Sometimes you become aware of your blindness only by chance, especially when the blindness is related to your privilege of being ‘normal.’ As a heterosexual male in a society dominated by heterosexual males, and whose rules are defined as such, I have had to devote very little thought to issues of physical attraction, except wonder why I was so bad at the games of courtship and affection. I was aware of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, but only at a theoretical and academic level. The one story I had done on the issue was linked to the Hindi film Dostana, and it referenced only how gay men became best friends to straight women.

Then, one day, while at dinner with old friends, I was told that one of them was gay. In all the years I had known him, he had never mentioned it, but now he had met somebody. They liked each other, and he wanted to introduce this person to us, and us to him. He wanted to sit with the object of his affection among friends, have dinner, tell bad jokes, and laugh at life’s little inanities. He no longer wished to hide this intimate part of his life from us — his friends. My first and immediate reaction was guilt. Maybe there are more appropriate responses, but mine was to scan my memory for all that I had said in his presence. It had never crossed my mind that anyone in my close circle of friends was gay, and in the many years we had sat and talked, joked and exchanged stories, I must have said something that would have been offensive.

Our vocabulary is so full of insults to those who are not ‘mainstream.’ We throw around terms like ‘pansy’ to mean weak or ineffectual, we talk of ‘limp-wristed responses,’ or use insults like gaandu, all of which are, in one way or another, a form of stating that anybody who displays any seemingly ‘gay traits’ is to be despised or dismissed. In all the years that we had sat and joked, when the pressures of political correctness did not tie me down, I must have said something offensive. I could not remember. These terms are a big part of our daily speech, my daily speech, and I could not remember, and that shamed me more. I could not undo the insulting behaviour of my past, but I vowed nothing of that sort would leave my lips again, either in his presence or any other person’s.

Maybe it was in that moment, sharpened to crystal clear accuracy by my guilt, that I understood instinctively what the LGBT movement is about. All that I have read about biology, legality and anthropology do not illuminate the question of how a friend responds to such a situation, of what it means to try and remember unintended insults, to be humiliated by the thought of how you have behaved towards someone you thought of as a friend, and who treated you as a friend, with respect.

At the end of the day how you deal with a friend is a question of honour, of values, of how you too would like to be treated by your friend in return.

I know that I would like my friend to stand up for me. I know that if things were unfair, I would like my friend to try and correct that. I know that I would want my friend, whatever the differences in our class, background, positions, to treat me as an equal. And in this list of things I understood my obligations to my friend in ways that I had never before understood the fight for gay rights. I understood that my friend deserved to live his life as fully as I did mine, and that he should not have to think twice before spending time with his friends, and with the person he loved, that he should have the freedom to choose who to love, and who not to, and that those who would deny him the rights allowed to me must be resisted, and if I did not fight for these things for him, I did not have the right to call him my friend.

And, to be honest, I was also just a little relieved. One of our mutual friends, who I would one day ask to marry me, had always been very impressed with this friend, and I had been just a bit intimidated.

OmairTAhmad

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