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.
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