A silent revolution to make campuses gay friendly is underway in colleges across India, finds out Sukhdeep Singh
Deepak was still in college when he decided that he could not live a dual life each day. Living in a hostel during his engineering days in a small town, he desired to get his friends talking about sexuality, and so he decided to come out to his friends. But instead of telling them personally, he chose to write about his sexuality and the problems and dilemmas of a young gay man in his blog. Needless to say, it created a lot of brouhaha in his college. “But it led to a lot of discussion among my friends, many times with me, many times without me. The shroud of mystery was broken and since they knew me personally many of their perceptions relating to gay men were broken too,” tells Deepak. While Deepak did face a few homophobic comments initially, most of his friends were supportive. “The time of my coming out couldn’t be better, because a few days later, the Delhi High Court decriminalized homosexuality and there was a lot of discussion in all of media on this topic,” says Deepak.
Deepak was all of 20 yrs when he took this step of starting a dialogue in his college campus. But his is not a lone story. In the last few years, especially after the decriminalization of homosexuality on 2 July 2009, a lot of students are taking it upon themselves to educate their peers about homosexuality and make the campus environment friendly enough for other queer students and are receiving support from their batch mates too.
Past Initiatives
While various new initiatives might have been started in the recent years, there have been attempts by students to start a dialogue among the youth as early as 2003. One such initiative was Anjuman, which was a students’ queer initiative of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) of Delhi and was an attempt to initiate discussion about gender and sexuality at a time when the case pertaining to Sec 377 was still pending in the courts and the capital city was yet to witness a gay pride march.
An attempt was also made in IIT Bombay, which now has a support group called Saathi for LGBTQ students, around a decade ago. An alumnus of the college had created a yahoo group with an aim of connecting gay students of IIT-B and published the group in various online communities. Being an unmoderated group, there were people from all around the country who had joined the group and the group lost its relevance. Another attempt was made in the institute around four years ago when a student contacted the owner of the yahoo group and was made the moderator of the group. However, these attempts were clandestine in nature and there were no open discussions in the campus of the tech-college.
Opening up
But with the decriminalization of homosexuality by the Delhi High Court, young students are now more confident than ever and talking about sexuality openly and utilizing all available media to reach out en masse. “I chose to write about it in my blog because I could reach out to more people at a go instead of telling them one by one, and also if it was there in black and white, it would prove that it wasn’t just another gossip or rumour, since rumours in my college campus were created every hour,” says Deepak.
Students in other institutes have been using the college newsletter to educate their peers and tell them that gay people exist, and exist everywhere and among them. One such instance that occurred earlier this year was in IIT Madras, where a young gay student wrote an anonymous blogpost titled Standard Deviation in the student run online news site The Fifth Estate telling about his struggle for self-acceptance, how suffocating the closet is, how the jokes cracked by fellow batch mates about gay people affect him, and how ‘uneducated’ even the ‘educated’ folks at IIT are. “Yes, gay people exist in IITM, not to mention in every other educational institution, in every walk of life,” he wrote. Inspired by IIT Madras, the editors of IIT Bombay’s newsletter Insight-The Third Eye asked an alumnus (who was openly gay during his years in the institute) to share his experience. Titled Gay @ IITB: Out and Proud and written under the pseudo name H, the post gave a detailed account of his life, from pre-JEE Days, to the fears of coming out, and finally the support received from all friends on telling them about his orientation. It also talked about a support group Saathi having been formed in the college campus.