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Sites and Insights Gay Bangladesh News & Reports 2008 Also see: Gay
Islam Reports 1998-2002 1 Comfortable in the virtual closet 3/08 2 Asian gay, transgender groups fight for their rights 6/08 March, 2008 1 The Internet has allowed for an important kinship to spring up within the Bangladeshi gay community. But the state of emergency of the past year has shown that it is now time to move beyond the virtual. by Tanveer Reza Rouf BOB’s homepage contains just one reference to gay rights, perhaps offering an immediate insight into the lack of overt political aspirations. The homepage largely concerns itself with ‘friendship’, devoid of political edge. Indeed, the first attempt in BOB’s (and the Dhaka gay community’s) history to assert itself politically came as late as May 2005, when the BOB moderators published a letter to the Daily Star newspaper, regarding the first International Day against Homophobia. The letter read: [The World Health Organisation] has removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Bangladesh, despite being a part of international community, seems blissfully unaware of it. Because of the ignorance, people like me who are gays are being discriminated against. The end product of such discrimination is immense mental suffering and physical harassment. The situation gets even worse when I can’t express myself to my family or friends. Homosexuals in Bangladesh are shackled to a life of secrecy, lies and even internalized homophobia. People quickly took notice of the letter. Within days, the paper published a rabidly homophobic response from an expatriate Bangladeshi. More importantly, a wave of ‘anti-political’ mails began pouring into the BOB message boards, nearly all from the site’s members. Some of these argued against the decision to publish such a letter in the first place. Two of the oppositional letters are quoted below (misspellings have been corrected to avoid confusion): [N]ow we are living in the society without any fear and suspect. We can hang around guys anywhere we want. No one bothers to ask. But please don’t make any situation that hampers our facilities as we would lose our all freedom by all the RED EYES of the society. We all should think about that side of our life … because we are living in Dhaka not Europe or North America that society won’t bother. Our society would bother for gays very very much as it’s a Muslim country. So, BOB do your job and please think about our safety also. …Every time a letter appears, some commotion rises and the antigay sentiment is crystallized. Bangladesh is a very conservative society and people have no sympathy for homosexuals although a lot of them practice sodomy … Fortunately people in general are not yet sensitized about the emerging gay culture and do not mind if two men hang around or share a hotel room. Making an issue is easy, but that will make our clandestine life difficult. Renting of hotel rooms will be suspected. Especially effeminate gays will face serious problem. In my judgment trying to put homosexuality on the public agenda will be self defeating in the short run. I don’t think Bangladesh will decriminalize sodomy in next 100 years! What’s the point in raising hue and cry, then? The emotions here speak for themselves. Most of the members of the BOB website disapproved of the original letter. There was also a strong negative sentiment generated outside the online communities, where it was also thought that BOB had gone too far in sending a letter about homosexuality to the most widely circulated English-language daily in the country. These reactions surprised and disappointed the BOB moderators, who, several days later, said that they felt the members had misunderstood their intention, in presuming that BOB was trying to become ‘rebellious’. On the contrary, the moderators said, they were only attempting to launch a more public discussion. Indeed, the beginnings of that discussion did emerge, when a response to the homophobic letter in the Daily Star was published in the newspaper. But BOB’s continued stance as an apolitical group was then made clear to the group’s members, with a mass mailing that warned that no further discussion on the issue would be allowed on the message boards. As such, BOB definitively abandoned political activism – banning further discussion on the publicity incident and instead, according to the wishes of its members, started planning for a disco party. Since that time, BOB has remained an online gay group that caters solely to the entertainment and friendship needs of its members, without any reference to political issues whatsoever. Real v virtual Were the law-enforcement agencies really such a threat? In retrospect, the answer appears to be ‘no’. In fact, the primary reason for the slowdown on the part of the gay community’s real-world activities was the fact that hotels began refusing to rent venues to gay groups, while the theatres that had previously been used for film shows were closed down, primarily because one of those theatres was owned by a Bangladesh Nationalist Party political personality. (It should be noted that, for a few months of the emergency, disco parties organised by straight groups were also halted.) But then a flurry of rumours began about supposed police raids being planned on gay hangouts, as well as supposed attempts to entrap gays through the Internet. The effect of this fearful gossip reduced the once-active gay community, which had been in the process of slowly attempting to carve out a public space for itself, into little more than a bunch of online, faceless gay men. Much of the rumours did prove to be false. Over the past year, not a single gay or transsexual man has been prosecuted under Bangladesh’s PC 377 statute, which is exactly the same as the archaic, widely criticised Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Nor, for that matter, have any of the rumoured police raids actually gone forward, though infrequent attacks on gay men have continued as before. Moreover, NGOs working with transsexuals and hijras (among others) have continued to operate smoothly, with the hijra community even recently staging a theatrical presentation about their lives. In the end, it seems that it was the gay-identified men who felt the largest impact of the emergency even if nothing significantly overt was done against them – and perhaps understandably since, compared to other sexual minorities, they are the least organised outside of the virtual world. One way or another, the emergency has added to the already volatile psychological state of the gay men of Dhaka, pushing them even further into what they perceive as a safe cyber space. This cannot go on indefinitely. Eventually, Bangladeshi gay men will have to realise that, until they start questioning the role of the Internet in their lives, and think of ways to utilise it beyond mere networking, nothing of substance will be attained beyond occasional dates. The community will first need to come out of the virtual closet before it can even begin to think about peeking out of the real closet.
June 09, 2008 2 by Irawaty Wardany, Denpasar Generally, Rido said, LGBT communities in Asia faced similar problems. "We are all at this time suffering from stigmatization, discrimination, persecution from religious groups and discriminative government regulations," he said. "For example, the 2004 regional regulation in Palembang, South Sumatra, categorizes LGBT as a form of prostitution," Rido said. He said religious-based persecution was the most difficult problem LGBT groups faced in Indonesia. "Those religious doctrines are then being integrated into the formal education curriculum. Naturally, the curriculum educates the students that the only 'normal' and accepted sexual orientation is heterosexuality," he said. Consequently, other sexual orientations are considered as not "normal" and unacceptable. This has resulted in students and communities discriminating against members of the homosexual and transgender community. "There are many cases of discrimination experienced by members of the LGBT community. One example involved a man who openly acknowledged his sexual orientation of being gay. Suddenly, his company fired him for no apparent reason," Rido said. He said other gay workers faced varying levels of hostility from co-workers. "They suddenly keep a distance or, even worse, socially isolate him just because he is gay," he said. He said upholding the rights of the LGBT community was a significant issue since sexual orientation was also part of human rights. Rido said the LGBT community in Indonesia just wanted to be acknowledged and treated the same as the other Indonesian citizens, who enjoyed the right to education, health, work and all the other basic human rights. "It is still very hard for people to accept the fact that LGBT are also human beings, who should be treated humanely," said Arus Pelangi secretary general, Yuli Rustinawati. A Sri Lankan LGBT activist, Rosanna Flamer-Caldera, said the situation in Sri Lanka was worse than in Indonesia. "Being part of LGBT communities in Sri Lanka is similar to committing a criminal offense. That's the reason why people with LGBT sexual orientation prefer to be invisible," she said. She said members of the LGBT community in her country who fell victim to criminal acts often didn't report their cases to the police, because the treatment they would receive could be worse than the perpetrators of the criminal acts. She said she participated in LGBT conferences and seminars around the world to learn about human rights instruments that could be used to advance the struggle in her country. |
