Juveria Tabassum
“Love is a
marriage of true minds,” said William Shakespeare in one of his many sonnets
dedicated to a young man he was in love with. Just like the timeless English
playwright, the world of literature has seen many brilliant poets and writers
who found love in partners of the same sex, and chose to write about the
wondrous sensation of loving another person, with little regard for the gender of their beloved.
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| Sumitra Ma'am Starting the Discussion |
The members then watched an
award-winning animated student film, In a
Heartbeat, which captures the innocent love between two young boys in the
most endearing fashion. The film by Beth David and Esteban Bravo of Ringling
College of Art and Design has gone viral on the Internet and has teased
widespread discussion on the importance of such depictions of the LGBTQ+
community in mainstream media.
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| Meghana Shares Her Views on Homosexuality |
After the film, Meghana
delivered a speech about how homosexuality has always been
prevalent in literature even though these texts have not been given the
attention they deserved. She touched upon the social taboos around
homosexuality and how change needed to start with classroom education that
attempted to overcome such regressive thinking.
The next presentation was by Supriya and Ruhina, who talked about writer Alice Walker’s
epistolary novel, The Color Purple. Set
in the early 1900s, the novel explores the female African American experience
through the life and struggles of its narrator, Celie. This was followed by a
moving spoken word poetry performance based on the story by Supriya. It conveyed not just Celie’s pain through her days of abuse and neglect, but
also brought forward her euphoria over finding true love in another woman.
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| Rakshita on Frank O' Hara |
We then moved on
to a presentation by Viola, Chandana and Rakshita on Frank o’ Hara’s truly
delightful poem, Having a Coke With You. The
poem talks about how O’ Hara finds the man he loves, to be a far more
enchanting muse than admiring great works of art or visiting exotic places, or
indulging in philosophical thought and research. O’ Hara’s breathless verse
conveys his deep affection for his beloved in lines like,
‘It is hard to believe when I’m with you that
there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as
statuary when right in front of it
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| Viola's Take on Having a Coke With You |
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are
drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing
through its spectacles.’
The poem and the
presentation left the club smiling in a weird sense of shared contentment.
After all, what can be more captivating than an expression of true love?
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| Maliha and Avani on How We've Made a Great Mess of Love |
D. H. Lawrence’s We’ve Made a Great Mess of Love, is a
remark on how the society has contributed to the perversion of love by making
“an ideal” out of it. The poem, presented by Maliha and Avani focused the
conversation around how the excessive definitions and boundaries that we put
around love have broken down its innate purity into something that’s insincere
and artificial.
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| Conversations on Homosexuality- Indian Style |
While we
deliberated over these thoughts, Soujanya, Gunapriya and Neharika came up with
a light-hearted skit that showed a young Indian Millenial attempting to explain
the concept of homosexuality to his oblivious mom and his adamantly homophobic
dad.
This was followed
by a video by Shravya, Swati and Ashmita,
which was a collection of views and
opinions of the students of the college on homosexuality. It was an interesting
way to bring the conversation to our own shores. We had Srinidhi set it up for
us with her brief speech about homosexuality in ancient India, where we learned
how the concepts of gender and sexuality remained fluid in mythologies that
maintained every human form to be a natural manifestation of the divine.
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| Akshara and Group take us Through Love's Great Power |
The last
presentation was by Akshara, Akhila, Srilekha and Rakshita on Vikram Seth’s Through Love’s Great Power. The poem is
a scathing protest against the Supreme Court’s ruling of December, 2013 that
overturned a previous amendment to section 377 of the IPC, which criminalizes
homosexual love as “sexual activities against the order of nature”. Seth’s
powerful verse suggests that it is not love that is an unnatural crime, but the
use of power in a way that victimizes an already marginalized group of people,
and deprives them of basic human rights.
In the end, as we
reflected over the poignant verses that we’d just read, we realized how a
discussion on homosexuality somehow ended up being a celebration of love in all
its exceptional forms.
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| Celebrating the Many Colours of Love |
We do not choose
who we fall in love with. And love is, beyond everything, an intimate,
inexplicable connection between two minds and souls. Criminalizing or fearing
homosexuality or any other expression of a person’s love, is merely an
expression of ignorance. Maybe it’s time we stop branding each other with
labels that dehumanize our true, natural feelings and let love run its own
course.
