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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  The Love Issue | Who owns our relationships?
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The Love Issue | Who owns our relationships?

It is a pity politicians, clergy and moralists do not have anything better to do than intrude into the private lives of people

An image of Vladimir Putin wearing lipstick during a protest against Russian anti-gay laws in 2013 in Madrid, Spain. Photo: Denis Doyle/Getty ImagesPremium
An image of Vladimir Putin wearing lipstick during a protest against Russian anti-gay laws in 2013 in Madrid, Spain. Photo: Denis Doyle/Getty Images

The “backlash" against the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people worldwide has been, to a considerable extent, a cultural reaction against the global dominance of the West. In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Uganda, Russia, and even in India, with the reinstatement of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (dating from 1861), it seems there is a widespread view that same-sex relationships are “unnatural", contrary to religion or alien to tradition, and must be criminalized.

Zealots who profess such a profound attachment to “nature" are, in all other respects, busily demolishing or polluting its rivers, oceans, forests, landscapes and soils. If everything that is “against nature" were to be abolished, the first object of prohibition would be the global economic system. It is clear that love of “nature" by those intolerant of other people’s sexual orientation, is highly selective.

In any case, there is no society and no culture on earth in which such relationships do not exist. Human desire and affection are not biddable: Spontaneous and unstoppable, passions flare up, burn for a spell and then die away, as “natural" as the element of fire; and it is the vainest of efforts by governments, with or without the aid of secret police, state-sponsored organizations dedicated to the promotion of virtue, informers and snoopers, to prevent the free development of such attachments.

Of course, they may be driven underground, compelled to be clandestine and publicly unspoken. Individuals whose relationships become publicly known may be set up as a warning and example to others, and subject to the most barbaric punishments—imprisoned, tortured, even executed or stoned to death; but no one in the world has it within his power (and these are generally the laws and edicts of patriarchy) to prevent people from being attracted to, or from loving, one another.

It is, however, pertinent to ask why, at this moment, the reaction against what is generally denounced as “homosexuality" should be so pronounced.

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Police detain leading Russian gay rights campaigner Nikolai Alexeyev during a protest. Photo: Ivan Sekretarev/AP

It is significant, however, that none of the countries which has so vigorously attacked the rights of LGBT people has for a moment raised its voice against the version of economic “development", which is the proudest achievement and most prolific export of the West. The governments of Nigeria, India or Russia offer no critique of the model of growth that has produced such spectacular gains for a growing middle class; and they view the crowds besieging the malls of Lagos, Mumbai or St Petersburg as the surest sign that everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. They have no objection to the avalanche of consumer goods, designer wear and all the accoutrements of the Western lifestyle which are now replicated among the well-to-do in every country in the world, even while large numbers of people languish in misery, denied basic needs.

But they object to certain cultural features which accompany this version of prosperity; one of which has been the inclusion of people in the general good fortune who were previously stigmatized or outlawed in the West itself; not the least sexual minorities, and to varying degrees, women and disadvantaged ethnic or religious groups. So in one sense, it would be true to say that those leaders, secular and spiritual, who throw up their hands in horror at what they see as sexual licence, are guilty of the deepest hypocrisy. They cannot accept some parts of the Western model of the good life and reject others: Cultural transfers come as a package. It is not cost-free; and one of the hidden penalties is the giving up of many traditional practices, responses and rituals of ancient cultures.

The idea that those who are at the receiving end of a particular economic model can “pick and mix" is false. It is true that transplanted cultures do sometimes take on a life of their own; but the notion that India or Russia or Uganda can proclaim their own indigenous values, when these countries have unthinkingly jettisoned so many of them, is a delusion.

In part, the attack on homosexuality represents an effort to declare independence and to rehabilitate tradition in areas in which it has been compromised by the epic process of globalization. And it is true that, even though same-sex relationships have existed in all cultures at all times, they have done so in a guise that differs from the Western claim that it alone represents the full flowering of humanity in this, as in other areas.

In other cultures, lesbian and gay have not been primary identities: They have been embedded in custom and ritual. They have not named themselves in such stark terms, nor announced their sexual nature shorn of all other cultural attributes. It is, perhaps, the single-minded assertion of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender that sets up hostility in cultures where, hitherto, these alternative ways of being have had some social or spiritual function—whether as patrons and clients, teachers and apprentices, officiants in temples or shrines, members of extended households, or simply loving friendships. The definition given to these relationships by the West is uncompromising and unequivocal; and it is perhaps this which offends the sensibility of those anxious to assert their freedom from an all-embracing model, which claims for itself a uniquely progressive role in the world.

For such a critique to be taken seriously, it would have to extend also to the economic sphere. And here again, in most societies, the economy has not been an end in itself, but has been part of the fabric of wider and deeper culture. In the West, the economy is central, and all the social and cultural shifts that accompany its growth and development are an indivisible part of it. The governments of Uganda, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, China or Russia are not going to contest the economic roots of the changes which are taking place within their middle and upper classes. They are discriminatory in what they are prepared to champion as “indigenous values"; and challenging the money value of everything is not on their highly particular agenda.

The West sometimes concedes that China or India or Brazil or Indonesia are “beating them at their own game". This, too, is hypocrisy. For it remains their game; other countries are mere franchisees, and it is by means of this “soft power" that the spread of values which originated in a single part of the world, has become established on a global scale.

There are, of course, even deeper ironies in the claim by India or Nigeria that homosexuality is alien to their way of life. For many of the countries which have recently reaffirmed the outlawry of this sensibility are simply reiterating prohibitions formulated by their colonial masters in the 19th century. The wordings of the laws against same-sex relationships are virtually identical—a suggestion that this was an off-the-peg legislation imposed by general imperial decree: “offences against the order of nature" are words that recur in the laws of several former colonial territories. While the original power has become more liberal and relaxed in its attitudes, its frozen legacy has hardened in places where it was once brought by stern missionaries and puritanical colonizers.

There may be something in the claim that LGBT sensibility as defined by the West is inimical to the values of other cultures and traditions; but that does not mean that such things did not exist, albeit in a form recogniZable and familiar to those cultures

In this way, there are complexities of which the leaders of these countries are apparently unaware: Their fulminations are the internalized ragings of sometime occupying powers who thought they detected signs of effeminacy, weakness or perversion in their once-subject peoples. Such leaders are stranded in time, uttering archaic formulae to an altered world.

There may be something in the claim that LGBT sensibility as defined by the West is inimical to the values of other cultures and traditions; but that does not mean that such things did not exist, albeit in a form recognizable and familiar to those cultures. India, in particular, has a host of alternative sexual identities which are peculiar to its own history and culture; that they were never named “homosexual" means that the word is seen as reductive and inadequate. It might, of course, have been possible for these countries not to have swallowed the Western model indiscriminately. They might have become wise in their own way; and have reached into their own treasure house of values to resist the onslaughts of consumerism, materialism and money culture. But they have not done so.

To take issue with one cultural sub-set of a system they have absorbed uncritically is disingenuous; and they will be taken seriously only when they show themselves to be more ready to challenge other aspects of alien rule which now passes for a universal norm. And we will probably have to wait a long time for that.

In the meantime, the strictures of politicians, clergy and moralists on other people’s personal relationships are intrusive: It is a pity they do not have better things to do—address the misery and hunger of so many of their own people, for example; but this is a form of morality beyond their voluntarily restricted remit.

Jeremy Seabrook is an author and journalist specializing in social, environmental and development issues.

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Published: 08 Feb 2014, 12:34 AM IST
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