shame and way out of it

First of all I never thought I was ashamed of myself, or to be more correct I did not realize it, although I am 32 and I think I am very smart. But the fact is I am ashamed, not because I am not the greatest scientist, or the best human being, but because I am gay. Yes I know in the present world it is not that hard to be gay. Most of my friends are so accepting, I can talk to them about my hook ups and all and not to ever forget my most amazing family who will support me who ever I sleep with. But still I am ashamed of myself, or I should say I have been ashamed of myself for last 31.5 years, leaving the first 6 months when I just eat, slept, cried and pooped. So you might ask if everything in my life is so accepting and rosy then why am I ashamed. And as I said, I myself did not know I am, and am just realizing it. I was ashamed of myself from the day I realized I was different, and that was much before I started feeling something “down there” after seeing a cute guy. I knew I did not like sports, I was not aggressive enough to be called a man; I knew I liked my sisters’ dolls more than the cricket bat that my grandmother bought me. That feeling of seclusion and “exclusiveness” did not work very well with me. I still feel tremendous shame when I pass a football ground, although I really want to look at the guys in shorts, but I know if the ball comes my way I do not have the skill to send it back to the players. So I kind of all my life avoided routes that will take me near any kind of sports. But as 4-5 year old kid, and knowing there is something inherently wrong with you, as in all popular media and in your extend and near family, the only role you are depicted as is a kid carrying a cricket bat or something of that sort, I started to find other ways to prove that I fit in. so I observed and learned. And who better to learn than from your father! The only man you were that close to at that age and by the grace of God my father was a Man in all possible way. He was attractive, self-established, sporty, insensitive, aggressive and always angry and in control. As most of the other “qualities” in my father was a little far-fetched for me to imbibe as a 4 year old, I decided to be always angry and try to be in control. So I remember always being short tempered, and trying to prove my worth by throwing tantrum. This worked well as I could distract my “gayness” or so I believed, but my sisters being kids as well and having, like any other kids, a sharp sense of finding out flaws, started taunting me as a “princess of angry fits”. They were so vivid in describing my anger and sometimes so hilarious that they told me that no prince will take me when I am actually in a desirable age as I would have lost all my teeth as I grind them too hard when I am “angry”. This statement although was to criticize me, always made me burst in laughter. And now that I try to remember from where I learned this grinding of teeth when angry thing, I know for sure it was not any man, but another person in my life who was a woman but was “manly” enough for her time, and that was my grandmother! So although I thought I would be safe in hiding my difference by being angry, but my role model for anger tantrum was from a completely wrong side of the spectrum. So by early teenage I knew I needed a new camouflage. I was always a “wiser” kid who was able to carry orders very well and execute plans, so being in a Hindu missionary school I was spotted early on as a “good kid” and so I found my second “deceit”. I became the saintly character of my school and family, who was very much into religion (back then I did not know the difference between religion and spirituality), performing religious rites, listening to only old, sometimes ancient music and appreciating art. I think this worked very well, so well that most of the time even when I was grown up, my lack of interest in girls was correlated to my sainthood. Reading these the readers, who are homophobic to start with, or may be not very aware of homosexuality, must be thinking of me and all “my kind” as manipulative demons. But trust me neither me nor anyone of my kind did it exactly to cheat you, it was to cheat and hide ourselves, as we knew we did not fit in. the shame and scare of this was so deep that we were desperate. And it is so difficult for me, and am sure for most of us to find out if eventually if there was anything that we actually liked in our “camouflage” or not. Like, I cannot decide now that my comfort with art and philosophy and history whether those are real or if I have enacted a role for so long that I have lost myself. This writing is neither to get pity or sympathy nor to enrage people I knew because I have “cheated” them for so long. This is a process of self-realization, where I am seeing how and why I am and what I am. A man is only a man if he is into sports, is aggressive, takes charge and the most importantly sleeps with a woman, even if I qualify for many of these I do not qualify for the most important one. So I wonder if I can change the definition of man (and for sure a woman) as someone who is not scared and ashamed of himself. 

Sexuality, metrosexuality and homosexuality

Being a homosexual man living in the US and having a pretty busy social/sex life, I encounter a question pretty often from my “fairer” counterparts: How does Hinduism (for most of them India means Hindu, which largely is true but being a-religious in my political view this hurts my feeling) address homosexuality. Now that is a tricky question. Unlike the Christians, Muslims and Jews we the Hindus do not have a standard booklet which tells us how to behave. The only near equivalent, that too I hear assigned by the British, is the Gita. But unfortunately the whole commentary there is about how we should be doing our duty as human being without getting attached and was delivered standing on the battle filed. Although men in uniform having sex with each other gives an erotic visual entertainment, but unfortunately I have not encountered any homosexual reference in the Gita. So unless I take a huge extrapolation and say if you are homosexual keep fucking men without getting attached, I do not see any way of addressing homosexuality from a “Hindu” perspective. But on second thought here I think I have a clue how we can introduce metrosexuality in the battle of the Gita. Look at the colour of the dhotis that our warriors were wearing, from yellow, to violet to any damn rainbow colour. In addition if we go to the epic Mahabharata, of which the whole story of Gita is a part of, you will see guys wearing a lot of jewelry, being very conscious about how they look, and participating in stereotypically feminine art form. Take the example of Arjuna, the most manly and handsome of all. During the years of their exile (do not expect me to tell you the whole story here) he transformed himself into a beautiful dance teacher called Brihannala and befriended all the royal ladies at the court of Virata! If I had no clue who Arjuna was and how many woman he slept with I would straight away take this as a sign of homosexuality where a guy transforms himself into a woman to be attractive to other men (mind it homosexuality is not equivalent to being transgender, a commonly mistaken vibe). Such examples are plenty in Hindu mythology. Like the time during the churning of the sea to get the nectar of life, the demons and the gods collaborated. And when finally the nectar was found, the gods decided to deprive the demons from it (how godly) by seducing the horny mortals and asked lord Vishnu to transform as a woman, Mohini. Once again Vishnu being the only Man in this universe and still transforming as a beautiful woman to seduce demons, does not sound very straight to me, unless they were playing a Halloween pared. There are even rumors that Vishnu and Shiva have a very interesting romantic relationship. One of the stories says that Shiva seeing Mohini (he was well aware that Mohini is actually Vishnu in disguise I suppose) got so excited that he started masturbating and when he was “done” his semen was transferred to Anjana’s womb through her ears and eventually she gave birth to the great Hanuman! My aim is in no way to scandalize the Hindu mythology, actually I love these stories. But my point is how effortlessly the gods swinged between being super straight males to homosexuals and in every way they were metrosexual with their coloured dhotis, face packs and jewelries. This makes me wonder if we ever had a rigid definition of sexuality in ancient India. In other words did we tag a person as “Gay” and cast him away from being ever attracted to a woman or not. With my modern and homosexual mind I can say there have been several instances when I was attracted both intellectually and physically to a “woman”. This attraction is in general very much dependent on few qualities that that women had, instead of finding them attractive because they had a vagina and boobs. India came in contact with the western masculinity, which is all about muscle and being insensitive and being sporty and all most probably when Alexander the great first stopped at the door step of the then Indian Territory. For the first time the two very different cultures looked at each other with awe, and started assimilating each other’s idea. Indian men started to be described in more “manly” manner, and this assimilation is still going on. I do not know if this was a good thing or bad, but this might be a reason while all Abrahamic religion condemned homosexuality, the ancient Indian religion, which we call these days Hinduism kept silent.

Love, convenience and consumerism

I am fed up these days, or may be to be more precise I am fed up for a long time in general. But this article is not to speculate the wiring in my brain, so I will discuss the current reason that makes me feel annoyed. Whenever I log into face book these days, I see an “amazingly cute” couple declaring their “eternal love” for each other. You might be surprised, how on earth two people in love can annoy me! Let me speak before you complete your judgment. I am not complaining about falling in love. Am sure it is amazing, although all my life the grass on my side has been pretty dull, so may be to some subconscious level my grapes are sour. But consciously I have some other issues with these couples. Most of them claim that they were made for each other and some higher force helped them in getting together. But when I look closely I see they are from the same country, ethnicity, skin colour, educational background, financial status, age group, and most importantly similar “attractiveness”. I find it extremely difficult to understand and hence digest how so many things can magically match to make an amazing love story. I start wondering is it really love or just a convenience? That brings us to the question “what is love”. I wish I had an answer, although even if I did, with my reputation no one will believe it. But still my speculative and argumentative mind runs in ten directions for an answer. And what I come up with is a definition by negation, which is, I can define “what love is not” most probably rather than what it is. According to me when two people, nearly a clone to each other, claim love, what they are doing is mostly trying to find a support in what they believe in. To me it becomes like garlanding your image in the mirror. And hence this is not love, it is rather a very primal narcissistic ritual. We all suffer from lack of confidence to some level, this type of love helps us in winning the weakness. All these brutal attacks on love and the people in love, but that does not mean I am looking for my love in someone who is completely opposite to me. Some level of agreement and acceptance is very important in a relationship, but a relationship where there are only agreements sounds very unattractive to me. For me love is not how many things we agree upon, rather it is how many disagreements we can live with happily. My grandmother, a wise woman of yesteryear, used to always tell us difference of opinion does not necessarily lead to a conflict of hearts. I could never appreciate that and so I had a conflict with her on this issue forever! But now that she is gone and I have started to tear open my gray cells every moment I think I see what she meant and why I could not see her point earlier. As I mentioned, she and her likes were from a generation of scares, where there were very few options in life. Be it material, spiritual or romantic. So whatever they got they speculated, concentrated and appreciated upon that. On the other hand we, and more so the generation which followed us, came in to this world with the option of 300+ TV channels, 1000+ brands of cloths, 50000+ options for food and so on and so forth. So for us it was always what suits me the best, an incessant effort to match my appetite without even considering if I satisfy anyone else’s appetite. Do not misunderstand me when I say these that I am saying getting stuck with whatever you have, good or bad, is the ultimate mantra to moksha in love. What I am saying is just be very mindful when you split your hair and decide good from bad. Define very critically how and what you mean by good. If good is just agreement then most probably you have got it wrong somewhere. After all in this world of consumerism we are not pressed with options as the characters in “Pride and Prejudice” or the two women in “Chokher Bali” and we need to be very careful with this ultrafevourable situation.