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Indian Express
4 days ago
- General
- Indian Express
This Pride Month, let all colours of the rainbow shine equally bright
Written by Samata Biswas On Sunday, one of the most widely circulated Bengali newspapers carried a literary supplement cover dedicated to the many contentions regarding human sexual orientations, penned by a Sahitya Akademi-winning author. Best known for his novel documenting the lives of trans women in Bengal, this article, on the occasion of Pride Month, was, however, riddled with inaccuracies and prejudices, prompting many Bengalis to ask again: What does 'Pride' mean, and whose voices were systematically erased to create human HIStory? It is, by now, well known that the uprising against governmental persecution and police brutality of sexual minorities in the neighbourhood of New York's Stonewall Inn, on June 28, 1969, is now commemorated across the world as Pride Month. In India, with the recent decriminalisation of sexual 'acts against nature', corporates and institutions have begun to celebrate Pride Month with a vengeance, offering consumer choices as the freedom to choose one's partner. It is also ironic that the United States now both celebrates Pride and undermines the rights of transgender persons, cashing in on the Stonewall uprising led by prominent Black trans women activists like Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and many others. Recent US legislation has gone back to claiming that there are only 'two sexes'. The illustrious author chose to ignore the word queer in his discussion of LGBTQ people, and placed bisexuals in the same category as paedophiles. Paedophilia, childhood trauma and grooming have long been used to discredit marginalised sexual orientations; it was a shock to find similar sentiments repeated in an article purportedly celebrating Pride. The word queer, with its long history of being a term of shame attributed to people whose sexual orientation was suspect, has been reclaimed by the community for more than 30 years now. It is now the most widely accepted umbrella term to describe a plethora of genders, sexual orientations and identities. The academic field of queer studies recognises diversity while also recovering hidden and submerged voices from before. Think of, for example, the recent book Queer Cambridge, in which Simon Goldhill describes a hidden community of gay men who lived and worked in close proximity to each other (in fact, along the same staircase in Cambridge) in the early 20th century, shaping much of what is today known as British culture. While the contributions of these individuals (including Rupert Brooke, Alan Turing and E M Forster) are well known, Queer Cambridge uncovers the queer connections and community that they forged and strengthened, creating new bonds across generations. Queer pride should also be, and often is, about uncovering such voices and connections. Mainstream, heteronormative society usually marginalises and hides such stories, histories, loves and events. Trans men are often infantilised, trans women made subjects of violence, lesbians made to hide in the shadow of friendship, while bisexual people are simply not recognised. For bisexuals, the author reserved his harshest condemnation: bisexual people can love both men and women, they do not care about the gender identity of their partners, and may even be attracted to trans women for a brief period before moving on and ruining their lives. Between Sigmund Freud's invocation of an anatomical or physical component of bisexuality to this author's association of bisexuality with disaster, the bisexual identity is in general maligned or unrecognised. One reason, of course, is the general belief that bisexual people have it easier, 'passing' for straight in a heterosexual world. Passing is often the only line that saves queer people from violence. Passing as straight, or cisgender (for trans persons), in a homophobic or transphobic atmosphere may potentially keep harm at bay, while also undermining queer and trans expressions of sexuality and gender. The suspicion and distrust of bisexuals encompass the belief that they can summon straight privilege at will, disown their queer identities and partners on a whim, and abandon queer causes. While literature and culture celebrate dazzling bisexual figures like Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo and Billie Holiday, and books like Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends become runaway hits, the bisexual experience continues to be denied legitimacy due to its disavowal of any kind of fixity. This Pride Month, let all colours of the rainbow — and the ever-evolving Pride flag — shine equally bright, and none at the expense of the others. The writer teaches English at The Sanskrit College and University
The Guardian
08-03-2025
- The Guardian
‘A very camp environment': why Alan Turing fatefully told police he was gay
For decades, it has puzzled historians. Why, in the course of reporting a burglary to the police in 1952, did the maths genius Alan Turing volunteer that he was in an illegal homosexual relationship? The admission enabled the police to prosecute the Bletchley Park codebreaker for 'gross indecency', ending Turing's groundbreaking work for GCHQ on early computers and artificial intelligence and compelling him to undergo a chemical castration that rendered him impotent. Two years later, he killed himself. Now, research by a University of Cambridge academic has shed light on the reasons why Turing, a former undergraduate and lecturer at King's College, Cambridge, did not hide his homosexuality from the police. 'There was a whole community in King's quite different from stories one knows about from gay history, usually involving casual pickups and a lot of despair, hiding and misery,' said Simon Goldhill, professor of classics at the college. His research has uncovered a 'rather happy' community in the formerly all-male college at 'the centre of the British establishment' while homosexuality was still illegal. 'It was a very camp environment,' said Goldhill, who will talk at King's 11 March about his new book, Queer Cambridge. For example, in the 1930s, when Turing was at King's, 'the provost [college principal] and many of the senior fellows [tutors] were openly and outwardly gay. They had sex with men and talked constantly about having sex with men.' Turing spent his formative years – from 18 to 24 – at King's, learning it was 'perfectly acceptable' for intellectual gay men like him to not hide their sexuality around people in positions of power. As a result, in 1952 Turing told the police the suspected burglar was a friend of his male lover. 'Turing thought he had the perfect right to be gay. He wasn't ashamed of it. It was who he was.' His experiences of gay life at King's were empowering: 'He'd had a relationship at school and people had been worried about that. So when he came to King's, where it was perfectly acceptable to be homosexual, I think that's when he developed himself as a gay person.' Turing gained a 'political strength and a political clarity' from his time at King's. 'He was somebody who was capable of standing up for himself as a gay man. He thought it was important not to lie, not to conceal, but to say: 'This is who I am. I think you should be able to deal with this.' He got that confidence from King's.' The poet Rupert Brooke and the author EM Forster are among the other gay alumni of the college, along with the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was a fellow at King's alongside Turing. Keynes kept ledgers of every man he slept with and what he did with them for years, Goldhill said. 'He's an economist – and economists count things. He's bookkeeping.' Keynes also wrote about how everyone in Cambridge was 'buggering each other'. Virginia Woolf, a friend of Forster, Keynes and the theatre director Dadie Rylands, another gay fellow of King's, claimed: 'The word buggery was never far from our lips.' Goldhill said: 'There's that extraordinary sense that it was very much talked about and open. You've got a complete gay community at the centre of the establishment, with Keynes and leading figures in economics, literature, music and art in charge.' The gay community at King's is likely to have its roots in a statute, signed by King Henry VI in 1443, which required King's to exclusively admit students from Eton College. 'Coming from one house in Eton, the undergraduates had already lived together as boys. They knew each other for ever,' Goldhill said. 'There was a very strong community among them – and that carried on.' Such intense childhood bonds meant students who desired other men were tolerated 'within the safety of the college walls'. Gay men who came to King's as 'pretty young' students and stayed on to become powerful academics were able to have romantic relationships throughout their lives, ensuring the gay community at the college thrived. Unlike other gay histories, these men not only had 'a sense of continuity of time and place, but a sense of moving through different stages of relationships as a gay man,' Goldhill said. After the statute requiring Etonians was overturned in the 1860s, teachers at other schools began encouraging bright boys whom they knew or suspected were gay to apply to King's, where they would get in and 'have a good time', Goldhill said. To this day, King's has a reputation for being the centre of LGBTQ+ life in Cambridge, Goldhill said. 'There has been and remains a spirit of tolerance and liberal values about the place – though even here, these days, such values are under threat.' King's LGBTQ+ student officer Ainoa Cernohorsky said that while queer students at Cambridge are always fighting for more space to be themselves, 'I have not encountered, seen or felt anything but unwavering support for my queerness – and for my role as the LGBTQ officer – from queer and non-queer undergraduates, graduates, professors and directors of studies at King's. It's a very accepting environment, and I think that's partly due to the way the college presents itself and the stories it chooses to platform.' There is a prominent Antony Gormley statue dedicated to Turing in the college grounds, while a painting of Keynes by his lover Duncan Grant hangs proudly next to paintings of Forster and other gay fellows in the grand college dining hall. 'These people are present in my mind,' said Cernohorsky. 'They left their mark on the atmosphere in King's.'
