When Gay Jokes Are Not Funny...

In my previous post, I wrote about the incorrect portrayal of Indian women as frigid in Underdog Entertainment’s play: Sex, Lies and Pokes—a hilarious take on online dating via facebook. In this post I focus on the portrayal of gay men and transgendered folks in the same play.

Please note, the play is well-directed and acted. I reflect on the laughs that the play earned and what that laugh legitimated and how that legitimacy isolates a certain group. In that sense, I criticize the script and the audience.

In the play, there is a gay or perhaps bisexual waiter who is portrayed making inappropriate advances on the male customers. The suggestion is that gay men are socially inappropriate, clumsy, inelegant, silly, and perhaps crazy.

Do you have a gay friend? If not, I suggest you make one. Having scores of gay friends both in India and United States, I can vouch that none of them carry the above attributes. I have known them to be intellectually sprightly, deeply artistic at times, sensitive at others, and at other times crazy workaholic, practical and grounded. I have known them as community organizers, writers, brilliant speakers, thinkers extraordinaire, awe-inspiring artists, and great cooks. I have spent many an afternoon in deep conversations and heart-warming reflections on life journeys. To some, I owe depth of my thinking and writing style.

Yes, they have their struggles and failed relationships and social rejections. They suffer from depression and anxiety and insecurity. They lack family support. Friends isolate and alienate them. They are openly laughed at.  I, at some level, find kinship in their sense of isolation. Caught in the in-between spaces myself, I find my community, my sense of being amongst them. Please stop making plays that are written from extreme heterosexual perspective.

This takes me to the other, even more oppressed group—the transgendered folks. In the finale of the play, the guy goes on a date with a woman who in reality is transgendered. You and I are privileged to walk in roads with a sense of belonging and ease. While you may know only “hijras” on trains and road signals, I have transgendered friends whose thought and writings I admire. I once had a friend who attempted to date a transgendered man and how difficult it was to come out openly that she was seeing him.  Relationships in their community is both hope-giving and at the same time fraught with pain. They truly live in the margins of society.

Please—have kindness in your heart to know the pain of the others who you mock so easily. Stop being flippant. Start being a human. Not the stupid dumbo boring straight guy/gal that you may be.

In the blogging community, for further insight and studies, do follow Firoze Shakir (twitter handle: @firozeshakir) or Susan Deborah (http://www.susan-deborah.org/).