Memoirs of a....Hindu Gay Man

In the beginning, there was nothing.  Or well, there might have been something.  But if there was, and whatever it was, it quickly became irrelevant.  What came after is the interesting part.  Because while everything started with nothing...from nothing came a lot of something.  Cells, fish, humans....Probably in that order.  But if you tend to think that the Big Bang came after Adam and Eve put one and one together (literally), then maybe not.

However, regardless of what happened even before humans...whether dinosaurs or dragons...what came from that nothing was a whole lot of...to put it kindly...Bull.  And I, like most members of my generation, and probably at least a dozen before me, was born with a thin layer of the BS covering me.  A veil of some sorts.  My geisha makeup of ignorance.

And while there are universal concepts of BS that we are fed from birth, there are some that I consumed due to being born into a "good South Indian Hindu family."  It took me a long time to figure out where I stood on lots of issues.  But at a younger age, I was most focused on how to live up to the standards and aspirations set by my parents. I was born with a never ending checklist next to my ear with little boxes that my parents could sorrowfully cross off or gleefully fill in with little stickers and smiley faces.

I don't know when I started seeing through the BS.  It might have been when one of my Indian friends told me that her mother had told her that SEX is what Americans did.

Exactly.

Because 1 Billion Indians, a thriving softporn industry, and the Kama Sutra have all resulted in the conclusion that Indians bear offspring by planting Harvard applications in the ground.  And then...out pops Dr. Ramakrishnamoorthi.

Perhaps the final step towards my self-discovery was telling my father I was a gay man.  A gay Hindu man.  In that second, I could see checklist on the side of my head burst into flames and disappear.  Marriage. X.  Children. X.  White Picket-Fence Life. X. 

There's a lot that I would have given in those moments to turn back around and just lie. To brush the whole situation off.  To believe his words.  That homosexuality, was simply a mental disorder.  An act of disobedience.  An act of one who lacks faith.  Or lack rationality.  Or lacks self-respect.

I had a new checklist that I was carrying, with all the blanks already filled.
Will never settle.  Check.
Has no faith in God. Check.
Will be promiscuous. Check.
Will have STDs. Check.
Has no respect for Indian culture. Check.
Totally Americanized. Check.

WHOA there!  Hold yer horses there cowboy!  Totally Americanized?  Then how about when the Texas GOP made a statement in 2010 itself that:

"We oppose the legalization of sodomy. We demand that Congress exercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy."

So what is it?  How can one group claim us to be too assimilated in a local culture when the local culture itself follows the "Smear the Queer" campaign.

And that's when I saw the light.

This had nothing to do with my religion or culture.
My nationality or my nativity.
My level of education or my IQ.
The number of beers it takes me to get drunk.

Open-mindedness and self-acceptance are not values and acts of one society in the world, nor are bigotry and forcible assimilation.  What makes me able to say I'm a proud gay Hindu man?  Or for that matter, a Christian gay man. Or Muslim.  Or even a woman who is pro-choice. Or a farmer who say he's opposed to the acts done at Guantanamo Bay. It is the idea of Liberalism.

Liberalism - A political theory founded on the natural goodness of humans and the autonomy of the individual and favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.

And a liberal I am.  And it's those things that do not promote these above values that hinder us from seeing family as family, but seeing children as strangers.  That make us think another man's God is our Devil.  That another man's joy is our pain.  That we can only succeed in life ONLY through our own values, through our beliefs, and through our way of living life....

That my friends, is that thin layer of Bull Shit over our eyes.

In ancient times, people in villages used to tell their children that the men of "other tribes" had feet that were backwards.  That they had no shadows, and had pointed teeth.  Some of them had no reflection.  Some drank goat's blood.  Some spoke only in howls.

Acts of unfamiliarity were used to help us not mistake foe as friend.  Today we use the same acts to make friend into foe. Brother into stranger.  Child into orphan.  Familiar into foreign.

No longer would we believe that the people who live in the next township eat the flesh of newborn babies.  And yet the same foreignness makes us say that Christians want to destroy society. Muslims want to bomb the planet.  Gays want to infect society with diseases.  Scientists want to burn our temples down. It's that lovely layer of BS that makes everything post- Big Bang so...interesting.  And yet, so pitiful. Pathetic.  And a real cause for us to shake our heads and say "tsk-tsk".

So I guess the Checklist still is there.
Hindu. Check.
American. Check.
Liberal. Check.
Bull-shit.  BIG X.