http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080071920
Pakistani gay finds love across the border
Press Trust of India
Sunday, November 09, 2008, (Islamabad)
The issue of legalizing
homosexuality has led to heated arguments in the corridors of power in
New Delhi, but that hasn't stopped a Pakistani gay from professing his
love for an Indian man.
A middle-class accounting student
from Lahore, who founded a website called 'Pakistan Gays' two years ago
for homosexuals, says he is in love with an Indian man he met on the
Internet.
Yet he harbours no hope of living in a gay relationship in either Pakistan or
India where homosexuality is illegal and tolerance for gays low.
"It is difficult to be homosexual in Pakistan...because you always fear that if
the people around you
knew about your sexuality, what bad feelings they would have about you.
We think that we are born this way, but still we feel we are doing
wrong," said the 22-year-old, who spoke to the Boston Globe on
condition of anonymity.
The accounting student, who runs
the paid website from Internet cafes so his family doesn't find out,
has signed up about 600 members of whom 302 have identified themselves
as gay, 241 as bisexual and the rest as transgender.
Homosexuality is a crime punishable by whipping, imprisonment or even death in
Pakistan.
However,
the report in the Boston Globe said, "But across all classes and social
groups, men have sex with men. In villages throughout the country,
young boys are often forcibly 'taken' by older men, starting a cycle of
abuse and revenge that social activists and observers say is the common
pattern of homosexual sex in Pakistan.
"Often these boys
move to the cities and become prostitutes. Most people know it happens
from the police to the wives of the men involved."
But not all of Pakistan's gays are leading anonymous lives.
Faisal
Alam, a Pakistani American founded Al-Fatiha Foundation, a
Washington-based organisation for gay and lesbian Muslims, in 1998.
Closer
home, 27-year-old banker Jalaluddin Ahmed Khan has launched a blog to
voice the angst of the gay community, which is forced to lead a
hush-hush life as same sex relationships are illegal in Pakistan.
Khan
describes himself as a "psychotic, sarcastic and socialist blogger from
Karachi" who writes about the vibrant gay life in the southern port
city and in Pakistan, and invites people "looking for gay love" to join
him in the virtual world.
"Homosexuality is religiously
unacceptable in Pakistan. Homosexuality is socially unacceptable in
Pakistan. (But) Homosexuality is an entrenched cultural truth in
Pakistani history. And in Pakistani life today," Khan wrote about the
hypocritical attitude towards gays in his blog "Tuzk-e-Jalali".
"As
long as people are quiet about it and pursue homosexual desires before
or after marriage and are not caught in the act, it is OK. Men are
allowed incredible leeway in their sexual pursuits as long as they are
not discovered," he wrote.
Khan feels Karachi is the city
where homosexuality finds the most social acceptance. "Peshawar and
Quetta are cities where acceptance of pederasty and the homosexual act
are considered normal but any open avowal of this would not be
acceptable to anyone. In contrast, in Karachi people might still accept
you for being a homosexual."
Khan, who claims most
Pakistani homosexuals are forced to marry and that some lead active gay
lives post-marriage, detailed in a long post his parents' reaction when
he told them he was gay and decided to call off his engagement.
"I
am gay. I have told my father, mother and sisters about it. They find
it disgusting, wrong and morally corrupt. They are not ready to accept
that I am gay...I want to be gay.
"I want to live a life of
my choosing. That is not possible if I live with my parents like all
other normal Pakistani guys," he wrote.
Khan says there are
hardly any "cruising spots" for gays in Pakistan unlike other parts of
the world -- "(therefore) beach parties and farm house parties are
quite common because of the secluded location".
But the
plus side, according to Khan, is that Pakistan's gay community is not
divided into strong sub-groups like in the rest of the world.
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