Gays And Lesbians From Immigrant Communities Struggle To Establish A Space Of Their Own

Written by Sruthi Gottipati Saturday, 23 January 2010 07:09

New York City may be one of the world’s gay capitals, but life is not easy for many South Asians. Stigma about homosexuality runs deep, and most say they have to hide their sexual identity from family. Such intolerance comes despite legal strides back home. Nepal’s Supreme Court in late 2008 ordered the government to legalize same-sex marriage, and India decriminalized gay sex among consensual adults last July. But that doesn’t change the thinking of many parents.

Sadat Iqbal said he never planned to come out to his family. But then his father found the porn.

Iqbal, now 22, realized he was gay when just a child. As a curious ten-year old living in Queens, he surfed the Internet for sexually explicit images of men. A couple of years later, his father, a first-generation immigrant from Bangladesh, sensed something brewing and browsed through the computer. He confronted Iqbal about the graphic sites he found on Internet Explorer’s history.

“He told me to change this side of me, to tighten the screws in my head,” said Iqbal, his voice dropping.

From that moment, Iqbal said, he began to rebel by “acting out” and sneaking out of the house late at night. During one of his nocturnal escapades, he got mugged, and his parents had to fetch him from the police station. That left him even more conflicted than before.

“I felt isolated and alienated,” he recalled.

New York City may be one of the world’s gay capitals, but life is not easy for many South Asians. Stigma about homosexuality runs deep, and most say they have to hide their sexual identity from family. Such intolerance comes despite legal strides back home. Nepal’s Supreme Court in late 2008 ordered the government to legalize same-sex marriage, and India decriminalized gay sex among consensual adults last July. But that doesn’t change the thinking of many parents.

One 31-year-old gay Indian American living in Manhattan, who requested anonymity, spoke of a time warp in the mindset of older immigrants.

“Our parents retain a lifestyle and a culture that was prevalent in India before they immigrated, and they are therefore deprived of the natural cultural evolution that has happened in India since they left,” he said. He added that such parents often perceive a gay child as “corrupted” by Western values.

The man described coming out to his parents as “very difficult” since it meant talking about desire, a taboo topic in his household.

“I was mostly met with silence and lack of acknowledgement,” he said. “Much of the silence continues to this day, and it is the silence that is oppressive.”

With such attitudes, it comes as no surprise that many South-Asian gays remain in the closet, even with the relative anonymity of the Internet. For instance, on websites such as adam4adam.com, the graphic Facebook for gay men, most ethnic Asians are from the southeast portions of the continent. None of the online members contacted by this reporter knew of any South Asians in the community.

Iqbal said most gay South-Asian men in the city gravitate toward gay hangouts in the East Village and Jackson Heights in Queens. Many deem the established homosexual enclave of Chelsea as too “white bourgeois.” But Queens, home to many gays and South Asians — some six percent of the borough’s population is Indian-American — is not universally seen as an LGBT haven and has seen a spate of hate crimes in the past few years. The most recent attack was in October, when a 49-year old man was beaten into a coma by two local men who allegedly taunted him for his sexual orientation.

The large South Asian community in Queens, overall, has little tolerance for non-heterosexual pairings.

“This thing is completely against our religion,” Abdelghani Benyahya, an imam at the Muslim Center in Flushing, frequented by South Asians, said of homosexuality.

Other community leaders echoed such views.

“All this gay/ lesbian is not in any religion. All South Asians, whether Muslim or Hindu, are conservative, so they won’t mix with them,” said Vasantrai Gandhi, the chairman of Community Board 3 in Jackson Heights, an area that nonetheless two months ago elected a gay man, Daniel Dromm, to the City Council.

It’s not just in neighborhood activities that South-Asian gays lack visibility. Most of the organizations that appear during gay rights marches in New York City are largely white.

“As a person of color, that’s what pissed me off the most,” declared Iqbal, who added, “A lot of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people focus on only white, middle-class issues.”

In order to bring issues such as immigration reform to the forefront while enrolled at New York University, Iqbal became a leader of the Queer Union, the second-oldest gay student organization in the US.

South-Asian gays often attend the monthly Bollywood Dance Nights in Manhattan, organized by the event management company Sholay Productions. But support groups for South Asians are now gaining popularity as an alternative to the partying. The South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association of New York City (SALGA) organizes brunches, book readings, and discussion groups.

“Most people are looking for human warmth and contact, and don’t know how to express that besides sex,” Iqbal said.

Empathy, laughter, and gobi curry were the chief ingredients of a SALGA youth support group meeting in the West Village on a recent Saturday night. Rather than dance at a club, the group of five preferred to sit in a tiny room at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, sipping soda and chatting about their lives.

Monthly meetings of an older SALGA crowd can draw up to 30 people. Common topics include the pressure gay men feel to get married and how to come out to wives or at the workplace. Participants also discuss religious and cultural issues that pertain to gay South Asians.

“Being a minority within a minority can be very isolating,” said Aneesa Sen, 38, a SALGA support group coordinator. Several years back, she and her lesbian partner were spat upon by a Latino man on the subway. “I was shocked,” said the Indian-born Hindi language tutor.

Sen is now keenly looking forward to her new project. She’s starting a hotline in mid-January for South Asians who fear they will out themselves if they venture to meetings held in public places.

“Volunteers have been trained to handle the hotline, and we’re ready to take off,” she said. “This could be an important step for many gay South Asians.”