Yes, we are people living with HIV, but to lose friends and to see ourselves being HIV positive in that situation, suffering...stink in the hospital rooms because of uncontrollable bowel movements, incontinence, which is uncontrollable bowel movements and bladder movements, and stink because of cancer, a very putrid stink. I’m sorry if it appears as a negative image, but it’s reality, and it also has to be portrayed. I think this leads me to conclude that such is the poverty of education and prevention campaigns, and such will remain the poverty of education and prevention campaigns unless revolution comes from within the community-based AIDS movement.

ASAP (Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention) started as a result of a need, as most other community services. A South Asian man went to the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT). His wife and his two daughters had already died, and he had started to become very ill. He didn’t speak English all that well, and there were just general cultural differences. ACT just didn’t know what to do. They contacted Khush, the South Asian gay men’s group here, and ALOT, Asian Lesbians of Toronto, and together they found that one of the member’s mother spoke the same language as this person, and she acted as the counsellor/translator for this man. He later died. It was a very sad story.

These three groups as well as the Toronto Counselling Centre of Lesbians and Gays formed the South Asian AIDS Coalition, in 1989. The first task was to do a needs assessment within the local South Asian community. The needs assessment found that the messages put forth by the mainstream AIDS organizations were just not getting through to South Asians. They felt that they were not affected by HIV at all, that in some magical way being South Asian made you immune from getting HIV. For example, South Asian languages are rarely represented in brochures, and you never see South Asian faces on any posters put out by the mainstream AIDS organizations. This helps us to understand a little bit easier why people might have some of these ideas. They also described AIDS as being a Western problem, and that of homosexuals, and they just felt that they were completely not at risk. SAAC later changed its name to the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention, to differentiate itself from another AIDS organization in the local Toronto South Asian community.

Our first objective is to increase AIDS awareness, taking South Asian cultural and linguistic needs and differences into account, basically educating our own community. Our second objective is to increase awareness in the established AIDS community locally and nationally on the needs of the South Asian communities across the country. Our present services include the provision of workshops, displays, printed materials, and videos. The printed material we have right now is actually one brochure that’s done in English. As we speak, it’s being translated into six different South Asian languages, so hopefully we can outreach to a larger number of people...We will expand on our video collection hopefully in the next two years.

We have come across barriers in reaching South Asian adults, especially women, and men who have sex with men but who do not identify as being gay. South Asian women have traditionally not had a voice in relationships, therefore the idea of a woman telling her husband to use a condom, who she may suspect or knows that he’s having sex with others, is out of the question within our community, and it’s looked upon as ridiculous and outrageous. We’ve realized that we cannot just promote condom use, we can’t say, “Use condoms,” to all groups, to all factions of the South Asian community, without speaking openly about these issues that affect us. Youth is another area where silence plays a role. Many South Asian youth will not admit to having sex or using IV drugs, and therefore they feel uncomfortable seeking information.

Silenced in both South Asian patriarchal societies and in white queer communities in North America and Europe, South Asian gays and lesbians have had to invent themselves, often with new words and names of identifica- tion. We’ve appropriated khush, which means happy, and some have reconfigured it to mean gay, while others have defined it as ecstatic pleasure.

A lesbian collective in the United States used the Sanskrit word anomika, meaning nameless, to address the lack of names in South Asian languages for relationships be- tween two women. A new lesbian collective chose shamakami, which in Bengali means desiring one’s equal.

A South African graduate student in New York writes of the alienation and fear of rejection he feels from his family. “I’m an outsider, an outcast in my own natural community, a hidden, silenced, non-person. To participate in the life of my family, I bury my sexuality, my politics, my anger as deeply as possible. I suspect there’s a secret dread in my family that I might ultimately shame them horribly.” He fears that the support and affirmation he receives from his family may disappear once he reveals his sexual identity. This dependence on family and South Asian communities for affirmation has paralyzed many gays and lesbians in South Asian immigrant communities. Members of Khush in Toronto have discovered that, “The greatest obstacle to our members coming out is a fear of losing our ties to our families and communities. We are a people whose sense of identity is constructed in a very large part by these institutions.” I think here is where it’s obvious how race, to me, structures the fact that there are very few safe havens.

One woman wrote in Shamakami, “I know not any word for myself/but khush/and even that is a mocking translation/I cannot envision living in India/preserving my ‘American’ individualism/loving a woman/building a home with her/defying family, friends/ignoring disapproval, silence/and still speaking, still fighting/to prevent silence.” Trying to speak and live, we confront the contradictions of our identities head on. South Asian heterosexists have often denied the authen- ticity of queer identitified South Asians by labelling homosexual relationships as ‘a white disease,’ insinuating that our presence in North America or Britain has “contaminated our minds and desires.” These heterosexists at- tempt to use the politics of race to condemn lesbians and gay men. They perceive queer identities as a threat to the cultural integrity of South Asian immigrant communities. Ironi- cally, these heterosexists unquestioningly ac- cept the historically western notion that heterosexuality is natural, normal, and bio- logically correct, and that homosexuality is unnatural and perverse, to buttress their po- sition.

In an attempt to resolve the conflict between national racial identity and sexual identity, several South Asian queers have searched for “our very own gay tradition.” Shivananda Khan states that sex between those of the same gender is discussed in many Hindu texts and sex manuals. Homosexuality was also depicted in religious statues. And Subodh Mukherjee of Calcutta has explored the descriptions of tantric initiation rites, Hindu festivals and sex which celebrate homosexual acts. The descriptions of sodomy in the Kama Sutra...and references to women loving women in the Mahabharata have been used to establish that there is a gay tradi- tion for Indians. Giti Thadani, a lesbian living in Delhi, has also embarked on an archeological project which substantiates Shevanan’s claims. She interprets the texts such as the Rig Veda and sculptures which depict sexual acts between women as revelations of a feminine world prior to 1500 BC where sexuality was based on pleasure and fertility, but not on the practice of progeny or identifying children with the father. That’s her way of saying ‘patriarchy.’ Giti’s analysis begs the question, “So whatever happened to the Vedic Dyke?” Giti argues that this world was suppressed by the emerging dominance of patriarchy and its vestiges were systematically destroyed since the Aryan invasions. And so here we have a sense that the Vedic Dyke existed and then she disappeared.

These new histories reconstruct and revise the master narratives of the past which have sought to erase differences and ignore contested values. The alternative visions that we can create can empower us to reclaim and remake both our present world and the understanding of these historical contexts that shaped it. But there’s a danger if there’s a refusal on our part to question and problematize these very strategic narratives that we use, these new histories. And this is precisely what Shivananda does when he interprets Giti Thadani’s work as proof that same sex relationships were socially acceptable several thousand years ago in some parts of South Asia. The presumption here is that sexuality is a definable and universal activity. It ignores a variety of cultural patterns and meanings. How do we know that a repre- sentation of two women embracing meant sex for the historical actors of the time? And even if they did refer to it as sex, does sex have the same meaning as it does for us today? How does one go about proving that some social practices are acceptable and highly esteemed? What kind of evidence does one need to make these kinds of claims?

The representation of physical acts does not necessarily reflect social acceptance. I think about the fact that it could mean the exact opposite. And so I think it’s very impor- tant to understand the context, the map of social reality of the time. We can begin by reading legal texts, religious documents, court texts, and even the placement of sculptures within architectural complexes. These texts, of course, are usually prescriptive; they pro- vide ideals. They cannot be used to under- stand attitudes, actual behaviour or motives.

We can use these texts and materials to speculate about how people lived and thought. Per- haps, though, the only people we will know anything about are the elite men who wrote and were written about, who endowed temples
and who designed law.

And as we do that, we also have to question the people that are writing about these things because Indian history has been very much a site of Orientalism, ancient Indian history in particular. There are certain political agendas at stake in making certain claims that have been made about Indian history and the Indian past. Orientalist scholars have presumed that India was more primitive, sensual and eroti- cized than the repressed, civilized Western Europe.

While the project of reclaiming and recon- structing the past is critical for present political and cultural struggles, let us not read too much of ‘us’ today into the past. South Asian lesbians and gay men are present now. On that alone, we demand acknowledgement and acceptance.