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Living a lie: Issues of identity
- Modjaji Books
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9(50 :650 chose to write under a pseudonym. Brought up in a conservative Hindu Gujerati family, she has had numerous hurdles to overcome, but has succeeded in living a meaningful and spiritually fulfilling life as a lesbian. 30=05.(30,!0::<,: 6-0+,5;0;@ 9(50:650 Why do I want to use a pseudonym for my story? I think there are a number of reasons. The other day I was talking to a friend of mine and she said at times she wondered if I was homophobic. I laughed my head off. “Why do you say that?” “Because you are very critical of gay and lesbian people who are very out there.” Actually, what offends me is anybody who is out there, in your face. It’s nothing to do with the fact of being gay; anybody who is continually in your face with their views – political or other – really bothers me. And I think it’s mainly a question of privacy that is the problem for me. I’ve always been a very private person. I come from a very conservative family, and one learns to respect that, as much as you make life choices, there is a sense that you don’t impose them on your family, or anyone else. Also, my family, who know about my homosexuality, don’t really know what to do with it. My brother is quite cool about having a gay sister, and on the surface is quite open about it. But my sister-in-law, his wife, is the epitome of someone who says that she approves, but is totally against it, and there is a whole passiveaggressive behaviour around it. She has a strange attitude; there’s a kind of falsehood about her response, like she is living a lie – not me who’s living the lie, but her. I’ve tried to be quite up front and say from the beginning: This is who I am. Her response has been the whole emotional stuff of pretending it’s fine when obviously it is not. Myfatherisstillalive,andwhenItoldhimIwasgay,hewanted me to go and see a therapist, and the doctor, and get medication for 1 Pseudonym [18.221.208.183] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:14 GMT) 9(50:650 it. I sat there thinking, what pill is going to cure this? But when he had thought about it, he admitted it was a hard choice for me, and he would advise me to live in privacy, which is more his need rather than my mine. So, I vacillate, not so much being private about being gay, but private about my relationship. I openly admit that my colleagues probably know I’m gay, but I’m very careful about who I’m with, and who I talk to. I don’t want it to be an issue, and I don’t want to discuss it with anyone – I don’t what to talk about my sex life with anyone. Even if I were heterosexual, I still wouldn’t want to talk about it. At times I feel there is this bizarre curiosity, which makes me uncomfortable. I’ve always questioned my sexuality, at least since I went to Varsity, although I had always been heterosexual. But I came to question my sexuality, because so often lesbian women would hit on me, or ask me out, and I began to think: What’s going on here; what’s wrong with me? And when I talked to my friends about it, and we had deep discussions, we all concluded that I was really heterosexual. Despite this, I remained single for a long time. Then I met and fell in love with a woman – spiritually, because it never reached a sexual level at all. But I didn’t make the connection that I was gay, because it was a soul connection that we had. In a sense I was living a lie in this relationship, and didn’t know what was really going on. Throughout this fairly lengthy relationship this person would maintain that she was heterosexual, but she wanted to continue being with me. I really didn’t know where I was, and kept thinking: It takes two to create something real. We lived together in a digs, at times with others and at times just the two of us. But never any sex. The fact that I was stoned and drunk for much of the time probably helped to keep me in there! I kept wondering whether I was sane or not, because nothing seemed to be real. In the end this rather weird relationship started messing me up, and I could see it was bad for me. So, eventually I disengaged from it. I had begun to think that I was bisexual and, because I had been single for so long, I began to think maybe I’d been batting for the wrong side. I was tired of being lonely. I met my partner while doing a theatre production and we immediately connected; I can’t explain it any other way. She was 30=05.(30,!0::<,:6-0+,5;0;@ a lot younger – there’s a sixteen-year age difference. This was my first serious relationship. I had never done the dating thing. What with my conservative Gujerati background, I had not been allowed to go to a ten o’clock movie until I was 22. And all the Guji guys were scared of me, probably because I was too assertive, so I didn’t get invited out. When I was 21 some of the community elders came to my father and said they were worried about me because I wasn’t married yet. And my father said, “I think you need to have this conversation with Rani; I’ll make the tea.” I’ve always been quite feminist. My brother believed that as a girl or boy you had to look a certain way and be a certain way, but I looked at all this Guji stuff and thought: I’m not going to get married; I want nothing to do with all this. For me, it was very much to do with rights; it was nothing to do with sexuality, but with gender rights. I thought: Why do you have the right to drive the car, and I can’t do the same? And my brother could go to a nightclub till two or even five in the morning, but I was not allowed out. And so, when I met my partner, I felt like I had waited my whole life for this. It was a very humbling experience for me and I had to work through a whole lot of my own issues about my body, and weight issues. When she first told me I was beautiful, I cried, because I thought, Oh, my god, are you sure? It’s done so much for my confidence, and I just feel so settled. But at first I couldn’t believe that anyone would want to spend her life with me, because of my own lack of self esteem. So, it was only when I met my partner and suddenly we connected and we clicked, that I had this amazing sense of two human beings who had fallen in love. She was heterosexual before that and had had no hint that she was gay. I happened to meet someone and fall in love, and that person happened to be a woman. However, when she told her family that she was gay, although she didn’t tell them about our relationship, there was a lot of conflict and abuse. Since then she has been able to make considerable peace with her family, and this journey is still in progress. Within my family, they are outwardly quite welcoming, and will say, “Come and see us,” but then will do bizarre things, such as when my partner gave my sister-in-law a hug, she would say, “You don’t have [18.221.208.183] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:14 GMT) 9(50:650 to touch me”. There’s an underlying kind of bitchiness, and she often makes it clear that she doesn’t want to be touched by this “vile” person who might give her something. So, we’ve got an agreement with each other that we don’t ever have to spend much time with our respective families; if we feel the need to we do, but if we don’t, then that’s fine too. My dad has never been told who my partner is, but it’s clear that he accepts it. My brother is in his own world, and doesn’t give it much thought. I was, initially, very afraid of telling him about my relationship because, every time I thought about telling him, I kept hearing in my head the things he might say about it. I’m usually very defensive with him. But when I finally did tell him, it was such a shock because he just said, “Oh, that’s cool!” – and a whole year of angst was just taken away. That has made a big difference to me; his accepting it has made it much more OK, somehow. I wish that with my sister-in-law I could just sit her down one day and say, “Here’s what I think”, but I don’t think she could hear it. I tried writing to her, but she said, “Don’t even bother, I’ll never accept it.” And she has also said, “I don’t want her in my house, as she is not welcome here.” And then I apologise to her, because we’re always so polite, but I think I’m actually fucked in the head for doing it. I say, “Sorry, I don’t actually mean to impose on you,” because, after all, it is her house. But my father lives there and we have to go to their house to see him. I’ve already lost my mom to cancer and I’m not prepared to lose the rest of my family because of her attitude to me being gay. But, all the time she pretends that she had to help my brother come to accept us, and you listen to it, and you think who is daft here? I’m too polite to challenge her and, however angry I might feel, I know that things said in anger can never be taken back. She is totally cold, but she happens to be married to my brother, so we’re stuck with her. In the end, reality is so relative, and as much as I want to say “this is my truth”, she’s never going to change and so I have to live with it. So, I’d rather invest my time and energy in the things I’d like to change, things that can be changed. I do know, however, that if she approached me directly, I would not back down from my position. But I don’t think that day will ever happen. 30=05.(30,!0::<,:6-0+,5;0;@ I think that is why if I’m asked why I don’t go public it’s because I don’t want to spend my time defending my life against hypocrites, people like this. It’s her problem, but she’ll never see it as that. I do have an uncle and aunt, who, when I talk about unconditional acceptance, they would be the example I’d use. Because they just, from the beginning, accepted us. It was hard for them, as I don’t think they had ever met a gay person before in their lives, and suddenly here I was and here was this partner of mine. It took them about six months to be able to visit, but they did, and now we pop in and see them every week and we’re very close. And that’s what matters; that they can make that journey at their age. Of all the members of my family who I’ve told about this, my cousins from London have also been very accepting; they are, like, OK, when’s the wedding? And there are my aunt’s kids who don’t care, because they see that I’m still the same person; I haven’t suddenly got two heads. Acceptance is so important. My brother and sister-in-law are very much into image, that’s their currency, and my sister-in-law is forty-something, wanting to be twenty. She’s going to grow old at some point, and she’s going to have to deal with these things at some point. I don’t believe my whole purpose in life is to share enlightenment with her; that’s her journey, but I certainly don’t have to live the lie with her. I think a large part of the problem is this continual politeness, so that any real engagement with issues is very rare. I don’t even know if my brother’s kids know, or how they deal with it in their family. When my father dies, maybe it will be different, but while he’s still alive, I think he’s too old to have to deal with the fact that his kids are fighting. After my mom died, I learnt that life is short. My brother is the Alpha Male, the patriarch, but he doesn’t have the ability to listen; say something ten times, and he’ll come back and ask the same question. Whereas, my sister-in-law sees and hears everything. But is anything serious ever going to impact on her life? I have the strong feeling that her son of sixteen, my nephew, is gay, so both my partner and I watch with the radar out as this boy grows up, and that will be her karma at some point. Of course, whether he ever acts on it, or decides to do what, in my opinion, most of the Guji guys do – get married and live in the [18.221.208.183] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:14 GMT) 9(50:650 closet for the rest of his life – I don’t know. But, at the moment his interests appear to lie elsewhere. So, maybe my karma is to exist in my sister-in-law’s life, and her lessons will come in their own time. For me, then, my sexuality is really a spiritual thing. I don’t go around telling people about my religion, and what it means to me. It’s a quiet acceptance of a spiritual presence, and I think this is how I’ve experienced being gay: it’s just a quiet acceptance of who I actually am. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m a good facilitator, or the fact that I’m a bad report writer. It doesn’t change me, it just adds to who I am. I know who I am, and it helps to define who I am, but it’s not the definition of who I am. I think another aspect of keeping one’s life private, is that there are two people in a relationship. I could see myself saying: “Actually I don’t give a toss about who knows; I’ve lived in this community for long enough for people to think it doesn’t really matter.” But there are two of us and, until we’ve both made that stand, until we’re both ready to talk about the partnership, it can’t happen. When I was working for an Aids organisation, one of my team members came to me one day and said he had just found out that he was HIV positive. I asked whether he was going to tell the team. And he said, “Oh no, I would never admit something like that in this organisation.” I thought that was living a lie because presumably you’re working in Aids because of the people. The problem is that people expect you to respond according to a certain script, and when you can’t respond within that script it’s a very different world you live in. The level of pain you would have to go through is just too deep, because it’s about your own identity. So, if I’m a coward, I’m at least a conscious coward. But it’s a bizarre world we live in. My activism is through theatre. All the plays I’ve done have had an aspect of gay relationships, and the difficulty of being gay in a relationship. These have expressed some of my more feminist views. But in terms of my own life, I just live it, and in living it and trying to be normal – in the sense that I believe I am normal – that should be the indication that I can do it. I’ve never been one to join a march, but I’d certainly write a poem or do a play about it. That’s my way of getting through it. In the play I directed, which touched on issues of identity and relationships, for example, 30=05.(30,!0::<,:6-0+,5;0;@ I knew that I was questioning my own sexuality, and it seemed that a lot of others were doing the same. And I felt that to find an expression of that in a normal environment was very powerful. And there was no judgement, so that if some of the cast wanted to discuss relationships between women, and some wanted to discuss religion, that was fine. However, what I do know is that it’s so nice to be happy, and to feel I’ve reached a point in my life where I really am happy. I’ve never had anything that I could call “domestic bliss” and when you find it, it is wonderfully enlightening and comforting, although it’s a very quiet relationship; very peaceful. There’s something about falling in love that brings a new sense of clarity, like an awakening, and suddenly I see everything a lot clearer now. You have to learn to love yourself before you can truly love somebody else. When you grow spiritually it’s not usually like a lightning bolt, but like a quiet realisation and progression towards self. I believe you’ve got to actualise self before you can actualise God. For me Hinduism is an amazing religion, because it is quite open and free about God. Being a lesbian is part of actualising myself and my potential, and if I want to be authentic and true to myself I need to accept that, and to see what gifts I receive from that. Then I’m closer to God. I’ve always meditated, and if I meditate for an hour and get hand-cramp through the beads, and get my breathing so deep that I get high, then I somehow reach some form of enlightenment. But this, being in love, challenges me to ask: Is this my karmic journey, is this my soul journey? I don’t believe that God is a sexual being, but the Creator, the Divine Light. I don’t believe God sees gender, and in a sense I don’t believe love sees gender; so for me it is just that I happened to fall in love with a woman; I didn’t look for a woman to fall in love with. I have connected with this person, this soul, on a soul-level, and the physical form is incidental, in a way. I’m still searching, and I’ll keep seeking, and I like sitting and meditating and holding my beads. But God is here for me, and God is everywhere, in all creation. ...