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LOVE IN A GAY TIME Some amorous resolutions for the new millennium Nishit Saran December 19, 2000 857 words To speak of love is to speak, firstly and perhaps exclusively, of oneself. What experts on the matter, what science, what art, after all, can give me truths, on the subject, that seem truer than the lived experience of my own heart? And what do I know of the hearts of others, except as seen in counterpoint to my own? To speak of love, then, is dangerous. More so, if the love that one wants to speak of is the very love that “dare not speak its name.” There are few examples in art one could turn to, and even these rare examples are allowed to exist only because they are works of profound genius – thus difficult to emulate. As for discourses of expertise on the subject (medical and legal discourses, for example), one would rather avoid them as far as possible, so implicated are they in the very systems that one is fighting. But why speak of this unspeakable love at all? For a simple reason: to be gay is, first and foremost, to love differently. If this difference in love were merely a question of the gender you happen to be in love with, then we would have no problem: enough has been written about love ‘in general’ and all we would need to do to understand gay love would be to change the gendered pronouns. But what if the difference between gay love and straight love were more profound? That is, what if the love between a man and a woman were different in its very nature from the love between two men or between two women? Then, every time we spoke of love ‘in general’ we would be wrong in believing that we were speaking the truth about ourselves, since we would invariably be speaking about heterosexual love… for there is hardly any homosexual love that has ever dared to speak! And worse, every time we loved as gay men and women, we would invariably be borrowing our models of love from heterosexuality with all its inherent biases of patriarchy and misogyny, with all its problematic definitions of masculinity and femininity. Politics apart, this borrowing of models would then bring incalculable hurt and misunderstanding into our daily lives. And what makes us confident, in the first place, that gay love and straight love is the same thing, especially when we have hardly any concrete examples of gay love around us? Granted that they share in common elements of sexuality and romance that are absent from other forms of love (such as parental love, filial love, fraternal love), but is that enough? One might take a radical position here, and say that there is no such thing as gay love at all… which for practical purposes means that it is culturally invisible. Gay love has to be invented – we need to invent it – and this is the same thing as saying that we need so urgently to speak of it. And this speaking has to be personal. We need gay literature, gay cinema, gay poetry, gay painting, to provide us models of lived gay experience, of gay relationships, of gay love – and we need enough of them to stand up and compare to heterosexual models. Only then will we even begin to resolve questions about the differences and similarities between gay and straight love… And, till that point, we must be careful; we must be self-critical in our desires and fantasies – again, not merely for politics, but also for our personal happiness. Our ideals of masculinity and femininity have been shaped by heterosexual culture, and however deeply they might be internalized, let us at least not be oblivious to them. For example, let us ask ourselves, as gay men, why we want big biceps, hairy chests and fair skins, and why we would ‘never’ sleep with drag queens – or, for that matter, why drag queens would ‘never’ sleep with each other since they are ‘sisters’? How far is this from self-loathing? At the other extreme, let us ask ourselves why we want to get married and have a big house with a dog and maybe even a few children. Natural instincts? Let us at least ponder the question without accepting half-consciously half-truths. And right now we are not even talking about the frighteningly retrograde views that most Indian gay men have about women, or – even worse - lesbians. If the dream of any gay movement is a world where we all are free to love, do we not have the responsibility to examine what we love, and why we love it, when we love someone of the same sex? A difficult project and, at the moment, a solitary one: in the face of a love that dare not speak its name, we must all, each one of us, following Whitman, speak and write and sing a song of ourselves.
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