Viraj's Blog

First (non-LJ/emo-annoying) blog entry. This is a freewrite paper I wrote earlier this year after seeing John Manzon-Santos' lecture, entitled “AIDS to Zen-”AIDS and Human Rights within the Asian American LGBT Community". I was supposed to write a "brief summary" while focusing on "south asian male masculinity"...this is what ensued.

Manzon-Santos constructed his lecture into three distinct “acts”, as he called them- (1) Stigma, (2) Primacy of Values, and (3) Reconciliations. While his lecture focused on his own experiences working in the nonprofit sector and raising awareness about members of the LGBT community who are afflicted with AIDS, I’d like to adopt his lecture structure and address both of these issues- the LGBT community and the AIDS pandemic- specifically in regard to the Indian American community.

The reason that I am not going to address the issue of AIDS awareness within the South Asian American LGBT community is because I feel that the issues separately have not been dealt with enough yet to logically lead to a strong movement that addresses the joint issue.

In my own experience, I have found that I have been raised in a much more conservative household than my family in India necessarily has- that is, my parents raised me with the values they learned in the 1950s and 1960s in India. They skipped the “westernization” of values that occurred in India during the latter part of the century. While this certainly isn’t to insinuate that the experience has been the same for all Indian immigrants coming to the USA after the Immigration Act of 1965, I have found in my own informal interactions that many of my peers have observed the same phenomenon. As a result, South Asian culture is often linked directly to a sense of what can only be crudely described as “prudeness”. To put it bluntly, people are afraid of sex. It’s something that I didn’t really start talking to my parents about until I was 20 years old, and that’s only because we watched a modern Hindi film that dealt with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. My parents never talked to their parents about it- it was just something they learned on their own, and they left me to do the same. This has also been the case with many of my friends- sex and dating are topics that are just never discussed within the home. On the other hand, I have seen a much different phenomenon in India itself- my cousins have all talked to their kids about dating and safe sex on their own since the schools don’t have a sex education program- but the topic still remains taboo within the Indian American community.

This can be best viewed through media representations. I’ll save the trouble of a laundry list of movies, but I watch my fair share of Bollywood (okay, I probably watch more than my “fair share, but we won’t judge.) and I’ve informally examined a lot of cultural practices through the Bollywood box office reports. I’ve observed that there’s a set of movies that are specifically targeted towards NRI audiences- they are the films with the biggest budgets, the biggest actors, and, most importantly, the least social commentary. The movies that are the biggest hits at the box office are the ones that are the least removed from reality- they don’t deal with actual issues and instead fill themselves with bubble-gum sweet love stories and song sequences in mountains. While there has been a notable influx in India of films being accepted by mainstream media that deal with “taboo” issues, the pattern has certainly not been carried over to the USA.

I’m going to use the case study of two specific films to talk about LGBT issues within Indian American culture. The first movie, entitled Girlfriend, was released in 2004. Bollywood’s first foray into lesbian culture, the movie tracked a young woman living in Bombay through her first year in college away from home. An ultra modern woman who cites American pop culture references and sports Gap clothing, she is the epitome of what women fantasize about being. She has a boyfriend, but one night at a party she gets drunk and sleeps with a woman- she realizes at that moment that she is a lesbian but tries vehemently to deny it. Two hours later, the film finally ends with the main character defiantly proclaiming “I am lesbian”…and then killing herself by jumping out of a window. Obviously, as the first mainstream movie to address the LGBT community, and since Bollywood is so synonymous with Indian culture, the movie insinuates that being a lesbian is somehow the antithesis to what it means to be Indian. This movie, despite its low production costs, ended up doing decently overseas and within India. Indian newspapers praised the film for branching out into previously unexplored territory and American reviews applauded its preservation of traditional ideology.

The other film, Honeymoon Travels, was released in 2007. The film, again set in India, tracks 6 couples on their own honeymoons. There is one couple who met only a couple weeks before and eloped- the woman is from India and the man from the USA. At the start of the film, the man still has not told his family about the marriage and, oddly enough, expresses much aversion to consummating the marriage while his new wife is ready to go. We learn later in the film that he is actually gay and that his family sent him to India to find a wife so that their community would stop scorning the family. However, in this film, the wife accepts her new husband for who he is. While they end up divorcing, they still remain close friends. The movie did quite well at the box office in India but completely flopped in the US.

There are a few comments to be made about this- the first is that both films present a common theme; that homosexuality is a direct outpouring of American/Western culture, and that was it not for this western influence there would be nobody from the lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender community in India. Indian culture (both in India and in the USA) still rejects Western culture and attributes these “undesirable qualities” to Western culture. In other films where Western culture is criticized, there has also been a recurring theme that suggests that “traditional Indian” culture will return to save them- but I’ll save that thesis for another paper.

These films, attributing “undesirable” qualities (in this case, having a sexual orientation that is not heterosexual) reinforce the conservative Indian American culture I mentioned earlier. The tradition of conservatism is toughened in the US- since popular media creates this fear of western culture, the “Indian” side is hyper extended to many of the 1.5 and 2^nd generation immigrant.

If it hasn’t come across, the point that I would really like to stress is that, in my view, to be Indian is often synonymous with being sexually conservative. As long as heterosexuality is associated with Indian-ness, the stigma associated with not just being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, but also as an ally, will continue. It has definitely been obvious to me that my parents are not comfortable with my identity as an active ally; while they haven’t forbidden me from embracing the identity of an ally, they are definitely averse to it.

Tying in very closely to this “conservative” mentality is also a fear of sex. Until very recently (within the last 3 years), films and other forms of Indian and Indian American popular media barely had a kiss, much less sex -or even insinuation of a sexual act. Again, the suggestion is that Indians don’t have sex because it is inappropriate. Indian films are all designed to be family films- there is no movie rating system and the movies are all multi-genre; they are meant to appeal to every demographic and also meant to be seen by parents and children at the same time. Therefore, movies aren’t going to have anything that parents wouldn’t feel comfortable watching with their children, and sex falls into that category.

When addressing the issue of the AIDS pandemic in Indian America, the first thing that must be addressed is the issue of safe sex- but here is where we run into a circular argument. In order to stop the spreading of AIDS, we must first acknowledge that people are having sex (and unprotected sex at that), which according to Indian American culture, is just not something that Indians should do. The people who do have sex (much like those who come out with their sexual orientation) are the “bad Indians”.

This is the situation now. Since the majority of Indian Americans in the United States are still only 1.5 or 2^nd generation, it makes sense that the old generation’s ideals are still being upheld. I certainly had many conservative mentalities before entering college. However, as I was forced into the University culture and I began to integrate into mainstream American culture, I was forced to question many of the maxims that I had been raised with. I began to realize what, culturally, was really preventing Indian America from progressing as a community. However, as I mentioned before, this phenomenon is not something that I have witnessed as unique to my own experience. Many of the youth in my generation have dealt with these same internal conflicts and have emerged much more willing to talk about these taboo topics. Essentially, I’m saying that there’s still hope for Indian Americans to realize and change these generational values. I do truly believe that with the generation of Indian Americans that follows heterosexuality and virginity will not be made synonymous with Indian-ness. With a reflection and redefinition of what it means to be Indian (or, rather, what constitutes a “good” Indian) can true progress, acceptance, and change occur.