Vikram’s Talking Points

Echoing Section 377 of India’s anachronistic penal code, which criminalizes homosexual activity, the Supreme Court of India proclaimed last year that homosexual relationships are "unnatural," and that Indian society is "not yet ready" to accept homosexuals on their own terms.

Now, a group in India is once again arguing in India’s courts that legalizing homosexuality will encourage the closeted homosexual community to seek treatment for HIV infection. Estimates indicate that 8 percent of India’s homosexuals are HIV positive (as compared to 1 percent of the general population), so I think they make a strong case for reducing the overall rate of HIV infection and AIDS.

I suspect that the great majority of middle-class Indians are not particularly averse to homosexuality, provided that gay couples carry on discreetly. A similar outlook can be found in the small towns of southern United States, where gay "roomates" are allowed to live together without excessive scutiny. The comedian Russell Peters often quips that a good family background would be important to Indian parents of same-sex partners. 

Ruth Vanita has argued for a modern Hinduism comfortable with homosexuality. She notes:

• Hindu philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti said that homosexuality, like heterosexuality, has been a fact for thousands of years, and that it becomes a problem only because humans focus too much on sex.
• When asked about homosexuality, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of the international Art of Living movement, said, “Every individual has both male and female in them. Sometimes one dominates, sometimes other; it is all fluid.”
• Mathematician Shakuntala Devi, in her 1977 book The World of Homosexuals, interviewed Srinivasa Raghavachariar, head priest of the Srirangam temple. Raghavachariar said that same-sex partners must have been cross-sex partners in a former life. The sex may change, he said, but the soul retains its attachments; hence love impels them toward one another.
• When, in 2002, Hindu scholar Ruth Vanita interviewed a Shaiva priest who had performed the marriage ceremony for two women, the priest said that having studied Hindu scriptures, he had concluded, “Marriage is a union of spirits. And the spirit is not male or female.”
• As Amara Dasa, founder of Gay and Lesbian Vaishnava  Association, noted in Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third Sex, several Gaudiya Vaishnava  authorities emphasize that since everyone passes through various forms, genders and species in a series of lives, people should not judge each other by the material body but should view everyone equally on a spiritual plane and be compassionate, as God is. [Link]