Don't Let Them Know Love, Sexuality and the South Asian Family with Sandip Roy, Minal Hajratwala, and Vivek Shraya
Date/Time: Jul 14 2016, 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm
Vancouver, Studio T, SFU Woodward's @ Goldcorp Centre For The ArtsCost: $15.00
Find tickets: here
Seeking 25-40, Well-Placed, Animal-Loving, Vegetarian GROOM for my SON (36, 5’11’’) who works with an NGO. Caste no bar (Though IYER preferred), said the ad in Mumbai’s Mid Day newspaper.
Padma Iyer’s personal ad, looking for a spouse for her child, was no different from thousands of others that appear in Indian newspapers every day. The only difference was that her son, Harrish, is gay. What the ad did (despite expressing a preference for a particular caste) was to normalize the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the public imagination, by bringing it closer home to that most normal of South Asian experiences – that of a mother searching for happiness for her child through an arranged marriage.
Hampering the acceptance of gay love in modern India is Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which under the heading ‘Unnatural Offences’, makes sex “against the order of nature” a crime. On the other hand, a progressive transgender rights law passed in India recently gives equality to transgender, intersex and asexual people, allowing them to identify their gender as ‘hijra’ on their passports. The hijras are a thousands of years old transgender community who have had long standing religious respect in India, albeit little protection from modern day discrimination.
All this goes to show that being LGBTQ+ and South Asian means dealing with a complex tangle of the personal and the political, one that manifests itself in diasporic communities living in countries like Canada, where same sex marriage has been legal for a decade. Despite some momentous legal milestones, many South Asians still feel unable to come out to their parents and families. Do we need to cultivate and see more representations of South Asian LGBTQ+ people across art forms and in the media? What positive stories exist that offer hope on a little talked about subject? What work needs to be done with communities and families? And how can broader society support this process?
To explore these questions in life and art are three fine writers from Canada, India and the USA – Kolkata based Sandip Roy, whose novel Don’t Let Him Know was recently published to worldwide acclaim, Minal Hajratwala from San Francisco, whose A Brief Guide to Gender in India for Granta went viral on the web and Vivek Shraya, a three-time Lamda Award nominated artist from Toronto. Hosting the dialogue is Romi Chandra Herbert, Co-Executive Director of PeerNet.
Books will be available for purchase at the venue while supplies last, and the authors will be available for signing.
Big thanks to our amazing partners for this event: Hari Sharma Foundation, BC Arts Council and SFU Woodwards.
Indian Summer Festival is made possible thanks to the wonderful support of:
Simon Fraser University (Founding Partner)
Heritage Canada, Province of BC, City of Vancouver (Government Partners)
CBC, Georgia Straight & Spice Radio (Premier Media Partners)
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