March
03 , 2006
Follies &
Fantasies of the Freaks
One cannot but be amazed at
the way the homosexuals, the Gays and the Lesbians,
assert themselves in the US as products of nature,
as belonging to the third gender, to be accepted
and respected by society without any qualms or reservations.
They are out into the open, ‘out of the closet’
as they themselves like to claim, and have no compunction
whatsoever in flaunting their queer sexual orientation.
An American acquaintance once mentioned that his
grown up son had adopted a different life-style
meaning that he had declared himself to be Gay –a
feminine man. The young man, he explained, without
any twinge of conscience, had found himself happier
in that lifestyle and was therefore entitled to
his choice. The Constitution guarantees the freedom
of choice in “the pursuit of happiness”
–a strained interpretation in this particular
context of the intentions of the Founding Fathers!
The Gays and the Lesbians have, in exercise of such
a freedom, set up strong, effective and vociferous
lobbies. The impact of these may be gauged from
the fact that one of the issues that President Clinton
had to tackle soon after taking the reins of power
was that of the Gays in the military. There was
a ban on their recruitment in the armed forces.
The Gays, who had come out of the closet and were
no longer ashamed of being queer but were instead
flaunting ‘Gay pride’, brought to bear
so much of pressure on the policy makers in Pentagon
and the White House that the Administration had
to lift the ban in 1993 ending the rancorous debate
over the ban.
This raised some eyebrows in conservative sectors
but who cares in the general laxity obtaining in
this society in gender relations. Don’t ask,
don’t tell is the formula now governing their
cases in the military. The Gays in the army must
be having a field day in pursuit of their version
of happiness, without being asked or telling anyone
about their proclivity, particularly in stations
where the soldiers are cut off from their families.
Many participants in the Gay Pride Parades now flaunt
their orientation by sticking to their car bumpers
specially made rainbow-colored plastics tapes.
The thrill has its trade-off too. For, nature has
its own laws and it allows the deviants some leeway
but then it asserts its laws in ways unforeseen
in human imagination.
The entire nation of Sodom, who lived in the area
covered now by the Dead Sea in Jordan, was destroyed
by God for practicing homosexuality and rejecting
Prophet Lot’s urgings to give it up. “We
let loose a rain of brimstone and all of them were
killed; see what was the outcome of such criminals”
{Al-Quran 7: 80-84}. The Bible also refers to two
cities, Sodom and Gomorrah (gum-rah?) which were
destroyed by fire for practicing sodomy.
The HIV virus which is sexually transmitted and
which causes AID is the brimstone or fire of the
present time. Over half of the victims of this deadly
disease are Gays. And, despite intense research
in many parts of the world, no such vaccine or drug
has yet been found that can at least control, if
not destroy altogether, this deadly, mutating and
highly insidious virus.
While people in South Asia know much about Gays,
their knowledge about Lesbians and their modus operandi
has been quite foggy. Eunuchs (khajasaras) and Sodomites
(hijras) have a hoary past. They have existed in
palaces, in their own alleys and in story books
for centuries. Not so, the Lesbians. One doesn’t
find much mention of such queer women in the classic
Persian and Urdu literature. Readily I can recall
only Ismat Chugtai’s short story Lehaf (comforter)
which handles this subject. Even the exceptionally
bold and brilliant writer, Manto, has not dealt
with it.
Perhaps it is because Lesbianism originated far
from the shores of Asia. The dictionary tells us
that the word Lesbian is from Lesbos, an island
in the Greek Aegean Sea. A prominent poetess, Sappho,
who hailed from this island was a homosexual and
had in her poetry glorified the abnormal activity.
According to some accounts, Lesbos was inhabited
by women only like the mythical island ‘California’
of Spanish novelist de Montalvo that he called ‘the
celestial paradise on earth’. It is open to
question whether the modern day Lesbians of California
and other parts of America have found the ‘celestial
paradise’ in their freakish ‘pursuit
of happiness’.
Nature does not favor the freak, the abnormal. The
case of the Medfly illustrates this.
The Medfly is a Mediterranean fruitfly which lays
its eggs on budding fruit and the larvae thrives
on the fruit flesh rendering it unsuitable for human
consumption. Some such flies were noticed on farms
in California a few years back. Thousands of male
Medflies rendered sterile in labs were let lose
in the area. Research at the University of Hawaii
had indicated that if such a sterile fly mated with
a wild female, the latter would become sterile too,
the more the mating, the wider the spread of sterility.
Such fruit flies, it was found, buzzed up to the
wild female flies, flapped their wings madly, danced
to a trance, sprayed their perfumes, and used all
other tricks in their bags, but almost all of them
got turned down cold. Somehow the wild female flies
sensed that the antics of these lab-doctored males
were as fruitless as the frolics of a Lesbian female
in a male mantel.
An Eskimo spotted a mermaid giving him a seductive
look. He responded by uttering ‘#??#’
meaning ‘How’. Many of us might utter
the same Eskimo word in regard to the intimate liaison
of Lesbian partners. It strikes as a fallacy whereby
a goose thinks it is a gander. It may also be viewed
as shadow-boxing.
A lot of make belief is, no doubt, involved in the
lives of Gays and Lesbians. No wonder the professionals
of the make-belief vocation, the actors and actresses
of Hollywood, are in the forefront masquerading
as proponents of the third gender. Many have joined
the ranks of this or that group. They do not tire
of glorifying and flaunting their queer bents. A
string of so-called ‘art films’ have
been produced on the theme. In the widely viewed
TV serial “Survival”, the award of a
million dollars went to a Gay participant.
Seeing the trend, some South Asian film producers
too have indulged in such art films. Deepa Mehta’s
film “Fire” focusing on a Lesbian character
attracted, as expected, a lot of attention and controversy
in India and abroad. An Indian-American young woman,
Nisha Ganatra, produced not long ago a film titled
“Chutney Popcorn” in which she herself
plays the role of a Lesbian.
On the pattern of the American Gay and Lesbian conferences,
a South Asian organization, Trikone, located in
California organized some time back a meeting in
San Francisco of South Asian queers, called DesiQ2000,
and it was reported to have been attended by hundreds.
The copy-cats of South Asia have even named their
organization in Canada “Khush” - literal
translation of the word Gay.
Francis Bacon had said: Prosperity discovers vice,
adversity discovers virtue. The first generation
South Asians had naturally embraced prosperity;
their progeny born in prosperity are discovering
vice. Unfortunately they are viewing the vice through
the prisms of their indigenous peers. Such peer
pressure would not be much effective if the elders
programed their wards correctly and firmly. Parents
would be well-advised to pay full attention to the
nurturing of their children, particularly in the
impressionable age, on healthy and virtuous values.
- arifhussaini@hotmail.com
