When you are living in a very heterosexual community, it is the strangest (and sometimes most comical) experience just coming out?
Like that joke for Bend it Like Beckham:
"Get your lesbian feet out of my shoes."
Old Indian Aunty replies "No, no. She's not lebanese"
Okay. So it sounds funnier with an Indian accent. But just this alone highlights a real issue.
It's not the coming out and rejection alone that is scary and hurtful, it's the fact that some of the older generation do not even comprehend the concept of two girls sleeping and living together like 'husband and wife'. I mean if it is not for the lustful desires of the maharajas, why else would you do it right? For love? Huh? Impossible!
And so on and so forth. So it's a really arduous journey characterized by intense emotions, just trying to explain the whole concept of lesbians to older folks. Sometimes I think they purposely act blur cause we all now that Denial and Ignorance is the first thing we learn after the word 'Amma(Mother)'in the Indian cultural group - In which ever continent or country you are at.
But what about friends?
My girlfriend recently was a little scared of telling her old friend from Hindi school that she was lesbian. Of course, the good friend also knows me as her 'friend' and is totally cool with me. So she was like struggling to message her and of course, at the end of it all the usual happened - The friend have had a hunch and she's happy and we're like one big happy family.
Then I ask myself. Why are we like flipping nervous out of our mind to just tell a friend that we're gay? Why are we so hesitant to come out to friends? Will they really leave us and seriosly at the mid twenties and do we have the time or the energy to bother?
Is it maybe because, on a subconscious level, we are thinking we are doing something wrong by being gay?
It's something we need to ponder ourselves cause if we don't accept ourselves, it wouldn't matter even if the world accepts us. And I don't know about you guys, but everytime I get accepted by an Indian person, it makes me more comfortable with being gay. Maybe in a very warped way, I believe all Indians are related and this Indian accepting me means a 'family member' has accepted me? And thus, slowly I feel that my parents would as well.
It sounds like the kind of thinking that might lead to suicide right? *shudder*
Oh well, I guess coming out to homophobic Indian friends is sort of the testing ground for bigger battles to comes. So I shall take on one Indian friend as at a time.
To slowly change the world.
