Aniruddh Vasudevan's blog

This is a guest post by Aniruddh Vasudevan, who's visiting the US from Chennai for a few months.

Despite the existence of desi queer collectives and communities here in DC, the responses and reactions of many Americans (both white and black people) to the visible presence of a queer person coming from India (me, in this case) have been a wee bit strange for me. As long as they assume I am a "queer from here" (the US), the conversation and their interest in talking to me goes one way. The moment they come to know that I am an out-queer living in India, everything changes. Sometimes it feels like a healthy interest, on their part, in knowing how it is to be queer and out in some other cultural, political, religious space. Some other times, they quickly conflate the images and news of punishment and execution of homosexual people in west Asian countries together with their general, relative ignorance about "the East" in total, and suddenly I am a whole other person for them.

One person even suggested that "continued US presence in that area will help to kill off fundamentalism and make this easy for you all"! First, I really saw in my mind's eye all Asian countries losing borders, melting and becoming a huge blob that he could conveniently call "that area"! Secondly, it was a very confusing argument for me: that a queer-hating government's deplorable attempts at ravaging Iraq, Iran and Afganistan only in the interests of access to oil resources, can even be validated as something that will prove to be easy on homosexual people in the long run. That opinion was twisted at so many places that it sent me on a dizzy spell! The issue of homosexuality, freedom, war, plundering, imperialism, coercive thrusting of one brand of democracy etc. were all so generously conflated into one single statement that it left me speechless for a while as to which one I take issues with first.