebrate
Of love of longing of a reddish hue
Of my pulsating clit that throbs

When I know you

Hooted winks that rest on my curves
And returning to an empty floor
Of a parched mouth longing for rum
And of dismay because it is eight
And the streets are dark and the men are drunk

And you can’t be because you’re alone

And today I shall celebrate
Of smoke from my nostrils
And of tubes of the plastic coconut honey paste
That keeps these curls just as you know them

Tight wild and lost

And today I shall celebrate
Because this bottle is over
But my words are not
Nor the love the longing or the reddish hue

Of things that were old but now seem new

And today I shall celebrate
Because it has been long due.




The Wayward Cloud

Neha

Sharing Dealings

Very recently a lot of my friends got to know about my (bi)sexuality. It's one thing that I'm quite open about it, I've never really made an effort to hide it, but I came out formally to my friends only a few months ago. I did believe that they would be more supportive of me, considering they've known me for about 4 years now, and they never came across as non-accepting in any form of conversation or interaction.

I came to know that they had made many sarcastic comments, and asked other friends of mine (girls) of I had been flirting with them, with a smug smile on their faces. This was absolutely unexpected, coming from the liberal background that we all did come from. It struck me at that point of time, that the loss I felt was in fact, absolutely nothing when it came to acceptance of homosexuality. There are so many more people on this planet who have to deal with so much more, ranging from expulsion from the workplace and disownment by the family to shock therapy and isolation. How would one deal with this? How do we explain us to the straight and so called liberal community?

So let's say that right now, the "normal" thing to be is heterosexual. Now imagine a society, a culture, where the "normal" thing to be is homosexual. How would we treat them? Would we be equally compassionate? I'm tempted to ask these "friends" of mine, why they never had issues with me when supposedly did not know. The second I said "I'm bisexual" in a game of truth and dare, the tables really spun around. If those are the ground on which people decide who is a friend and who isn't, I'd like to ask them if they actually know what a friend is. So is it worth explaining us to them, or should we just ignore them? Would that make us less approachable to them? Would that increase the distance between them and us?

And ironically, the song in the background goes;


"Release yourself - it's a big sky.
Reveal yourself, it's a big sky.
We love, we leave. We take, we give.
Release yourself - it's a big sky."