Queer is normal – Payal Dhar’s Eternal World

“Well, irrespective of what anyone says,” said Noah, “Stephen’s family consists of Jan. All right? Stephen and Jan.”
[13 year old] Maya digested that. “Stephen and Jan?” she repeated. “Are you sure? They’re always fighting”.
“Absolutely sure. They’ve been together for twenty-five years or so
[…]
“I mean”, said Maya thoughtfully, “like, are you sure? That’s a funny kind of family.”
Noah shrugged. “There are all sorts of families. Parents and children, husband and wife, brothers and sisters, friends. All sorts.”
“Oh”, said Maya. “I thought you had to be related.”
“You do. You relate through love and responsibility, and a commitment to take care of each other.”
Maya nodded reflectively. “Stephen and Jan” she said. “That’s good. I like them both”.

Now, you may not be one of those people who like to read fantasy fiction. But I am. I read a particular kind of fantasy fiction – mostly written by women and preferably with leading female characters. The kind that has witches and wizards and dragons and enchanted things and different worlds. Nothing gory or bloody. Basically, books that my friends’ children would read.

I read them mostly because I lurve these alternate worlds of magic and colour; it is a kind of utopia for me. But I am also interested in how fantasy fiction is written. And while I read, I keep an eye out for characters that are not resoundingly straight. Recently, I re-read A Shadow in Eternity, The Key of Chaos and The Timeless Land – a set of books written by Payal Dhar – and was again struck by how simply and sweetly she has introduced a gay relationship and a non-homophobic world to her young readers. It is ingenious because there is no sudden and didactic introduction of homosexuality into the story and no admonitions to refrain from stereotypes or name-calling.

Instead, what you find is a gradual unraveling of how Jan shares life and home with Stephen, Maya’s Healing teacher and Noah’s friend. We, along with Maya, see the two men cooking, sharing household responsibilities, arguing about life, and caring about each other and the people around them. It is the only family shown up close – other than Maya’s own – and the most ‘normal’. And Maya gradually (and sometime after the conversation quoted above) understands and is told about the relationship between Stephen and Jan.

Gay characters are not unknown in this genre of writing, though queer female characters are rare. Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Trudi Canavan’s The Black Magician Trilogy are two other instances that come to mind. Maya is an inhabitant of both our world and the Eternal World and there is much interaction between the two worlds. This is different to Le Guin’s and Canavan’s alternate worlds which are very different to our world in geography, climate, customs, etc. The similarity and interaction between our world and the Eternal World normalizes different romantic relationships to the Maya and the reader. The acceptance accorded to queer relationships is highlighted by the questions that Maya asks because of her own realization that it is not possible ‘back home’, which is a successful literary device in this instance. Jan and Stephen stand out for me because they don’t stand out in the story.

Two worlds, three women

1.
When I was younger I was married for around six or seven years. I remember this as being one of the happiest times of my life, for three reasons. One was because the man concerned was an unusual one -talented, confident and quite comfortable with himself -a rare characteristic as far as Sri Lankan men go. The second thing was that for the first time in my life upto then, I was comfortable with myself. And finally the fact that for the first time in my life upto then, other people were comfortable with me.
Life as a queer woman in Sri Lanka, I find is a completely different experience. I am very used to feeling like the weird person in the room since childhood, since that is how I have always been. But being queer in Sri Lanka is a whole different level of weird. So many doors are closed to you, so many things you don’t say to so many people, (often the ones you’re closest to), and so many, many, many things you just don’t DO.
There are places one avoids, conversations one edits, dreams that one abandons, all because you know that for so many people, knowing exactly what and who you are would be just too much to handle. These are the two worlds that many of us inhabit – straight and queer. And still for its difficulties and trials, I know where I belong.

2.
I had girl friends before and after I had boyfriends. Boy friends were uncomplicated. So uncomplicated that I managed two at a time. I was doubly spoilt, taken out to nice restaurants, shown off and generally proudly paraded to friends and family.
With girl friends it’s always been hidden. Never met the parents, never taken home, never invited to dinner with family and rarely taken out.
Yet if you ask me now why I choose secrecy over acceptance I would say “to be myself”. With women I am me, not pretending to be someone I am not, just to please him or his family or just to save face. With women I can be that dark and dirty secret that lives in a closet – but that closet is my own and dark and dirty can be exciting!

3.
In school, for a long time, I was one of a handful of girls in the class who didn’t have a boyfriend. I would either be surrounded by discussions of how some adolescent male looked, touched, gave letters or arranged a secret meeting on the way to tuition classes with my classmates. Or I would have to listen to prim and snooty comments of ‘we’ were much better than ‘those girls’ who had boyfriends. I didn’t want to be in either group. Then in my early twenties, I had an intensely boring and terribly depressing relationship with a man for too long.
Life was much easier, though. It didn’t even occur to me that there would be a time when I would look wide-eyed at how joyfully people around me would greet news of upcoming weddings. Or that I wouldn’t be able to hold hands in a restaurant with the person I love. Or edit certain parts of my life when talking about myself. Or that half the family – the half that had tedious marriages and lackluster lifestyles – would be talking about me in horrified tones. When you are straight, you take these things for granted. I only had one complaint.
Men just didn’t work for me. Nothing to do with lesbian tendencies in denial. The men I was with blamed it on a home with ‘too much’ independence and an education that was ‘too feminist’. With women, my world fits together nicely.

Everyone wants to be a lesbian

So what’s going on with all these men pretending to be lesbians online? Like we don’t have enough trials of our own to be going on with, now we have to spend time trying to figure out if that increasingly interesting online chat is being conducted by some hairy fat man in a vest with a good line in conversation and nothing better to do with his time.

Like we’re not all paranoid and defended enough as it is. It’s enough to make one want to give up on the internet altogether, I tell you. After all, there are loads of us, who like many in the mainstream world of online chat, have much deeper and more intimate relationships with our online lovers than any we do in ‘real’ life. It’s one of the few spaces we can feel alone, intimate and unobserved, especially if you’re queer and live in this particularly bigoted region of the world.

So what the fuck? Last week we followed with increasing interest, the story of a blog that we carry on our links which seemed to reflect many of our own anxieties and fears – the story of a young, lesbian activist being threatened and finally kidnapped in Syria. The discovery that the blog was written by a ‘middle-aged, married American man’ aroused varying emotions across the homosexual world, ranging from outraged fury and paranoia, to amusement.

Later the same week, Paula Brooks, executive editor of the US-based lesbian and gay news site LezGetReal, was exposed as being a fake identity created by Bill Graber, who now says he is a 58-year-old from Dayton, Ohio.

Eek.

So who else is out there, (presumably) hiding from his wife, scratching his balls and busily typing away?

And why? What is it about our poor persecuted demographic that makes men want to BE us? We already know that most straight men’s top fantasy is to watch and/or participate in a lesbian encounter and we find that creepy and humiliating enough. And while we’re all for freedom of speech and would be the first to support great fiction writing, this weird and deliberate deceit of gullible women (never mind the general public and the damage done to the queer cause everywhere), ends up being just another sample of male arrogance and entitlement .

Becoming normal

A friend living in a Scandinavian country recently told me of his difficulties in locating and meeting other gay people to hang out with. It is so normal to be gay in that country, he said, that they are difficult to find.

I found this highly amusing. What would happen, I wondered, if we actually became so normalized that we would disappear into the woodwork? Would we feel less special?

Lost in a crowd

I imagined life where you just walk into a pub with friends, queer or straight or whatever, and just have a ‘normal’ time with no complaints about people staring. Your commitment ceremony or marriage evokes the same tediousness as does your straight friends getting married now. Your queer friends have babies and you forget to visit them till the baby’s first birthday. You hold hands in public with your girlfriend and no one gives a fuck! There are few gay bars and not many gay parties (not secret anymore either), there is no need! Finding out if film stars are gay never occurs to you and coming out is a quaint thing that previous generations used to do.

Somehow, I can’t imagine my community of gay men and women enjoying that much normalization.

Amina has been kidnapped!

     

This is outrageous.

Syrian blogger Amina Abdallah kidnapped by armed men.

Author of A Gay Girl in Damascus had shot to prominence for her frank views on Syrian uprising, politics and being a lesbian…

Note: there is now discussion on the identity of Amina and whether the blog is fictional. See the Guardian and New York Times articles on this.

The sucking sound of lips

“I leap to attention an inch from her face”

“the sucking sound of lips on lips, with saliva exchanged”

“she entered the cinema and felt a line of current run through her body”

Once you’ve read Rajpal Abeynayake and A.S.H. Smyth on Blue, there really isn’t much more to say. Sri Lankan English writing is generally amateurish and there is no reason to expect anything radically different from this. There are a few interesting stories in it – Marti’s and Ameena Hussein’s stories for instance. But beyond that, the critics’ views hold hold true. We can’t be expected to like anything and everything in the name of erotica and there is a reason why sites such as Writing World and The Erotica Readers and Writers Association give you advice on writing erotica.

From a queer perspective, however, Blue is interesting – it is the first time that a number of queer short stories have appeared in a collection of Sri Lankan short stories. In a collection of about a dozen short stories, four stories bring us sex between women and one describes a sexual encounter between men (albeit one very young one). Even if you consider Blue only as “fiction” and ignore the “erotica” side of it, this is significant in the Sri Lankan context, because queer desire is represented rarely in literature.

Whatever its literary merit (or paucity of same) it also raised a discussion on the nature of erotica as a genre. I have heard various questions consequent to Blue: is erotica the same as porn? Is erotica as explicit as porn? Should erotica have a storyline? All I can say is that I need a lot more sex, a lot less purple prose, a lot more finesse and a lot less description of the setting for it to be erotica.

‘Scorching’ the publishers claim it to be. The wrong adjective I think.

We’re back!

We’re back! And we’re sorry we’ve been away for so long. As you must have realized, our posting has dwindled over the last few months and has now come down to zero. That’s because we’ve all been caught up in the demands of work and home and have had no time at all to write.

But rejoice, devoted readers, we are back! We’re planning to get right back into the groove and start posting regularly again. Please send comments and critiques and most of all, keep reading.

Where is Amina?

One brave blogger has been telling her story of life as an openly gay woman in Damascus, Syria. But now she’s gone underground.

http://damascusgaygirl.blogspot.com/

Coming out…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/13/dear-mariella?INTCMP=SRCH

THE DILEMMA:I used to think I was close to my twin sister. However, six months ago she got in touch with me on a social-networking site and said she was a lesbian and didn’t love her husband any more. I flipped out – mainly out of shock, but also anger. She refuses to go to counselling. At Christmas she and her husband “split up” and she moved in with my parents for all of three hours before going back to him. He is a solid guy and knows all about her supposedly being a lesbian, but is standing by her. I guess she still wants to be with him. I feel hurt and feel like I’ve lost my best friend. I’m just wondering how I can ever get my sister back, or do I have to accept she is now a stranger who I perhaps didn’t know anyway?

I read this letter (and the reply) in the Guardian recently and was struck by the issues that are raised when a member of the family decides to come out as gay. All my gay friends have stories about this traditionally life-changing moment and most of their stories are positive….in the end. Over time, most families realize its not going away, and simply give in, either embracing it all or just not talking about it at all.

I remember trying to tell my supposedly liberal and highly educated family of brothers and sisters, that I was a lesbian. One of them immediately blocked it out and pretends even now that she knows nothing about it; one of them tried manfully to talk about it but later started to avoid the topic and the third is now known to have worriedly discussed it with a friend saying “I think something must be wrong with her.” (My parents, fortunately for them perhaps, are dead)

Luckily my siblings and I don’t live in the same countries so I don’t have to deal with their reactions to my lifestyle very often. I know who I am and what I feel and this is not going away to suit anyone. I sometimes wonder how such intelligent people could be so retarded about an issue like this, in this day and age…but that’s how it is.

http://www.oberlinlgbt.org/bechdel/bechdel-1.html

I’ve just bought a pink T-shirt

I’ve just bought a pink T-shirt but I’m worried it might make me look a bit, ahem, gay and give off the wrong signals. What do you think?

(Name withheld)

You know, I really gotta hand it to homophobes: they sure do think they’re hot. The rest of us, I feel, go through life thinking that maybe we’ll catch a few friendly glances coming our way. Homophobes, on the other hand, seem to believe that they are so irresistibly attractive that every gay person of their gender wants to jump their bones, given half an opportunity and a public toilet for privacy. Maybe it’s because these homophobes get so few offers from the people they do want to attract that they assume theirs is a face that appeals more to the other side, so to speak.

There was a simply marvellous quote in a New York Times piece recently about whether gays should be allowed to be open about their sexuality in the military issue, or whether America should continue to deny a group of people a basic human right and instead make them feel ashamed of themselves by suggesting there is something perverted about them when they are giving up their lives to defend their country. But I digress. The reporter spoke to one soldier who said that no, he didn’t want gays in the military because he was worried about being “approached”. That this young man, as he conceded, had never been “approached” in his life – by a man or woman, one suspects – did not lessen his concern. After all, he was just so hot, despite his eyes being – one imagines – ever so slightly too close together.

Name withheld, I’m guessing these are the, ahem, signals you are, ahem, fearing. Well let me assure you: that you are even worrying about looking, ahem, gay, proves that you have neither the wit, nor intelligence, nor style to accomplish such a feat. Look gay? You wish.

Ask Hadley