I am gay. Lets not beat around the bush with this sentence. There are many incidences where people I meet talk to me about how being gay shouldn’t be important in the larger scheme of things, how I should pay more give more credence to the fact that I am of a different sexuality than what is considered the norm. I was a teacher, I am an editor now. I love reading, writing, photography, sketching, graphic designing, blogging, watching movies, et cetera et cetera – That is all well and fine, but I have to mention this fact: being gay has shaped my life, it has manifested itself in my choices, my fears, my hopes and my loves.

Being gay has made me see life through a perspective that I would not otherwise have had. It’s not a cliché you see, it has made me evolve as a person who appreciates differences and who realises that it does take all kinds of people to make the world.

I grew up in a lovely suburb of Mumbai called Bandra. I was surrounded by a joint family who sheltered my childhood. My dad is an alcoholic and never kept a job a few years since after my birth, so essentially, my mother was a single parent who provided for both my sister and me. Since we were in a joint family, I was adequately shielded from the blusterings of my father. Again, it was somewhat of a cliché that I had no great male role models to look up to, my family was dominated by hard working women, who loved and battled through life valiantly. Quite the amazon society.

I remember falling in love with Superman when I was five. Christopher Reeves, to this day, happens to be someone I moon over. I never knew why I liked him, perhaps it was the super powers, perhaps it was the eyes and the smile and the hair – oh, you get my drift. But five was too young for me to identify what I felt.

I vividly remember the phase of me wanting to wear make up, and women’s clothes. In my head, I had no real male model to look up to, I just had these wonderfully strong feminine personalities at home. The ones who dressed up in flowing saris, applied lovely make up, were fragrant and who handled the running of the household diligently – from my grandmother, to my aunts, to my mother. So if I wanted Superman, I had to be Lois Lane.

But it was more complicated than that. I yearned for male role models. I didn’t really know how to assimilate into ‘boy culture’. I thought cursing was wrong, I was never interested in sports. I loved reading and watching movies was a passion. I was a good looking child, but I entered my teens in the typical dork phase. I had glasses, I was as skinny as a twig, and I walked with a swish. I didn’t really think it was all that bad until my mom decided she had had enough of my dad and took us to a new home which she had bought out of her savings. I was thirteen.

At that time, I didn’t understand her reasons. I was taken from the sheltered atmosphere of a joint family and thrust into a home which was in a distant place that was the opposite of Bandra. From a household that was filled with people, I, most times, found myself alone throughout the afternoons and evenings. School life became a disaster.

Mom shifted me into a new school closer to home and it was definitely not the kind that I was used to. I went from an all-boys school to a co-ed school (where the boys and girls sat in different rows) and I remember the first day I went to class. The teacher present there asked me to sit with the girls. I had to stand up in front of the whole class and claim that I was a boy. I still remember the laughter. I began figuring out then that I was truly an oddity.

It was during that school year that I realised that boys were both cruel and considerate. Bullying happened with name calling, but mostly, it was laughter that I heard all the time, at my expense. How I spoke, walked and excelled at studies were all fodder for student jocularity. I remember two boys being interested in taking care of me, they were both brothers. Each would be nice to me and talk to me and I, being starved for friendship, spent a lot of time around them. When they began asking me sexual favours, I didn’t understand it at first, and soon enough, I began avoiding them. My upbringing was such that sex had never really crossed my mind and having any sexual act seemed like a very bad idea at the time.

Around this time, my mom and dad had a reconciliation of sorts and he came to live with us. Promises of being better fell through quicker than a castle of cards under a strong breeze. He would be lying drunk at home when I returned from school. My first exposure to straight porn was it playing on the telly when I returned from school, while he lay passed out on the couch.

My father and I never had a healthy relationship, to say the least. I used to ache for a kind word to pass his lips, a shoulder I could use to lay my confused thoughts on, some guidance, some support… but that was not to be. In fact, since he and I were alone most times through the afternoons, he would deliberately pick on me. Some trivial reason would be used to pick a fight, and that would eventually lead to physical assault. He would bang doors, rail abuses, and eventually, all of it led to me retracting deeper into insecurities dealing with myself.

In the late 80’s, the only recourse I had to knowledge about what I wanted to know about sex was books. So I dived into those worlds right then. I remember reading The Lord of the Rings and wondering how lucky Frodo was to have Samwise – and how awesome it would be to have Gandalf the Grey for a dad. I immersed myself so deeply into other imaginary worlds that I found deep seeded solace in them. I didn’t want to face the real one. Each time I would think of school, I would get (what I know now) a panic attack. Mom and her parents thought I just didn’t want to go to school and play hooky. So, many times, I was forced to. I remember blacking out on my way down the stairs and a neighbour finding me on the stairs and bringing me home. Eventually, I begged my mother to have me admitted to another school. She agreed.

I went to a new school for my ninth and tenth grades. Nothing really changed. I just had to go through the fitting in process all over again. I thought I would have a chance to have a brand new experience, a fresh start. I had surmised that I was different, and differences aren’t accepted in the world, especially one dominated by teens. So I tried to be more ‘normal’. It began well, but eventually I was singled out as an oddity within a week. Differences cannot be hidden: another lesson I learnt. Teenages sniff them out like bloodhounds on the trail of a wound. I was isolated again. I did make one good friend in those two years of schooling. One friend who helped me through, without really knowing that he was somewhat of an anchor through six hours each day. His name was Anand Aithal.

By this time, I had delved into so many books, I began understanding the concept of sexuality. I remember one book that opened my mind completely about sexuality and how it occurs within different people. I chanced upon Nancy Friday’s Men In Love in the local library. The fantasies I read there were eye openers, literally. I began to  see the world differently and also realised things about myself. Why I was so different and that I wasn’t really alone in the world – there were others like me who felt and hurt and fantasized.

It was also during that time, I began understanding that I was sexually interested in boys. I developed a crush on the head prefect of the school. He was tall and handsome and the girls (and I) mooned over him. I never really spoke to him, and he never really noticed me. To this day, I remember standing in assembly lines and watching the back of his head. I’ll also never forget the time he spoke to me. It was at the very end of our schooling years. The farewell party, which is the equivalent to Prom, where he and his friends called me over to say hi. I went. He handed me his food plate and asked me to just hold it while he returned after getting a drink. He left me standing there with his plate and he never came back. It was a small thing, a joke, meant to be laughed off, but I still remember how it made me feel then.

Junior and Senior years in India are termed as Junior College years. Apparently I did not outgrow or outmaneuver my oddity, when I joined college. I easily got admission to the college I wanted to attend, I had no problem in deciding which stream I would like to be educated in. I loved studies. However, I did not care much for being excluded by my peers. I inevitably was. Maybe I was just a geek, but one incident reminded me that it wasn’t what I wore or how I looked that made me face the brunt of ridicule.

It was a day, when boys and girls send candy to each other with notes, dedicating the sweets to the ones they cared about. The felicitations were being read out in an Economics class. I heard my name being read out, and a tittering followed. Apparently, I received a bunch of sweets from an unknown admirer, who happened to be male. The messages that were read out were not affectionate, or laced with admiration or ardor. They were meant to humiliate and deride. I bore the recitations remarkably well, smiling frozenly; inside, all I wanted was to run out of that class room. Later, as I walked out of class, the class representative strutted up to me and asked me, “Harpreet, are you gay?” I looked him in the eye, and countered, “Why? Are you asking me out on a date?” He walked away, and I remained standing.

I think that was the turning point for me. I never gave in after that and I walked ahead and through the people that bothered me.

It was in the course of this year, when my mother asked me one evening, if I was gay. I wanted her to know how I felt about boys. I wanted her to accept me for who I was. My father certainly was not about to do so. She was all I wanted approval from, if I had her on my side, all of the pain I had gone through would just be a memory. I wouldn’t have to carry it like a burden. So I would talk to her about the boys I liked, and one boy in particular, who I had a thing for. She noted that I talked of him incessantly, and so she was prompted to ask me about my sexuality.

Coming out is a process for some, for some it happens on the spur of the moment, for some it never manifests. For me, it was a process. Through the years, I didn’t even realise it but the way I was prepared her. Ultimately, when she wanted it said, she asked me. I would have told her myself if she would not have asked me, but since she did ask, I merely replied with a “ yes, ma, I am.” She nodded her head and continued cooking. I don’t really know what went through her mind at that point. I didn’t ask. I let the topic be. I knew she needed time to process the information, and she took a couple of months. But she never asked me to change, she never asked me how or why. She just accepted it, quietly and gracefully.

Backed by this feeling of hope, I grew into my own when I got into Degree college. In great part, I found pleasure in the subjects I chose to major in. Sociology, Psychology and English Literature became strong supports and by the time, I reached my final year, I had a group of friends I cherished. I stopped thinking about why I wasn’t accepted by guys and I just went with the flow and became friends with those who wanted to know me more. I met my best friend around that time, and to this day, she remains my bestie.

I think the highlight of my final year was when I wrote and directed a play with my entire class being a part of the production. The English Literature department supported the endeavour and in the first half of the play, I had boys dress up as girls and vice versa. Everyone agreed to do so and for me that was a coming around full circle. In the first half, one of the parts I played was of the character of Cleopatra meeting up with Shakespeare, played by one of the girls. I still remember working hard on the costume and my mom helping me out with it. When I walked on to the stage in front of an audience that was filled with my peers, I was a nervous wreck. The moment I stepped on there, there was a collective gasp from the audience and then the room resounded with applause. I was no longer the boy who wanted to fit in, if I didn’t fit in, it was no longer a problem for me. paradoxically, it made no problem to the people in the audience as well.

Then, I avidly set about looking for other gay people. Up until my 20^th year, I had not met a single gay person. I hunted for clues, and I found the name of a person who ran a gay magazine in my city. I found out his number and called him, but he was too busy to speak to me and suggested I visit his office and subscribe to his gay newsletter. So I did that. And I found a classified section in it. I decided to put up my advertisement in it. I had no other alternative back then. Today, things are easier with social media and telephones and computers.

to be continued…