Gay Pride — in Delhi

From The Guardian:

Yesterday was the biggest day in the life of one 26-year-old insurance agent in Delhi, yet he came to the city’s long-awaited first gay parade hiding behind a mask.

“I have to remain invisible,” he said. “If my parents see me on TV, I won’t be able to go home. And if my colleagues recognise me, there’ll be hell to pay in the office.”

The gay insurance agent is typical of millions of Indians condemned to lead a double life since, much like in Victorian Britain, they risk becoming social outcasts and even criminals if their sexual preferences are revealed.

Though the setting up of advocacy groups and helplines in recent years has given India’s homosexuals a voice and some solace, they are still largely a hidden and persecuted community. But in a sign of changing times, India’s gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the traditional hijra transsexual community came together for the first-ever Delhi Queer Pride Parade yesterday.

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Delhi’s feeling gay and Deepa Mehta is happy

From The Times of India:

Deepa Mehta, who has just completed another celluloid treatise on the subjugation of women, can’t hide the pride in her voice when she’s told that Delhi’s first-ever gay parade today will begin from Regal cinema in the Capital, where the screening of her lesbian film, Fire, was forcibly stopped years ago.

“I remember I was in Dubai in 1996, watching AR Rahman’s concert. I had just thought Fire would come and go in India without creating a ripple, like all films on unconventional themes. I should’ve known better. I got a call in the middle of the concert, asking me to come down to Delhi immediately. They had just halted the screening of Fire. I was aghast. It was my first brush with the moral police. Later, of course, I got used to being bullied by extra-constitutional censors in India.”

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A biography of the world’s most famous sex manual

Michael Dirda reviews The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra, James McConnachie (Metropolitan, 267 pp, $27.50) in The Washington Post [via 3QuarksDaily]

Years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around drinking when I heard a friend murmur two sentences I have never forgotten. “You know, guys, sex is the greatest thing in the world.” He paused and we were all about to nod in agreement. He was, after all, a noted and knowledgeable ladies’ man. Unexpectedly, though, he then added, with infinite wistfulness: “But it’s just not that great.”

There, in that gulf between the reality and the dream, lies the domain of pornography, the sex industry and the masturbatory fantasy — of Viagra and the midlife crisis. Our Western myths of love are seldom about fulfillment; they are all about yearning. In Plato’s Symposium we are told that the gods divided the original ball-like human beings in two, and that we consequently spend our lives searching for the other half who will complete us. So-called romantic love, which first blossomed in 12th-century France, revels in passion delayed, forbidden or otherwise thwarted. Its real theme is desire.

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Forbidden knowledge

Posted by Namita Bhandare:

My new column in Mint is on sex education, and why ignorance is not bliss. How did you learn to speak words we dare not speak? What’s your story? Tell me. I want to know.

My formal sex education at an all-girls convent school in New Delhi can be summed up in two words: woefully inadequate.

What passed for it was a brief interlude when one fine day in biology class in std IX, our NCERT-issued textbook opened with that tantalizing chapter, “Reproduction”. A frisson of expectation ran through the class as Mrs Ravindran began reading in her clear lilting voice. Towards the end of the first sentence, however, the voice became hushed as poor Mrs Ravindran (who had by then turned beetroot red) put down the book and said: “Girls, you can read the rest of the chapter on your own at home.”

“On your own at home” pretty much sums up our attitude to sex education. We still hesitate to ask questions, speak “forbidden” words or seek out information. A television ad for Naco (National AIDS Control Organisation) highlights this ingrained reticence as it urges men to boldly say “condom”, a forbidden word if ever there was one. New sexual awakening? Hardly. In India, the urgency for sex education is seen not in the context of sexuality, but of HIV/AIDS.

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The bhabhi chronicles

India’s first home-grown, online graphic porn star is the unlikely Savita bhabhi. In Tehelka, Anastasia Guha checks her out.

COMICS HAVE A WAY of bypassing our critical and moral register and going right to the id. They have a way of getting into, and then staying in, the deepest recesses of the psyche. This is apparent from our frenzied interest in Savita Bhabi, India’s first animated Internet porn star. Created by the appropriately underground Deshmukh, Dexstar and Mad (whoever they may be, they are not telling - we did ask), Savita Bhabhi is growing to be a phenomenally popular pornographic comic strip. It has grown solely by word of mouth to 3911 registered users in little over a month since its inception. The lead character has been drawn with every Kserial bahu trapping firmly in place: the dull gleam of a mangalsutra, sindoor forming a bright contrast to long dark hair parted chastely down the middle.

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A sex manual for Indian sensibilities

‘Penetrative sex’ and ’sexual intercourse’ are banned from NACO’s watered-down sex education manual for teachers scheduled to be introduced across schools in August this year. Teena Thacker has the report in The Indian Express

Over six months after it pulled out its sex education manual following nationwide protests, the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) is ready with a revised version which has been sent to various states for their comments.

The states have been given two months to review the manual, which is expected to be introduced in schools by August this year.

Following protests over the “explicit” content in the earlier manual forcing NACO to pull it out in October last year, the expert group has tried to play it safe this time. The manual, which has been re-named as the “teachers’ handbook”, has no pictures of human figures or words like “penetrative sex” and “sexual intercourse” this time. It is expected to be uploaded on the NACO website for wider comments.

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Sex and Indians

According to a Durex Sexual Wellbeing survey, Asians are clear losers when compared to rest of the world. Only 46% Indians experience an orgasm almost every time they have sex. Couples from China and Hong Kong are the least likely to reach orgasm during sex, while the Italians and Spanish claim to have no problems climaxing (achieving orgasms 66 percent of the time). Other Asian countries such as Japan (27 percent) and Singapore (36 percent) ranked poorly

However, while 55% of Indian males almost always climax during sex, women get a worse deal with only 26% almost always achieving orgasm.

Click here for Durex survey:

South Asia’s circles of sexuality

Himal SouthAsian’s March cover feature takes a look at the wide range of sexuality, particularly alternative sexuality, in South Asia. Diwas KC reports on the push for gay rights in Nepal which recently won a significant victory with a Supreme Court ruling

Nepal was recently witness to a victory of sorts for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and inter-sex (LGBTI) communities. It was an undeniably historic day on 21 December 2007, when the Supreme Court of Nepal, in response to a petition filed by a coalition of local LGBTI-rights groups, ordered the government to fulfil its contractual responsibility to LGBTI individuals by amending existing legislation or formulate new laws that would permit this community to better exercise its civil and human rights.

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Elsewhere in the same issue, Miranda Husain sets aside stereotypes to understand alternative sexuality in modern-day Pakistan

In 2004, the (now defunct) United Nations Human Rights Commission used its 60th session to debate a resolution that had been tabled the previous year by Brazil on “Human Rights and Sexual Orientation”. This represented the first time that the world body had actively considered adopting a motion specifically aimed at ending discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Pakistan – along with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya and Malaysia – proposed amendments to the resolution, demanding that the term sexual orientation be removed from the text entirely. As it had announced previously, the Pakistani delegation upheld the stance of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) by ultimately voting against the resolution.

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Tanveer Rouf sees how the Internet has allowed a new kinship to develop in the Bangladeshi gay community

Homosexual men in Dhaka who openly identify themselves as such are mostly from the middle and upper income groups. In large part, they have come to understand their identity mainly from information obtained from the Internet, which those who know English are able to access from a computer at home or a cyber café. Men in Dhaka have had access to information and images related to gay issues since as early as 1996, but over the past decade there has been a mushrooming of cyber cafes all over the city, with the competition leading to affordable rates.

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Marini Fernando says sexuality rights activists in Sri Lanka are having a hard time being heard

As in many Southasian countries, sexual minorities in Sri Lanka grapple with a harsh and discriminatory law that proscribes “gross indecency”, a term that is never actually defined. Up until 1995, this legislation applied to men only, but a movement to raise awareness on the need to reform the law led to it being made gender neutral. Now, women too come under the ambit of the law, and for the past 13 years, consensual sex between two women in private has been criminalised.

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And Chayanika Shah calls for a strengthening of the women’s and ‘queer’ movements in India

A disability-rights activist recently said that she considered the Indian women’s movement a natural ally of the disabilities movement, as it was the only progressive movement in the country to have politically explored the notion of the body, from biological variation to socially constructed ideas of ‘difference’ and inequality. Actually, the same holds true for what can be referred to as the ‘queer’ movement. Queer is a recent description for an evolving politics that questions patriarchal ‘heteronormative’ structures – those institutions, such as marriage, family and community, that regard only heterosexuality as ‘normal’. (For convenience I use ‘queer’ movement as a term to describe the plethora of sexuality-rights movements, and also because each of these identities has a potential for challenging the norm. However, many activist groups, across genders, do not necessarily identify with ‘queer’ politics.)

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For a complete list of contents click here