From The Personal Ads: Oh MUM!!!

India's first gay marriage ad: Mumbai mother seeks 'vegetarian groom for my son'

Mother of gay activist places advert seeking "Well-Placed, Animal-Loving, Vegetarian GROOM for my SON" in Mumbai newspaper’s matrimonials pages...

Telegraph.

Bless.

India: Today

Of all the cruelties that we as human beings can visit on one another, one of the most cruel is to say:

"You shall not love or make love with the person you love, not because of excessive youth or because of unwillingness, but because he or she comes from a different religion, a different caste, the same village, the same gender.

You may say you love each other, that you are happy with each other, that you give each other solace and courage and delight, but your love disgusts me. It runs counter to custom, it is an offence in law, it is against the order of nature, it brings dishonour to our family, it will dilute our blood, it will bring about kali-yuga, it will corrupt everyone around you, it is an abomination in the sight of the Lord. It must be forbidden.

You may say you love each other, but I do not care. No, I cannot turn away and simply let you live your life in peace and happiness. I must do something about it. I will indeed do something about it. No, you have not harmed me, but I will harm you. I will disown you, I will treat you with contempt, I will make you an outcaste or a criminal, I will lock you up. I will break your legs, I will fling acid in your face, I will hang you from a crane, I will stone you to death.

If the mob helps me, so much the better. If the law helps me, so much the better. If I can wrap myself in a flag, so much the better. If I can drape religion around myself, so much the better. But by one means or another, I will tear the two of you apart. It is fit and proper that I should do this.

I will do this because my Clan tells me to, my Panchayat tells me to, this Book tells me to, this Section of this Act tells me to, Civilisation itself tells me to, God himself tells me to.

No appeal to reason will touch me. No appeal to humanity will touch me. No appeal to Indian history or modern science will touch me. My brain is a science-free zone. My brain is a history-free zone. My brain is a fact-free zone.

This, at its core, is a simple matter. My love is right. Your love is wrong."

Vikram Seth writes beautifully on Section 377 and gay rights in India.

PS The law looks set to be repealed - though it is not to believed to have been used to prosecute any men for having consensual sex anyway.

Fagburn is sure the likes of Queer Nation NY will be putting as much effort into protesting this as they have been doing over Russia - so send in all your stories and photos!

India: As Thousands Cheer

Who knows how many countless thousands and thousands of people - not just in India - but across the entire world took to the streets yesterday to protest India's recriminalisation of gay sex?
A Day Of Rage!
It's hard to sum up such a magnificent, inspirational groundswell of humanity and of global queer solidarity in just one image.
But thankfully the ever-modest and publicity-shy Peter Tatchell has retweeted this photo of himself to his legions of fans.
Thanks Pete!
Where would we be without you?

BBC: Hashtag Trending Etc

The issue of gay rights has trended worldwide several times this week - following developments on legislation regarding same-sex relationships in a number of countries.

India's Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated a ban on same-sex partnerships after a four-year period of decriminalisation. The court ruled that only India's parliament could change Section 377, which describes a same-sex relationship as an "unnatural offence" that is punishable by a 10-year jail term. Hashtags about the ruling trended on Twitter, including:#sec377 #scrap377 and #LGBT.

In Australia, legislation allowing gay marriage in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) was overturned. Meanwhile in Russia, gay rights groups are calling for increased pressure on the International Olympic Committee ahead of next year's Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.*

#BBCtrending's Anne-Marie Tomchak investigates the social media tactics being used by LGBT supporters.

BBC News.

"But does social media have a real direct impact on moving the debate forward?"

No.

* They then show that butt-awful Allout.org video, which was not made in Russia, and is based on a hysterical fiction.
Ta-dah!

India: Ban

"Today is a great day for prejudice and inhumanity and a bad day for law and love. But law develops and love is resilient and prejudice will be beaten back.

"I wasn't a criminal yesterday but I'm certainly a criminal today… But I do not propose to take the permission of their lordships when deciding who to love and who to make love with."

Vikram Seth.

Always good to see people protesting against injustice - not sure if this "ban" will actually change anything though.
Oh empire! Will your legacy ever end?
[And the Indian government have said they'll overturn it].

Yes, that's how I usually feel afterwards, too.

Times Of India.

PS BBC News UK/US press round-up - and on the Indian media's support for decriminalisation. 

Stephen Fry's Out There: No Gay Sex Please, We're British!

In part two of Around The World In 80 Gays, national treasure Stephen Fry pays (literally) flying visits to Brazil, Russia and India...
Same as before, two things were striking; Fry does seem to have a big problem with (gay) sex - you may recall he was famously and vocally celibate for many years, and often spoke of his disgust at the very thought of making the beast with one back.*
In this context his simple, simplistic conclusion to the programme, "It's all about love" seemed telling.
Or do I mean damning?
The only bodily fluids Stephen Fry enjoyed sharing were tears.
And boy did he cry a lot, with joy and with pain.
Boo hoo, squish squish.
TV documentaries rely on this emotional pornography.
They are politically crude, tending to go to extremes - here the grieving mother, the pantomime villain politician - that may cast more shade than light on the viewer's understanding of what life's really like for ordinary LGBT people.
Fry also went into one of his trademark patronising patrician rants about how these people are not "educated".
See also him saying they're "backwards" and "uncivilised".
You can take the man out of the public school, but you can't take...
On the positive, he was good again at reminding viewers how anti-gay laws and prejudices are a legacy of colonialism.
In the final scene, he's speaking at a gay bar in Mumbai, congratulating the patrons, and just as you're thinking; "Yes, Stephen, but you're talking to members of the English-speaking, western-oriented, middle-class elite...", he basically says this himself - and signs off by hoping their freedoms will soon come to the hijras in the slums.
One of the strengths of this episode was how he repeatedly stressed that trans people - from drag queens in Sao Paolo to the hijra of Mumbai - are often the worst treated of all the four letters in the LGBT community, by both the straight world and our own.

The segment on Russia - boo hiss etc - was by far the weakest and seemed rather odd.
He interviewed Vitaly Milonov, the St Petersburg politician who'd introduced a local law banning "promotion of homosexuality", which has now notoriously gone nationwide.
But everything we saw suggested this wasn't actually being enforced; Fry, a best-selling celebrity over there we learned, began by meeting members of a lesbian and gay group still freely operating out of their nice offices, and ended by promoting homosexuality to a large group of Russian journalists.
At one point he asked a lesbian mother; "Do you think that we'll see a day when you will be threatened by this law?"
Note this is a hypothetical question about the future, not what's happening now.
Similarly, despite all the "This is how Hitler started!" hysteria by some in the West over Russia's own Section 28, several Russian LGBT campaigners have said they doubt the law will be applied generally.
The take-home quote from this programme, instantly, endlessly tweeted and RT-ed as soon as the credits started rolling, was; "Homosexuals aren't interested in making other people homosexual; homophobics are interested in making other people homophobic."
A nice platitude, though for the  record, can Fagburn put the record straight and state he is interested in making other people homosexual?

* See this post on the blog, Towards Queer...

Wikileaks 5: A Gay Gandhi?

This is a few days old - sorry, but I don't read The Times Of India that often, and I don't think it's been picked up in the western media.
A cable from the US Embassy in Delhi leaked by Wikileaks has apparently outed Rahul Gandhi, the Indian politician thought to be the heir apparent of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
Rahul, 40, is a Congress politician and son of the former Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, and the current Congress President, Sonia Gandhi.
The Indian press have sniggered before that he is something of a "gay icon" (nudge, nudge) - as in the hilarious Julian & Sandy-style cartoon above.