When Will We Win?
Cochin Herald|November - December 2016

Be More. Ask For More. Deserve More

Sreemoyee Piu Kundu
When Will We Win?

A few evenings ago, I met a gay friend, all of 30, for coffee, and as we got discussing our respective single lives in the bustling national capital of New Delhi, he mentioned, a note of bitter sweetness soaking his last words, how he was frequently propositioned for sex with single men in Delhi, who were horny as hell and literally could do anything for a blow job. What was surprising was that many of them wouldn’t want to reciprocate the same, insisting that they were ‘straight.’

I think of pleasure, its principles and how we are in complete denial of the fluidity between the sexes. I think of a very dear gay friend whose life was shattered beyond repair by his partner of over a decade who decided to marry and father children agreeing to obey his parents, never looking back, once. Or a woman whose story inspired Sita's Curse, Neeti from Jaipur, who at 17, was married to an impotent man fifteen years her senior, who practically raped her every night and forced her to watch porn, and paraded her to an aging Godman, to plant his seed in her womb, as a divine intervention. Her son is ten today. I wonder if Indian families are to be blamed for this stifling, stereotypical mindset conditioning or the hypocrisy that exists in society that places marriage at the center of heteronormative behavior. How conforming is considered safe, and the frightening weight we attach to relatives, neighbors, bosses, jobs and friends.

I think of men I have been romantically involved with my 20’s who could never tell their families about us, one of them once telling me that because my mother had remarried and my father was now a South Indian, that made us not the ‘usual family...’

This story is from the November - December 2016 edition of Cochin Herald.

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This story is from the November - December 2016 edition of Cochin Herald.

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