Life's lessons on homophobia

I don't remember at what age I first realized that girls are actually different from boys. It must have been sometime before I started kindergarten or during those early days of schooling. At that age, the only way to know, of course, is by looking down and seeing for yourself. But I do recall the day the class bully told me that hanging out with girls is not cool. He said girls are usually dirty, they cry a lot and only idiots talk to them. I followed his advice for a long time but in my defense, I did not have much choice. The alternative is to be seen talking to a girl, be teased by the boys and the worst part of it is being bullied by the big guy.

It was much later that I realized how good it actually is to hang-out with girls. In around a decade's time, being seen with a girl had gone from being labeled a loser to being called a champ! Suddenly, having friends who are girls is cool and if a girl comes up to talk to you, you don't get teased, rather you are called a stud. Girls had gone from weaklings who cannot compete on the playground to beauties who must be loved and cherished. And when college happened to us, the competition was more on who scores with which girl than on who scores how much in which paper! We all had that special someone for whom we nursed our feelings and were ready to die for an evening with her. In this madness was a friend who strangely didn't think running behind girls is good and that the whole exercise is just silly. In retrospect, he had a point, my grades would vouch for that, but his reasons were, at that time, shocking!

I wasn't particularly friendly with the strange guy and his choice of not being like us in chasing girls, wasn't very helpful either. But one evening we got talking and that is when he let his secret out. I didn't know why he chose me to tell that. He reasoned that he thought of me as the liberal one in the group. He said he doesn't like girls and that he actually likes boys. My first reaction is that of shock and honestly, I didn't know how to react. I did know about homosexuality but to find one from our group to be gay was unbelievable.

As a child, I had been sexually abused by an 'uncle' who took unfair advantage of me. I had gone through the cycle of feeling dirty, blaming self for what was happening to me and essentially living the horror of sexual abuse. And when the strange guy told me of his homosexuality, I was enraged as I thought he is going to an 'uncle' to some unsuspecting and trusting child. It was much later I realized my mistake of having equated sexual abuse with sexual orientation where relationship is between consenting adults. But on that evening, I shouted at my friend, called him names and said he will rot in hell for eternity.

When I met that friend again after some days, he said he regretted having told me of his sexual orientation. He said it was not his choice but that was how he is wired. He told me that the God, who I had said will make him rot in hell, is the one who created him and made him that way. He said he has the same feeling as I have when I look at a girl but for him it has to be a boy. It sounded strange to say the least. I didn't agree to his reasoning on that day but I, nevertheless apologized for my earlier rage-filled rant. That evening, his words came back to haunt me. I realized that when I was growing up, nobody came up and told me to like girls or to get aroused at watching straight-sex pornography. It was within me to be straight, to like girls - that was how I was wired! That friend had told me that as he grew up, he just liked boys and that it was not because he was somehow made homosexual by someone or that he had a psychological baggage of having been abused in childhood. It was, as he put it earlier, how he was wired. The simplicity of this fact surprised me and made me realize that our desires to be liked and loved is similar, albeit directed at different ends of the spectrum!

The most important part of the realization was understanding that I or anybody else do not have the right to ask anyone to love someone. Why should the society dictate who should be loved and how? And why should an emotion as pure as love have any rules? But a minority within us, the lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders (LGBT) do face these restrictions everyday - for something as simple as expressing love. This fact made me convert from homophobic to a supporter of equal rights for LGBT.

I found love in a girl. My friend did in a boy. The bottom line is we can love and be loved - that is all there is to life and nothing more. Let us not complicate the rules of love with misguided beliefs and closed minds. Let us widen our horizon and start loving.