LGBTQ students to tell their story at DU meet

NEW DELHI: "If you don't talk about it," observes Manish Jain (19), second-year economics student, activist and gay, "No one will." It has taken a lot of guts but six members of the LGBTQ community, all students of Delhi University, will publicly discuss their experience of being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer on a campus that's not exactly known for its liberal outlook, in a panel discussion. Organized by student-run Gender Studies Group, "Sexual Minorities in DU" will find voice at the Faculty of Social Science on October 25 (Friday).

"We wanted current students because there's very little talk on the topic. All discourse in gender forums is centred on women, not even lesbians," says Jain, who was forbidden from raising the topic at his college's forum. Open discussion on sexual minorities is new to campuses in general; in a first, Students' Federation of India picked a gay candidate for the Jawaharlal Nehru University's student union this year. The same month, three positions in the DU student union were bagged by members of a group which believes homosexuality is a foreign import.

Jain, who has not come out to his parents, was reluctant at first. "There are no places where you can meet," he says. That leaves dating sites and cruising—both risky. He intends to cover all these issues. He has found his panellists through the group, a page on a social networking site or "friends of friends". But the idea for such a programme came from Ashley Tellis, the first openly gay professor in DU.

Nishtha Tewari (20), a third-year English honours student, felt "more comfortable" after announcing her bisexuality to her parents on Wednesday. "My mother said it's my life. My father laughed a lot," she says adding, because it seemed too easy, "I'm not sure they got what I was saying."

"I know of people who've faced violence," says Jain, "A friend staying in a rented accommodation close to North Campus once had to run out and raise the alarm. The landlord found out and gave him a really tough time," he recounts. "There's also a divide between those who 'act straight' and those who 'act gay' or 'effeminate'," he explains.

Vikramaditya Sahai, a PhD student in the Department of Political Science, prefers a "simple oppositional position" to the "far more complex form" taken by homophobia. Women who think it's "cool" to have a gay friend won't talk about their own sexuality at home; there's "inherent homophobia" even among those who work on gender issues. "There's no narrative of queer experience of the university," he says, other than "perfunctory references". "The university is imagined as a utopia where everyone mingles; people assume there's space for discussion," he explains, "But in DU, space for disagreement has shrunk."

(One name has been changed to conceal identity)

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