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“Gaycation” recap (2.2): India

In this week’s episode of Gaycation, Ellen and Ian head to India to address the issues that LGBTQ people face in the country. As Ellen tells us in her voiceover, India is dealing with a rather interesting situation. With over 1 billion citizens, and many, many different regions, growing pains and moving on from British colonial rule have created a complicated environment for its LGBT citizens. While a third gender (those known as Hijras) is accepted, life for many queer Indians is complicated at best, downright dangerous at its worst.

The duo starts off their trip in Mumbai, the largest city in India and located on the country’s Western coast. They meet with author Parmesh Shahani, who literally wrote the book (Gay Bombay) on being gay in India. He stresses the community aspect of being queer and brings up the Draconian British Colonial law, Section 377, which criminalizes homosexuality. In his opinion, there are still many who hold on to the values and mindsets of colonialism. After being lifted in 2009, the damn law was put back on the books in 2011, which was a crushing blow to the LGBT community. Still, the LGBT community perseveres.

Ian heads to a weekly gay dance night and chats with quite a few out and proud gay men. There is a major thing that can’t go unnoticed: there are no women there. That’s certainly not lost on Ellen.

Next up, Ellen and Ian address something that affects 88% of the Indian population: arranged marriage. They meet with a family who made a big stir when the gay man’s mother put an ad in the paper looking for a husband for her son. Harish is a vegetarian, cat loving gay man who is just looking for a match, and his mother, Padma, loves and accepts her son and wants the same for him. While they did meet a few eligible men, Harish has yet to become engaged. That doesn’t mean Padma and Harish will stop trying, though.

Our hosts travel to meet one of India’s most well known and respected LGBT activists, former journalist Ashok Row Kavi. Row Kavi points out that issues for LGBT citizens in India are divisive. The needs of queer women are different than those of queer men, which can make it difficult to create a united front. While women deal with violence and oppression within the home or their familiar close-knit circles, gay men deal with a more public side of violence and ignorance. He also doesn’t shy away from bringing up another issue that keeps gay men and women divided: misogyny.

So, where are the queer women and how are they fighting for a place in this world? Ellen and Ian meet up with a social organization for queer women called Gay-C and get their asses handed to them on the bad-mitten court.

Gay-C holds events and creates safe spaces for queer women. One of the members of Gay-C speaks about privilege, and how their backgrounds make life a little easier being both queer and female. This is not everyone’s experience as we will see later. Another one of the women points out that women’s sexuality, queer or not, is invisible in their experience for the most part in India. It’s about marriage and children, so female sexual desire is not given the credence it deserves.

Now for the other side of the coin. Ellen and Ian meet up with a queer woman who has been in a relationship with another woman for years and is anticipating her love getting engaged and married to a man. The woman is in disguise in order to protect her partner’s identity. It’s positively heartbreaking, and Ellen’s face cracks with pain for her.The woman admits that once her partner gets married, there will be a sense of freedom from the shame and hiding that they have been dealing with for so long.

Because some women are at risk of violence in their own families for being queer, Ellen and Ian travel to a safehouse for queer women who have nowhere else to go. They meet a couple who fell in love and left their homes with only the clothes on their backs in order to be together and escape a certain oppressive situation in their village. Since their families are holding their documents and all their money, the couple can’t get work or start a life on their own. Still, they express much love for their families.

Next stop, our hosts travel to Haridwar, where a famous guru claims that yoga and spiritual practices can cure homosexuality. Naturally, they put this to the test, but thankful remain gay as a box of birds. They are eventually granted a meeting with Guru Baba Ramdev at his compound, where he explains that he can cure diseases like cancer and HIV. His is a business of nearly one billion dollars. Ellen asks Baba Ramdev if he believes his yoga practices can cure homosexuality, and he is quick to say that he is not anti-gay. However, he does believe that homosexuality is an emotional problem and those who have such feelings, should simply abstain from acting on them. He does not believe that we are born gay, and while he doesn’t long for the suffering of anyone, he does espouse to the belief that it is an abnormal and uncivilized way of life.

After heading back to Mumbai, Ellen and Ian meet the pop supergroup the Six Pack Band, whose members are all part of the Hijra gender non-conforming community. Hijras are an ancient community and appear in early Hindu writings. While their existence is accepted, life as a Hijra is far from a walk in the park. Hijras struggle to find employment, and acceptance within their own families. Begging is often the main source of income for members of the community, but hopefully, the popularity of the Six Pack Band will change some hearts and minds. When Ellen asks how the Hijra community fits into the LGBT community, she is told that it doesn’t.

While Hijras are legally protected by Indian law, the same can not be said for those in the trans community. Ellen and Ian travel to Delhi to meet up with an aspiring Bollywood dancer named Jat and his wife, Laksme. After trying to teach Ellen some Bollywood moves, they sit down to talk about their experience as a couple. Jab recently left his job to follow his dream of becoming a dancer. When Jat came out to his parents as trans, they had him hospitalized, drugged and held against his will for two weeks. Meanwhile, Laksme was also keep under lock and key by her parents. The couple planned an escape and are now living on their own in Delhi. Laksme’s parents even concocted a plan to abduct her under the pretense that her mother was in a serious accident. They took her to a place to pray away the gay, and when it didn’t work, her father promised that he would kill the couple. Laksme feels safe with Jat, however, and did not allow her father’s threats to keep them apart. Jat and Laksme offer advice to others in their situation: be yourselves, and don’t be ashamed of being trans or queer.

“We often look outward to bring progress,” Ellen tells us in her epilogue, “but in the case of India, progress may come from looking within. To the philosophies their wisdom already hold.” I certainly hope for the LGBTQ community all across India, that this comes to fruition.

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