C.M-S: How did you come to be involved with ILGA?
A R K: ILGA heard about us and started sending us bulletins. We knew that there was such an organisation but there was no way we could get in touch with them. They heard about our work from other Asian lesbian and gay groups, in Europe, London and America. That's why they started sending us stuff.

C.M-S: Many of our readers would be interested in the differences in ideas about love between men in Europe and Asia.
A R K: Love between men has always been known in Asia and thought to be superior to love between men and women because that seems to flow from a social obligation. You see most marriages in Asia are decided by families and not because a man and woman fall in love. Though the notion is fictionalised in romantic novels, marriage never takes place that way. It is mostly two families getting together, and not two human beings getting together. It has always been known therefore that a love between two men is superior to love between a man and a woman. Hence it has been often made a lot of in songs and movies. In Indian movies there is a recurring theme of two men deeply fond of each other, for example, but it seems to be a-sexual. Many gays and lesbians would like to look into what these sort of alliances are and when they turn erotic. But the fact remains, that there are many in Asia should prove two things. That there is an absence of homophobia and a refusal to discuss sexuality. (??) Out of this would come another corollary that is a logical argument -- that a large number of women and men are bi-sexual.

C.M-S: You have started a group in Bombay..?
A R K: Bombay which is the largest city in India now some 12 million people. Our group is interested mainly in empowering the lesbian and gay community to organise itself, to have an outreach programme to the gay and lesbian community, HIV and AIDS prevention, and generally to make our presence felt on the Indian social scene -- to have a higher visibility.

C.M-S: I heard you talking to some friends about some interesting aspects of sexuality and homosexuality in Indian history...
A R K: There is a shrine in South India, in Kerala, where the reigning Deity in the temple is a son of two male Gods, Vishnu und Shiva (He's also called Hari-Ara Gutra). Though the homosexual aspect is never mentioned the underlying mythology is always homosexual. For instance no fertile women may go there. This "dis-emphasises" the fertility of women. Virgins -- both men and women -- are allowed to visit the shrine. All men who visit the shrine must abstain from sex for at least a month before a pilgrimage there which draws more than five million people go there every year. This is just one example.

There are large sexual minorities in India -- the eunuchs, for example. This is why we have never used the word homosexual in our charter. We speak of "alternative sexuality". We need an umbrella organisation to unite all the groups of people who believe in an alternative sexuality.

In the great French and Russian revolutions you have lost the notion of alternative sexuality. The damage done is that in working towards a classless society. You have killed many other minorities. You have done away with many other minorities. A lost societies in Asia and Africa have inbuilt social inequity-- which we have to fight against, but we must also realise this has given time for a lot of other minorities to find their space. Now these minorities are under pressure because of industrialisation and the homogeneity which is imposed by industrialisation. Hence it is our duty to protect them -- just as it is our duty to protect minorities which not anti-social in content and are contented living peacefully within their environment without doing any damage. I would say that a great deal of homosexual and lesbian history has to be unearthed in India. The last point about this is that India is the only continuous civilisation whereas as ancient Greece has gone, ancient Mesopotamia, Persia -- all are gone along with ancient Egypt. There is a discontinuity there. In fact India is the only civilisation which has this continuity -- whether this continuity is good or bad is not for us to determine, but that it exists is something that the homosexual and gay and lesbian movements all over the world must understand and appreciate. There are layers upon layers of civilisation in the Indian sub-continent and there are fascinating things like lesbian and gay, homosexual temples which cannot, and should not be wiped away. I appeal to the lesbian and gay movements in Europe not to be so euro-centric because if we do not watch out within the next 50 years we will lose this tradition of homosexual and lesbian heritage that is there. This is part of the whole homosexual movement because we are a planetary minority. We have become a planetary minority. We have the resources, we have the skills to teach other minorities how not to get marginalised.

C.M-S: Could you relate something about yourself as an illustration of the life in India?
A R K: "Coming out" is for us a "ripple" effect. The basic problem in India is the strong family system which prevents you from coming out. Unlike Europe and America where the gay sons and daughters move out of families to seek a life of their own. In Asia we find that there is no existence for the individual, and we end up as the last children to stay with their parents. These are dialectically opposite notions of how we are prevented from coming out, any many times we are prevented from coming out. Coming out in the West it is a long process but you can imagine how difficult it is to come out to society in general. In my case it happened that I was to my colleagues in my office and I discovered that it was an empowering process, that they didn't care, and were in fact very helpful. Slowly but surely it became a process that I started coming out to the family. It was very uncomfortable in the sense that one of my brothers made it a question of principle and used it to break the family up. T he family has broken up. But the funny part is that my mother chose to come with me -- as the head of the family now that my farther is not living any more. She chose to come with me. That is a moral principle which has been won -- the acceptance of the gay son or daughter, grudgingly, but acceptance because we are the only ones who care about retaining family traditions. This is exactly the opposite of Europe where you move out. So maybe Asian gays and lesbians can teach European gays and lesbians what it means to continue the quality of family heritage. For instance, today the Asian lesbians are today fighting for the fact that they need their lesbian elder sisters so that they can learn tradition - traditional medicine -- it is still there in Asia. A great deal of lesbian history is already there and now they find that they don't have access to it if they are remote from the family. It is a great thing that we are learning a different way for what gay and lesbian and sexual liberation is all about.

I think there is a "Jing and Jang" principle in the world that the gay and lesbian, or sexual minority all over the world faces -- and you're going to find this increasingly so as we move into the very centre of the Judo-Christian origins like the west-Asian cultures. The very fact that homosexuality offers an attractive alternative life-style is what makes these elites fear. The fact that there is a homosexual alternative which is so attractive to Arabs, is why Arab countries are so afraid and suppress homosexuality with such brutality and insist on the dis-empowerment of women - to keep them as reproductive units. You see in the case of the Palestinians they are actually killing women who co-habit with Israelis. This seems to be the way Arab tradition is going, it is our job to tell these cultures that it is not going to work anymore. In this way we are also the harbingers of the feminist movement. We have to encourage tribal and ethnic minorities. I don't see why the tribes of Africa have to imitate westernisation in the name of modernisation.

There is a lot of talk about how HIV is spread because of the immunisation efforts of western missionaries in Africa. I would have thought that instead of doing that it would have been better to improve sanitation first. When the white man first went to Africa the "white man" had the book and the African had the land. But in modern times (now) the African has got the book and the "white man" the land !

This is something we homosexuals can point out to the Africans -- don't go through the usual routes of so-called modernisation because they have been tried. There are alternatives. Modernisation need not mean westernisation -- that is what we want to say in Asia.

C.M-S: Thank you for the interview -- under difficult conditions -- on a busy street.

Colin de la Motte-Sherman