Category: I Am

I have been sitting here, at my computer, reading messages coming to and fro from friends, people who used to be friends, family and wondering what it means to be a part of a community. Over the years, this sense of community has changed. I began life as a Sikh boy, loved by the women in his family, and probably, one male who happened to be my paternal uncle. I didn’t realise it then but the lack of male affection would play a large part in my psycho-sexual development. Family then was made up of these strong, Amazonian women – much like on the island of Themyscira. Loved and nurtured and protected.

Realising I was gay was not a gradual process, probably one of semantics; but never of nature or impulse. Sometimes, I wonder if life would have been simpler, if I would have been able to be sexually driven towards the opposite sex. Who knows? I sure as hell grew up with a very comprehensive knowledge of the workings of women. But hold on, I must correct myself, straight women. Because we all have breeds and distinctions, Lucy Davis, of course is very different from, say, Antiope. I have been rapped on the knuckles for not seeing that difference as a difference, very recently. I shall acknowledge and accept the difference, for straight men are quite different from gay ones.

I will however, be speaking my mind here and people who think that I am being politically incorrect and/or disrespectful can keep their thoughts to themselves. There are just about so many arguments that one can bear regarding martyrs and their complexes. But I digress and this is the last simile to an apology that I will be professing.

So, straight people are different from gay people. Naturally. We have our own problems. Then there are communities within communities. Let me just talk about the gay ones. We have a whole plethora of them. Each having their own issues and their own journeys. I begin by taking on the victim complex myself, hell, if you got things to cry and rant about, Let me partake in similar masochism. Or is it sadism? Who can tell the difference these days?

I learned that every path of every human being is their own and no one, no one gets to judge that. I learned this while being beaten by my father. I learned this when I was ostracized from groups who wanted to play games. I learned this when vendors would grab my arse because it had a swing in it when I was younger. I learned this when I learned to remove that sway from my arse and walk ‘how men should walk’. (No one pointed out how men should walk though – there were variations there, too.) I learned this when I saw how men treated men, women treated women, men treated women, women treated men, children treated children, and – well, you get the gist. Humanity sucks.

The third gay man I met broke my heart. I mean, all of you who have had your heart broken, and that’s one claim that everyone knows how to make, know how that can suck. The group that helped me, the only one that did, and I did reach out to the one already known, was the one that was just forming. Its first hundred members then. They helped. They helped by being there. By bringing a shattered self-esteem back, bit by bit, a kind word, a compliment, a pass and laughter. There was a lot of laughter back then. A lot of it. Sigh.

It had its first drag party in ’98. Everyone dressed up in drag. Even from the group that had let me down, they were there, too. Everyone knew how to adjust – or was I too young to notice what was happening, too ignorant of innuendo and malice? Or maybe too blind to what humanity has always been capable of? All said and done, I believed I had found a place to be and grow.

I did grow. I found love. I found company. Friends. I found that my family was a brilliant family and they had a place in this new-found company that eventually became family, too. When I had a heart break again, it was not as severely felt because I had so many shoulders to lean on and so many other avenues to which I was brought into.

Lights fade. Fights happen. There comes a time when even Frodo refuses to drop the Ring into the flames. And you go, “what the fuck?!” I realized that money matters to a lot of people. I realized that money does make the world go around. And in reality, the Ring does win. Human beings can be capable of the most terrible horrors. Rods in vaginas, puppies been thrown from buildings, infants being raped, homosexuals being tied to fences and left to the elements, friends turning on each other for profit margins, families breaking apart over property and again, money.

Time wore on, relationships I had hung my faith on, shattered. Ultimately, faith, itself, shattered. I began seeing the world askance, away from the rose tints of equality. There was no such thing as equality. So, I turned to diversity. The thing I so unwillingly mention in the first paragraph itself. Straight women are different from gay women, gay boys are different from straight boys. Well, huzzah, for diversity, huzzah for all the colours in the rainbow. Somewhere over the rainbow remains a song, I don’t think the somewhere is the destination, Dorothy had it right: we aren’t in Kansas anymore. (Thankfully?)

I stuck to ideals for a couple of decades. You know the spiel: loyalty, fidelity, honour, code, right, left, yada yada yada. When I hit my late thirties, I realized that it’s all a crock to bring about some mimicry of civility, an act in which you can either gain thunderous applause, or get booed off stage – either way, you go back to your dressing room and rub the make-up off and go back to a bed, misunderstood and spent.

You see, the people who said you could look to them for help, turned their backs. The ones who said you were good enough, found other people who were better. The ones you sheltered in your home, offering them food, and solace (don’t forget the fucking solace), said that they never needed you, in the first place. They didn’t know what they were thinking back then. But, fucktards, if you could think, and decipher your cock from your arsehole, you wouldn’t have needed me to point the two apart, would you have? You can’t blame me for pointing to your cock, if you don’t have it now, can you?

I was thinking in the depths of what now appears to be nothing where there was a facsimile of a soul leaves much to be desired in the constraints of action. Everything has become a little worse than Death. When mom faced cancer, we strove against it. But what do you know, there are things worse than Death. For all those naysayers and peeps who talk about how Padmavati didn’t need to walk into a pyre, don’t really know what they are on about. The Nazgûl exist. The blades, they pierce virtue with, exist. The wounds they leave behind exist. There is no Glorfindel to carry you over the Bruinen. The real fuck up is that Valinor doesn’t exist. Frodo, in this day and age, is essentially fucked. All that’s left to him is to become Gollum – look out, here comes the video game.