The mahatma and the maharajah

It was news to me when I read nine years ago that Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi might have been bisexual, and had a German-Jewish bodybuilder lover during the years in South Africa.  Shocking it was to even consider the possibility.

Later, Frédéric Martel, a researcher at Sciences-Po Paris and ZHdK Zurich, looked into the original correspondence between Gandhi and the German.

The writings between the two men, as they appeared in Gandhi’s many letters, are surprising: love is present, explicitly; a dominating/dominated relationship emerges, even in the nicknames the two men call each other; there’s talk of Vaseline; and Gandhi tells Kallenbach how Kallenbach “took complete possession of [his/Gandhi’s] body.” The two men took an oath of love, a love whose nature “the world has never known.” And when they were finally separated because Kallenbach did not obtain permits to join him in India, Gandhi wrote to him saying that he dreamed of him. “These letters are very emotional. There is clearly an attraction between these two men,” Eric Itzkin, the biographer of Gandhi’s South African years, tells me when I interview him in Johannesburg.

Nein, nein. That can't be true, right?

India, where hetero-normative rules, is slowly opening up towards the non-hetero human condition.  "India also saw a 22-point increase since 2014, the first time the question was asked of a nationally representative sample there."  Now, about 37% say that homosexuality should be accepted by society.

But, acceptance is not easy.  Even when a maharajah comes out of the closet.

The fallout from his announcement was brutal, beginning with protests in his hometown, Rajpipla, where he was burned in effigy. His mother took out a newspaper advertisement to announce she was disowning him.

Where is Rajpipla?  In Gujarat.  Gandhi's home state as well.  But, worlds apart in so many ways.

Who is the royalty?

Prince Manvendra was born in 1965 to Raghubir Singh Gohil, the current honorary maharajah of Rajpipla, and Rukmani Devi Gohil, the daughter of the former maharajah of Jaisalmer.

Of course, the maharajah title does not mean anything in a democracy.  But, people still remember the old stories.

The prince has a tough time gaining acceptance.

His father, the maharajah, acknowledged in an interview that it was difficult for the family to come to terms with his son’s sexuality and the constant media attention on the family.
“But it’s his decision,” the maharajah said.
His relationship with his mother remains frosty, but other members of the family have been supportive, he says. His grandmother, on her deathbed, expressed her happiness that he had found a partner to share his life with.

I would think that talking more about Gandhi and his German-Jewish bodybuilder friend would go a long way to further LGBTQ rights and acceptance.  I wonder what Prince Manvendra thinks about that.

Only in America!

Lemme give you the response to the title of this post right away before you read further: NOT!

When JFK became a presidential candidate, as a Roman Catholic in a country where Protestants viewed Catholics with a great deal of suspicion, he had to go out of his ways to make sure that voters understood that he would not be a Vatican candidate.  In a stirring speech about the separation of church and state, and his Catholicism, JFK said:

contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic.

An Irish-Catholic-American was elected president.  And JFK happens to be the only Catholic ever to have been elected to the White House.

In that ancestral home of his--in Ireland--an "American" history is being created: The son of a Hindu immigrant is all set to be the next prime minister of Ireland.  He is only 38--younger than JFK's age when he was elected president.  And, oh, this young man is gay:

A gay son of an Indian immigrant is now all but certain to become the next prime minister of Ireland, a country that has rapidly been leaving its conservative Roman Catholic social traditions behind.
Leo Varadkar, who was chosen on Friday by the Fine Gael party to be its leader, and therefore the head of the center-right governing coalition, will be the first openly gay taoiseach (as Ireland’s prime minister is called), and, at 38, the youngest.

The kind of a story that we normally associate only with the US.

Who were/are his parents?

Mr. Varadkar was born in Dublin in 1979, the son of an Irish Catholic nurse from County Waterford and a Hindu doctor from Mumbai, India. His parents met in England in the 1960s and lived in India for a time before moving to Ireland.
Growing up in a country where religious divisions have historically run deep, he attended a Catholic elementary school and a Protestant high school that followed the Church of Ireland tradition. He told The Irish Times in 2015 that he was raised Catholic but was “not a particularly religious person.”

How fascinating!  Almost a made-for-movie story!

Varadkar reminds us:

“If my election today shows anything, it is that prejudice has no hold in this Republic,” Varadkar said at Dublin’s Mansion House after the results were announced, adding: “Around the world people look to Ireland as a country where it doesn't matter where you come from, only where you want to go.”

I needed such a positive news to offset the bleakness here in the land of the free.

More on Gandhi's (bi)sexuality. Wait, the Mahatma or Rahul?

The nerd and the junkie in me are delighted with the craziness in this world, including all the attention on Gandhi's (bi)sexuality.  So, here I am three weeks after that first post, yet again yakking about it :)

The best one I read about all this was in the New Yorker.  But, that will be towards the end of this post.  Because, well, here is Aravind Adiga writing that Gandhi was the symbol of manliness in a country that was otherwise devoid of strong male figures, and where, he quotes MJ Akbar here, young boys were forever in the shades of the saris of their mothers and grandmothers. 

He exaggerates, but then he is a fiction writer :)  Plus, Adiga seems to confuse courage with sexuality and manliness. 

There were no Charles de Gaulles or Fidel 
Castros to inspire us. Independent India’s most important statesman,
 Jawaharlal Nehru, suffered from an air of masculine inadequacy, 
stemming from his failure to forestall the Chinese invasion of India 
in 1962. Liberal, tolerant Indian politicians almost always looked
 like pathetic specimens of masculinity; the charismatic men were 
either those who had advocated military action against the British—or the even more macho Hindu nationalists.

I am all the more convinced that Adiga should restrict himself to fiction, where he excels.

The New Yorker has one hilarious piece on this: "I was Gandhi's boyfriend"  ... I envy these writers for being so creative :) Here is one really funny moment there:

he eventually dumped me for this German-Jewish bodybuilder, and I warned him, I said, “Hello, been there, and I know that at first it sounds hot, but pretty soon it’s all ‘Nein, I can’t stay out late, because I have to get up early for the gym,’ and ‘Nein, we can’t do your rally for South Africa, because we’ve got my cousin’s Seder, remember?’ And his mother will be all ‘So, Mr. Gandhi, I’m told you like to lie down in front of railroad cars, to demonstrate a political point. Can you make a living from this?’ ”

 Meanwhile, there is loud talk that Rahul Gandhi is gay.  

Who cares, right?  Makes for interesting discussions, and blog posts though!

Christian charity feeds non-gay African famine victims

When I was in Tanzania, which now seems like eons ago, one of the hot news items in the papers there was from neighboring Uganda, whose government, with valuable assistance from American evangelicals, had passed one of the most virulently anti-gay legislation in the world.  There I was comfortably seated inside the newly constructed Doubletree and having coffee in the morning admiring the scenery when I almost spilled that bloody strong coffee when I read about the death penalty for gays!  If it was that shocking to a straight guy, I could only imagine how absolutely threatened gays felt in Uganda ...

Well, that was then ... and the following is now (from, ahem, America's Finest News Source) about a Colorado-based Christian charity that raises money to feed non-gay famine victims in Sub-Saharan Africa

Christian Charity Raising Money To Feed Non-Gay Famine Victims
Note how this charity "does not discriminate"--helped non-Muslims in Indonesia :)

Homophobia caused Queen's demise in the US ...

I wondered earlier on why there wasn't as much an interest for, and excitement in, Queen here in the US.  My only hypothesis was that somehow the life and lifestyle of the singer--Freddie Mercury--was not received well, particularly during the virulent anti-gay days of the 1970s and 1980s, which was when Queen was soaring high.

I wonder no more.

Unfortunately that was the case.  And this was from the metaphorical horse's mouth--from Brian May, make it Dr. Brian May, who was the co-founder of the group and their lead guitarist.

May was a guest in Terry Gross' "Fresh Air", and her question to him was about the rather incongruity between most of the band's fans who in those years were not quite supportive of homosexuals.  May suggested that even though the world was aware of Mercury being gay, it was something like an unspoken topic amongst his fans.  He put it so well:

"I think it was an undiscussed thing for a long time. The truth of the matter is nobody should care. Why should anyone care what sexual persuasion people have? It's about the music, and Freddie would have been the first to say that. He never hid the fact that he was turned on by men instead of by women, but strange enough, I don't think it was always the case. Because in the early days, we used to share rooms. So in the early days, I know who Freddie slept with, and they weren't men, but I think it gradually changed. And I have no idea how these things work, but it wasn't really anybody's business but his, and we never talked about it as if it were important. Why should it be important? We just made music together."

May went on to say that in the US, it was indeed the gay aspect that resulted in the group touring in America much less than they liked :(  That they were the biggest group everywhere in the world, playing to packed stadiums, except here in the States.

In particular, he referred to the video they made for "I want to break free".

In the video, which is easy to make out that it is a spoof at various levels, the Queen's players dress up as women.  May said that in the promo tour interview in the Midwest, the ashen-faces of the people when they watched the video made it all clear ...

Anyway, apparently after Wayne's World made Bohemian Rhapsody and Queen famous all over again, by when Mercury was already quite ill, Mercury's comment was that he would probably be dead before they got big in America again.  It all makes sense, now, as to why his death did not register as a huge event here in America :(

Brian May is quite a Renaissance Man.  The way he explained the physics of the acoustics of their music making to the physics of inter-stellar dust .... he came across as a wonderful lecturer too.  Dr. May is now the Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.

Graham Slam :)

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Torture. DADT. Gay. Obama. Wimp.

So, in an earlier post I wondered how the Daily Show would respond to Obama flip-flopping on the torture photos. Well, Jon Stewart did great. An awesome job. But, highly depressing to realize that this is politics here in the good ol' USA.

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