Gay pride walk in capital today

Quilts Of Love June 26, 2009

Culture & Society: Queer Rights

Quilts of Love

link Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 26, Dated July 04, 2009

Queer Pride Week comes once a year but millions of Indian women fight all year round — as women, ‘single’ women and lesbians, finds AMRITA NANDY-JOSHI

EVEN IF THEY are not fed healthy food, little girls in India are guaranteed a big diet of behavioural norms. A ‘good girl’ ought to be soft-spoken, polite, obedient. She ought to marry. She ought to be a mother. If she dares to stray a little out of step with these prescriptions, it is seen as a momentous act of defiance. If she chooses to marry a man of her choice, it can create considerable tremors and if she decides to marry a girl, she threatens a seismic event — one that rattles the foundations of society. Within the spectrum of sexual minorities, millions of women who love women (popularly called ‘lesbians’) have bent the norms and are fighting at many fronts — as women, ‘single’ women and lesbians — in India’s villages, towns and metros. For those who have come ‘out’, it has been a trapeze act without the net. For those who have not, life is another name for claustrophobia. Out or not, that most homosexuals will again wear masks at an upcoming Gay Pride (in the last week of June in Delhi and Bengaluru) is a statement about us as a society.
Read more at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main42.asp?filename=hub040709quilts_of.asp