“We are like any other person walking on the street. And a life of normalcy is all that we expect,” says Shivkumar Lanka, a 35-year-old associate professor at an engineering college. Lanka is the founder of Nestam, a voluntary group for the LGBT community.
June which is celebrated across the world as Pride Month, hardly saw any events in Visakhapatnam. “I do not understand the concept of Pride March. Rather than walking the streets I would go to people and try to educate them about gender, sexuality and homophobia,” Lanka says.
Working on these lines, Nestam holds hour-long seminars in schools and colleges for students of Class VIII and above. During these sessions, volunteers talk about gender dysphoria, plural sexuality and the normalcy of such thoughts.
“Most of the principals and heads of departments are fine with the seminar and allow us to interact with the students. Of course, there are a few who not for the seminar,” he says. Lanka, whose experiences made him come up with the seminar, says that apart from educating children, it will also provide a sense of security to those kids who are at conflict with themselves.
Longing for acceptance
“The sheer assurance that I’m not the only one going through this and I can approach people and talk to them, does wonders to the way a person feels and thinks. Not every parent is supportive about their child’s non-heterosexual choices and in such difficult times the child needs support,” he says. Lanka’s mother was supportive when he came out to her in 2010, though she initially thought that he was going through a phase that would pass.
His conflict with himself began in 1997, during his teenage years. “It was a difficult phase, I felt like I was at war with myself. My friends could not understand what I was going through. It was more difficult back in those days. Internet was a luxury, so I had to rely on the few magazines and books that spoke about homosexuality,” he says. Recalling the days when he was trying to understand himself, Lanka says that most of the magazines that he read slotted homosexuality as a disease and said that it had a ‘cure’.
“Reading these magazines made me think I had a ‘disease’ so I went to a doctor to get myself cured. He prescribed blood pressure tablets,” he says.
All these years of conflict did not bother him as much as the thought of coming out to his parents did. Coming out to their loved ones is difficult for many members of the LGBT community. They weigh the options of acceptance and rejection for months or years, before opening up. The seeds of self-hate and shame that have been seeded by the earlier generations force them to doubt the normalcy of homosexuality.
An uphill task
When Sanchari Biswas, a 28-year-old research scholar decided to come out to her sister at the age of 17, it was a humongous task. When she could not speak it out, Biswas took the aid of a letter to convey it to her sister who gladly accepted her with a big hug. But that was not the case when it came to her parents.
“My mother was of the opinion that it was all in my mind and would fade away eventually. I came out to her in 2014 and had to do it again a month ago. Despite loving me for the person I am, she is still unable to accept that I am a lesbian,” she says.
Biswas, a native of Kolkata who moved to the city six years ago, feels that though the city’s youth is acceptable towards the LGBT community, there is a lot of fear and silence around the subject.
“The members of the community themselves are too scared to be open about their preferences. There is a constant feeling of being inferior or of being judged and harassed which prompts them to be silent,” she says. Despite the obstacles, Biswas feels that the attitude of people towards homosexuality is gradually changing. She recently told two of her colleagues about her sexual orientation and they readily accepted her.
As a piece of advice, Biswas adds, “It is time to organise events in Visakhapatnam, the way cities like Kolkata, Pune and Mumbai have it. Society should know that we exist and are a part of it.”
