What's wrong with being gay: When it comes to sex, we're all perverts
Like most youngsters, 18-year-old Parvez too worries about homework, heartbreak and pimple. But his worry doesn’t end there. A student of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, he has a more weighty issue to grapple with: his sexual identity. Parvez is gay. Though his close friends know about it and are okay with it, his parents are still in the dark. He is unsure how they would react to his revelation. His hunch tells him that it is not going to be pleasant.
“They are very orthodox,” he tells this writer on the sidelines of the queer pride parade held in the capital, recently. “That’s why I want Section 377 to go. At least that would give me some hope in telling them that I am not a criminal anymore.”
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Amid all the sound and fury over intolerance, if there is a section of minorities who should feel legitimately aggrieved over the way they have been treated in this country, it is the LGBT community. Not only has the law been unfair to them, even doctors who ought to have been guided by modern science have been prejudicial to them.
A Mail Today exposé, earlier this year, clearly showed how some reputed Delhi doctors still regard homosexuality as a curable perversion rather than a normal variation of human sexuality as recognised by both Indian and international medical bodies including the World Health Organisation.
Dr Nagendra Kumar, a resident at Max Hospital, and one of the several doctors whom Mail Today interviewed as a part of the sting operation, even went to the extent of prescribing medicines based on a “gay patient’s” supposed behavioural patterns.
To know why some doctors feel so yuck about gay sex, it would be worthwhile to do a historical flashback to an unlikely place which is now regarded as the de facto headquarters of tolerance: Europe. There in the late 19th century, you would have met Dr Charles Samson Féré, the vintage equivalent of Dr Kumar, in the French capital Paris.
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Like Kumar, Féré too believed that “homosexual disease” could be identified and treated on the basis of a series of behavioural traits such as postures, methods of walking and inability to blow (no, it’s not what you are thinking — it is the inability to whistle). Féré believed that inability to whistle was the mark of an effeminate man. Thankfully, Féré’s treatment methods were less brutal than many of his colleagues in Spain, who at that time were busy grafting testicles from the cadaver of hypersexual straight men or even monkeys on to gay male patients in the hope of curing them.
This shows that our moral panic and disgust towards gays is not just an Indian problem. (Most African nations too are anti-gay.) But the funny thing is that when it comes to sex, we all are perverts in one way or the other than we may be aware or even care to admit. There is a high probability that you, the reader of this column, are a sexual deviant.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, regarded as the Bible of American Psychiatric Association, lists a total of eight deviant sexual desires. Three among the list are voyeurism, an acute interest in watching other people having sex; exhibitionism; and fetishism, an erotic fixation for a non reproductive body part that can exclude genital sex.
With our collective passion for porn, most of the Indians would readily fit the bill of a voyeur. Similarly, there is a little bit of exhibitionist in most of us too. Think about all those occasions when you have worn tight, formfitting or revealing clothing to show off your body. A fetishist on the other hand, no matter how sexually straight he is, cannot impregnate a foot or a belly button and spread his genes. Then there are people who are sexually attracted to bees (melissaphile), inanimate objects such as chairs, tables, walls (objectiphile) and more shockingly, even amputees (acrotomophile). With so much of idiosyncrasies around, why are we yucking out gay sex alone?
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In fact, what should actually make us squeamish is that amid all these debates on intolerance, a nation of more than 1.2 billion have remained shamelessly tolerant to a Biblical law inspired by Abrahamic tribal lifestyle, inflicted on us by our colonial masters.
Now, with BJP leaders like Arun Jaitley and Prakash Javadekar coming out in support of decriminalising homosexuality, it is time we consign Section 377 to the waste bin of history. Doing so, would make the lives of people like Parvez a lot easier, apart from reaffirming our own tolerant credentials as a nation. After all, before migrating to become a cherished Western value, tolerance was an Indian virtue.