HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

[VOICES] Lisa and Jenni's global adventure to search out "Supergays" takes them to a royal audience with a Prince.

When Jenni and I first researched the idea for Out & Around, I googled “Gay Around the World” and came up with a video clip of Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil speaking on Oprah in 2007 about gay life in India. We found Prince Manvendra’s story so compelling that we built our entire project around trying to meet Supergays like him to inspire others. So, we were thrilled when we had a chance to meet him while he vacationed in Udaipur, India.

Prince Manvendra is the 39th direct descent of a 650 year old dynasty. He grew up in a palace with 200 servants and the pressure of an arranged marriage. After a divorce and a hospitalization due to a nervous breakdown, he chose to speak publicly about his sexual orientation with the hope of changing how his fellow citizens of India viewed homosexuality. His honesty with the public led his parents to publicly disown him and accuse him of bringing great shame to the royal family.

Yet, Prince Manvendra has thrived since coming out and reappeared on Oprah in 2011 to tell how his life has moved forward. He founded the Lakshya Trust which supports sexual minorities in India,  and he was a keynote speaker this winter for a symposium on gay tourism in India. In his state of Rajpipla, there is now a restaurant with out HIV positive employees, a Transgender Welfare Board, and plans for a retirement home for LGBT individuals (which Oprah promised to inaugurate next year).

Despite his stature in society, Prince Manvendra took the time to welcome us to his country. He noted the importance of “gay family” in his own life, and he invited Jenni and I to stay at his palace next time we travel to India. With such a royal invitation, we will be sure to return sometime soon!

Here is a little Q & A with the Prince about his work, dating, adoption, television appearances, and royal life….


O&A: What is the day-to-day life like for a Prince?
Prince Manvendra: The day-to-day life is a bit different than that of a commoner. We have a lot of responsibility over our shoulder to look after the interest of the people and the town. Though India is a democratic country now, there are a lot of people who depend on us for the welfare and development of the town.

When I am not working in my LGBT and HIV projects, I like to organically farm, breed earthworms, and teach yoga. I also pass a lot of time learning music. I’m learning the harmonium, a classical Indian instrument, and I give stage performances.

O&A: What do you enjoy most about your role?

Prince Manvendra: I’m proud that I’m born in the royal family. I enjoy a lot of privileges and respect. I love doing my job because today’s politicians are not following their roles. Most of them are corrupt. The people in our town look up to us in times of crisis. I try to carry out the duties of my forefathers in the past.

O&A: What’s it like looking back on your coming out experience?

Prince Manvendra: My main purpose coming out openly was that a) I wanted to break the myth that prevails in Indian society that homosexuality is a western influence b) that homosexuality only exists in the lower economic status and c) to improve education about HIV to reduce the stigma. I didn’t expect this matter to reach to Oprah; I expected it just to carry to national news. I created a big controversy in India because nobody from the royal family had come out and spoken so openly about one’s private life.


O&A: Who inspired you most to come out?

Prince Manvendra: There were a lot of people who inspired me. The most important person is (fellow Supergay) Ashok Row Kavi, my godfather in the gay family. He brought me away from the feeling of guilt and exposed me to the gay world. Being from the royal family, I didn’t have a chance to meet other gay men. I started working in Humsafar Trust and was trained as a counselor. Ashok introduced me to a lot of people working in HIV.

O&A: How has your life changed since coming out on Oprah?

Prince Manvendra: Oprah’s interview was the second turning point in my life. Her interview brought into limelight a lot of issues on homosexuality and HIV in India that was not known to the Western world. For example, one of the things that came out is that 85% of our gay men are married to women, most of them forcibly. Also, the world learned that homosexual acts were a crime in India [as of the 2007 interview]. This came out to the whole world and people gave me a lot of affirmation. I then received invitations from world leaders in Sweden, Brazil, Australia, and France and began to travel more.

O&A: Last year you were on a BBC reality TV show called Undercover Princes in which you lived a covert life as an ordinary person in England, holding down a job as a housekeeper and dating. What did you learn about yourself from that experience?

Prince Manvendra: It was a challenge for me. It gave me an opportunity to have a commoner’s life which I would not be able to do in India. I also wanted to try to find true love, which I had failed to find in India.

[In the royal family], love doesn’t come even within the family. There is a lot of formality existing between the children and the parents. We don’t even call each other by names because we are so formal. We maintain a distance. When the natural love is not formed even between a parent and child, you can imagine how hard it is to find love in other areas as well.

The TV show hasn’t been aired in India as of yet. The relatives of mine who have seen the show wished that I had not shared some of the royal secrets, but others have said it is important that it is shared so that people don’t think it is always so rosy.


O&A: So what’s it like to date now in India?

Prince Manvendra: There are a lot of gay dating sites in India. I use a site. The problem is that people don’t believe it is actually me. Whenever they see my profile and photographs they argue with me to take my profile down. They think I am a fake and ask me not to spoil the image of the prince they respect so much. I have a difficult time convincing them. They ask what I am doing on a website. And I say, “You forget. A prince is also a human being with the same emotions and desires. But if you don’t believe me, then God bless you.” But I am open to love.

O&A: Your mother publicly rejected you when you came out in 2006. What is your relationship like now?

Prince Manvendra: It’s the same. But one thing is for sure… she’s realized that she can’t make me straight. She’s lost all hope about curing me. She also doesn’t create any obstacles for me in my activism and HIV work. There are still a lot of misconceptions about how HIV is spread in my town. She had these ideas that I would get infected because I worked with HIV positive people, but now she has learned the basics.

A journalist asked me once how I felt when my mother disowned me. I told him that I felt that she never owned me. She never gave me the love and affection that a mother should give a child. So I have no regrets.

O&A: You’ve publicly announced that you plan to adopt a child in the near future?

Prince Manvendra: Adoption has been common in most royal families in India. The male is very important to carry on the family lineage. I made this announcement to answer the questions of the people in my town who are looking forward to the next in line. I have not yet reached the stage where I have taken action since my father still has the authority to make decisions. Once I take charge, than I will take over the decision about the adoption. It will be a full grown boy from the extended family itself.

O&A: Tell us about the HIV organization that you started in 2000.

Prince Manvendra: When I founded Lakshya Trust, we were helped by Humsafer Trust, India’s first organization that started working on HIV and homosexuality. The idea was to create a platform where the gay population in my state could come together to talk about issues (marriage pressure, police harassment, social issues, legal issues, and HIV). Lots of our friends were dying and we needed to spread awareness. We were lucky that the government in our state came to our side and funded us.

Now an HIV positive network in my state has started a restaurant and employed HIV positive people there to show that you can’t get infected by someone cooking for you. That’s mainstreaming. If you can get the support of society you have won.

O&A: What keeps you most engaged in your work?

Prince Manvendra: I’ve created my own gay family. This gay family keeps me going on because of the amount of love I’ve received. They’ve always supported me during my bad times, emotional turmoil, and happy times. This motivates me to work more for the community and welfare of our people. You need to build a support system.

There is a favorite quote of mine, “Gay rights cannot be won in the courtrooms, but in the hearts and the minds of the people.” I think it is no longer a national issue, but a global issue. We have to all unite.

O&A: What are some of the positive changes that you have seen since the decision of the Delhi High Court to decriminalize homosexuality in 2009?

Prince Manvendra: There was recently a symposium on gay tourism in India last month. There are also now multiple new gay publications. The judgment has brought about a lot of liberalization in the country. Bollywood is portraying homosexuality in more serious roles rather than ridiculing us or treating us as clowns as in the past. The Delhi judgment has mainstreamed homosexuality into society. There is still a long way to go, but we just have to continually fight for it.

O&A: What’s next for you?

Prince Manvendra: In my own town, I’ve started a retirement home for the LGBT community. It will be the first of its kind in Asia. That home will house a lot of seniors from the community. In India, we are used to living with the joint family. After coming out, a lot of us are thrown out of the family and don’t have a place to go. Old age can be the most difficult time in a person’s life and the time when you need the maximum support. We want people to live the rest of their lives in peace.

We’re actually getting inquiries from people from all over the world. It’s open to anyone regardless of race, caste, religion, nationality. All you have to be is LGBT.

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Jennifer Chang and Lisa Dazols are from San Francisco but are travelling the world in search of gay people who are creating change for the LGBT community. The project, Out and Around: Stories of a Not-So-Straight Journey, is a collection of their conversations with these “Supergays” around the world. Their trip will cover 15 countries across Asia, Africa, and South America, chosen because those are places where the LGBTQ movement is just starting to take shape, and they want to tell the stories of the people there who are leading the charge. www.outandaround.com.

QUEER AND MUSLIM?

[VOICES] Abdul Rohman, faculty at the Indonesian Islamic University talks about faith and sexual orientation in The Jakarta Post.



Here is a take-out of the full article from the 12 December 2011 article in The Jakarta Post.

"Insisting that same-sex relations are actually compatible with religious beliefs would almost certainly challenge mainstream perspectives.

Within the context of Indonesia, as the country with the largest Islamic population, you cannot be a gay or lesbian, for example, and a good Muslim at the same time because most Islamic teaching bans same-sex practices.

I do not attempt to justify homosexuality or promote gay culture but I call for a dialogue on religions and sexual preferences.

Sexual identity and religion are sensitive and contradictory issues in Indonesia. Only a few are willing to discuss them open-mindedly. Most are likely to say that having a different sexual preference is a perversion of religion and a betrayal of human nature or social norms. Luckily, we still have various media able to look at the issue through a different lens.

We may recall a story about a transvestite who was jailed because she married a man whom she loved. Previously, the court had ordered her to become the “real man” she was naturally intended to be. Another example is a transgendered person whose access to healthcare was denied because their gender identity was not recognized administratively.

Coming out as a homosexual in public can potentially rob you of your job, reputation, social life and lead to alienation from your family. It is as if letting people know that you have a different sexual preference from the majority is taboo and violates nature. Therefore, many gays opt to live in the closet and in some circumstances commit suicide. This shows how being sexually different from the mainstream culture makes individuals vulnerable.

Being a Muslim and gay at the same time sounds incompatible. Without attempting to make subjective justification based on religious texts, however, both aspects can coexist if we look at the idea that serving God has nothing to do with sexual preference. In many verses of the Koran there is no explicit sentence saying that someone cannot serve God if he or she practices same-sex relationships. Also, there are competing ideas about whether the people of Lot were punished because of their homosexuality or their negligence in serving God.

Within a more humanistic framework, celebrating beliefs and expressing sexual identity are part of our human rights and for that reason the government should recognize them as they are explicitly mentioned in international documents.

Nonetheless, for particular reasons the government has remained ignorant and let righteous vigilante groups exercise violence against sexual preference discourse.

Should homosexuals give up their faith even though they still believe that Islam is a peaceful religion and a blessing for the universe? Gay people still can practice their religious duties since religion is a personal relation with God and has nothing to do with sexual preferences. What can we expect from religious groups that spread their ideologies through blasphemy, abuse and negligence of their sense of shared humanity as creatures created by the same God as gay people? ..."

Read the full article from the 12 December 2011 article in The Jakarta Post.

ANOTHER COUNTRY

[VOICES] Alex Hopkins tells the story of two men who have escaped Uganda, quite possibly the worst country in the world to live in if you're gay.

 

The young man’s body lies on the floor in the bathroom of a slum dwelling on the outskirts of a city in Uganda. The body does not move.  The hot air is filled with the toxic fumes from an old gas boiler. About an hour later there is a phone call to a leading gay rights activist. The young man has been rushed to hospital. By the time the activist reaches the scene the man, who was in his late 20s, is dead: Sam Odyiambo had taken his own life.

Meanwhile, in the city of Malmo in Sweden, a 24-year-old Ugandan man sits in
an internet cafe. For just over a month he has been living in the third most populous city in the country, yet he has rarely felt more alone. This young man, Sentongo, is gay. He now lives in a Swedish refugee camp. Neither of these men knew one another, but if they had met, they would have shared the bond of having been born in the most dangerous country in the world to be gay. If they had shared their stories they would have seen notable similarities. Their histories speak of systematic persecution, senseless violence, and a level of fear that it is almost impossible for Western LGBT people to imagine.

While the world waits to see if Uganda’s heinous anti-homosexuality bill is passed in the next parliamentary session, both of these men have escaped from their daily nightmare. For Sam Odyiambo, the pressure had simply become too much and he chose the only route to peace that he could envisage – a solitary death. Sentongo has been one of the fortunate few to escape to a country where he can finally stand a chance at grasping freedom. Yet his body and psyche bear the marks of one of the most brutal regimes the gay world has ever known...

‘My body is in a very bad way and is covered in scars from constant beatings,’ he confides from the small room he now shares with two Somalian refugees. ‘I am constantly weak and tired and spend my days sleeping and moving around as much as I can.’ Sentongo’s voice is soft and cautious and it takes him time to gather the courage to divulge his experiences. He has to keep his voice down in case his roommates come back. They do not know that he is gay and would turn on him if they knew. ‘Well, they are from Africa,’ he remarks sadly...

To read the rest of Alex Hopkin's revealing story, check out ISSUE 3: THE ART ISSUE of Out There magazine. On sale now.

NIGERIA: CRISIS POINT

[VOICES] Williams Rashidi explains Nigeria's horrific Same Sex Marriage Prohibition bill and how it affects the local LGBT population.

 

The Nigerian Senate voted on Tuesday, 29^th November to pass the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill. The bill if passed into law stipulates a maximum 14 years for gays and lesbians people and 10 years for people who aids, abets and witness same sex marriage. It also places a ban on gay and lesbian organizations /clubs in the deeply religious nation. Nigeria already has laws that criminalize homosexuality.

Chapter 21 of the Penal and Criminal Code of Nigeria:

Section 214 states:  Any person who- (1) has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature; or (2) has carnal knowledge of an animal; or (3) permits a male person to have carnal knowledge of him or her against the order of nature is guilty of a felony, and is liable to imprisonment for fourteen years.

 

Section 217 specifically states: Any male person who, whether in public or private, commits any act of gross indecency with another male person, or procures another male person to commit any act of gross indecency with him, or attempts to procure the commission of any such act by any male person with himself or with another male person, whether in public or private, is guilty of a felony, and is liable to imprisonment for three years.

 

The Sharia Penal Code: The provisions of the Sharia Penal Code apply predominantly in Muslim north. The north coincidentally houses more male homosexuals, compared to the south of the country (Sexual Diversity and Human Rights Research Project 2007 -2008 – INCRESE).  12 Northern Nigerian states have adopted Islamic Sharia laws with harsh punishment for people with sexual orientation and gender identity considered deviant and un-Islamic. This include homosexuality whether male on female but with more harsh punishments for male homosexuals. Section 130, 131 and 134 of the Sharia Penal Codes stipulates and states that “whoever commits the offence of Sodomy shall be punished:

With canning of one hundred lashes and if unmarried shall also be liable to imprisonment for a term of one year: or

If married with stoning to death (rajm)

“Any woman who engages in same sex relationships with caning which may extend to fifty lashes and in addition sentenced to a term of imprisonment which may extend to six months”

Sodomy in this clause is mostly restricted to anal sex between men. The Sharia Penal Code is not usually applied to the act of sodomy by heterosexual couples. The above provision is also mainly applied to sexual relationships between men. Also in the Sharia Penal Code is a provision that stipulates to punish:

                 

Within these repressive and discriminatory laws, the National AIDS Control Agency, a parastatal of the Federal Government of Nigeria currently has working policy on HIV/AIDS captures the needs of men who have sex with men who may or not identify as gays and bisexuals.. But the question that organizations working with LGBTI, most especially men who have sex with men ask:  is this laudable policy of the Nigerian Government in responding to the HIV epidemic amongst MSM and the general population realistic, in the midst of repressive and discriminatory laws that criminalize same sex oriented persons, most especially male homosexuals in achieving universal access for all and the current passage of the Same Sex Marriage Bill by the Nigerian Senate.

 

The bill which is not yet a law has escalated tension and caused wide spread fear within the LGBT community on insinuations that the governments has given orders that gays and lesbians be fished out in the country for prosecution. In an interview, Rashid Williams, Director of Queer Alliance said, ‘I do not think the government is serious about  making Nigeria a truly democratic and free nation, in which everyone is respected no matter who they are and how they choose to identify themselves as long as this is not criminal. I don't only see and sense discrimination in the bill, I sense people taking laws into their hands to lynch, extort and blackmail and commit other forms of violence and hate on people just on the grounds of their perceived sexual orientation when it may appear not to be the case. The bill also takes way the fundamental human right of freedom to association and peaceful assembly as embedded in the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It grants both state and non state actors the power to infringe and access the privacy of people based on their real or perceived sexual orientation. This is a gross deviation from the Constitution and International Human Rights Principles and Standards to which Nigeria is signatory. It breaches the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights that protects from discrimination whatsoever and of which Nigeria as a country has signed, ratified and domesticated. Moreover, who is talking about Same Sex Marriage in Nigeria when Nigeria's human rights record is nothing to write home about?

 

In 2002, Innua Yakubu a student of the Government College in Jigawa State that also has Sharia laws was killed by his fellow classmates on the grounds of his sexual orientation. Earlier this year, gay rights activist Rashidi Williams and his male friend were ambushed by a group of men on the grounds of them being gay. Violence and hate crimes committed on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity is under-reported and when reported, is sensationalized by the Nigeria media. Cases of rape of lesbians have also been documented in Nigeria.

 

Queer Alliance an organization working to promote the well-being and advocate for the rights of LGBT in Nigeria also reacted by saying that the social problems the bill will create will be enormous than the country can bear. The bill will lead to the migration of talented LGBT people to countries where they are protected. It may also aid the migration of people who are ordinarily not affected by the bill, claiming asylum on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

 

The major challenges, not just for sexual minorities but for everyone are discriminatory and repressive laws in the country. People should be free to be who they are and not fear to conform to societal expectation. The passage of the same sex marriage prohibition bill by the Senate also leaves HIV service organization working in the country, asking if the government is really serious about fighting the HIV epidemic in Nigeria. Gay and Bisexual men also have sexual relationship with members of the opposite sex to keep people away from prying into the private lives and also conform to societal expectations. This creates a transmission route for HIV; criminalizing identities will not solve the bulk if Nigeria’s development problems.

 

Governments of African countries need look inwards, back into their societies, rather than branding homosexuality as a western way of life. They need o ask why their colonial masters who instituted these laws in their countries did so if homosexuality was absent on the continent. Africans need to also know that we cannot talk of developing the continent and addressing the basic needs of the people by criminalizing a specific group within the general population and making people live in total fear of the lives. It is counterproductive to the development the continent yearns for.

Williams is Founder and Project Manager of Queer Alliance Nigeria and is also part of the Queer African Youth Networking Centre in Lagos.