Tag Archives: bisexual

The Gender Closet

Gender_Trouble

Author: Anonymous from India

I was born in 1989. It was my first tryst with gender. I was my parents’ first-born. My father, unhappy with a girl child, refused to take my mother home. He came around eventually when I was about a year old, and never did he make me feel any less because of my gender. But years later, when I came to know of the agony and suffering my mother had to go through because of my father’s initial rejection of me (and of her), I was furious with him. I could never tell him that. My father passed away in 2002. I was thirteen then. As I have realized over the years, that was my second engagement with gender. Overnight, not only had I stopped being a child only concerned over report cards, sports, and being popular with friends, but I had also become the ‘son’ of the family. What that meant was that I had started making my own decisions and had an opinion of my own – qualities which, in an ideal world would be agendered – but in the world I inhabited, made me feel ‘like a man’. The artificiality and constructedness of gender roles would dawn upon me much later, thankfully not too late.

The Crush(es)

My first real crush was the neighbourhood ‘didi’. We had sleepovers, spoke into the night, exchanged stories of our everyday lives. Then there was this ‘best friend’ at school who I couldn’t stop talking to and thinking about. University changed my life in many ways. I fell in love with a friend who was (still is) heterosexual.  Another friend was in love with me as well. But the biggest change happened when a bunch of us opted for the Gender Studies course at University. New ideas were thrown up every day. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble made a lot of sense. My life started to make sense as well. I could articulate my thoughts on how looking at that heterosexual friend made me feel happiest, even though I knew she had a boyfriend.

Time Flies and How?

I had completed my Masters in 2011, and had been teaching at a college. I had attended a seminar where an acclaimed playwright was there to inaugurate some gallery on Indian English literature and interact with students as well. As the dramatist took the stage, I asked my professor who was sitting next to me, “Is the lady sitting in the front row his wife?” Astonished, said Professor turned to me, “He’s gay!” I was mightily embarrassed. I knew the dramatist’s plays spoke of homosexuality but I had never linked his art to his sexuality. I do not know what had changed but when I reached home that day I called up my professor and came out to him.

What followed was a long process of coming out to myself, coming out to three of my friends, coming out but scrambling back in when it came to telling my mother. We live in different cities now and I want to keep it that way.

I met someone last year, and we’ve been together since. Life is still complicated but I know where I stand. I identify myself as queer.

Dance Party Prayer

isloo-starsAuthor: Summer from Islamabad, Pakistan

It was when I was 14 and there was a dinner party at my house and I invited two of my friends from school and, as usual, we holed up in our room and danced to loud music while the grownups did their partying downstairs. And there was this moment: I was tired and out of breath, so I stood near the door watching the other two. And watching one of my best friends, I thought: Oh my God, she’s beautiful! She’s so amazingly beautiful and I love her so much.

And then I thought: Please don’t let me be gay please don’t let me gay please don’t let me be gay.

Twenty years later and I’m glad God didn’t answer that particular prayer.

A Scribbling Phase

dance floorPooh from Peshawar, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

A hot summer evening, a party, 2012: I was with the girls I love most.  My four best friends and I were partying when suddenly a girl, an acquaintance, asked me for my permission to be kissed. I completely refused. She insisted again and told me that this will not be on my lips. She lied, and I moved away.

I was there, sitting on a couch. And I realized something different. It was not love; it was not some magical feeling in my gut. It was a point when they show you in the movies with a swirly effect that one has a flashback.

–flashback–

I was engaged in 2009 to the man who proposed me and wanted to marry me. I had known him for quite some time. We were perfect.

We went out on our first date. He tried to hold my hand. I shivered and let go. I never felt attracted, I never felt at ease. The thing kept on, I cried every time he came near, and eventually we broke up in 2011.

No, being with a male person was not new to me. And I had been to co-education schools in Pakistan.

–reality–

I looked at all my friends, So many people on the dance floor. And I was trying to locate myself.

I tried being with men, but I do not understand. Why do I still remember a girl that I had met up and was with for 6 months in 2002 as much as I remember my ex-fiancé? Why was I more comfortable with her ? Why would her touch be more caring? I realized that although I had fun with male partners, I could not be very comfortable with them unless I was drunk. I did not want to see what was inside their pants. I do not know if that fear came from a sexually abused childhood or just that I was not in the mood.

I racked my brain for my entire crush list. Why had I always fancied men like Will Young and Gareth Gates and not men like John Cena? I had my answer: I was surely not straight. And that I was sinning.  Being bisexual was not very difficult for my close friends to accept, because most of them were queer or friends of queer.

But the thought of my newly Islamized family finding out scares me of the consequences, and what I fear the most is losing my right to an education.