Love & loathing in the US

In America

Heeding my father’s suggestion, I left St. Stephen’s after three semesters, and headed to the US, to Tufts University in suburban Boston. It was January 1982 and I was twenty years old.

I missed Alka and Rosie intensely — writing them long letters and phoning frequently, despite the prohibitive cost of international calls back then. But I also felt a huge sense of relief at being in a place where I was anonymous, with no one on the campus knowing anything about the stigmas I carried from my past. Even Bharat, at Harvard, was a twenty-minute bus ride away. It was a completely new start. I desperately hoped that being in the US, a beacon of freedom and progress, would somehow help me deal with the anguish and fears raised by my homosexuality. But it proved to be an unrealistic hope. America was not the ‘promised land’ I had imagined it to be in the naiveté of a young man from a distant developing country. I soon found, astoundingly, that not only was homosexuality criminalized here, the hatred for it was immeasurably more real than in India. 

My initial steps in confronting my homosexuality were so furtive and ridden with shame that while making them, I never imagined that they were steps forward — that they would cumulatively add up to emancipation for me.

Thus, at the sprawling university library, praying with a pounding heart that no student I knew should chance upon me, I began to read the occasional articles in the New York Times and Boston Globe about homosexual issues. I would hold the newspaper in such a way that people sitting nearby could not see what I was reading, or I would make a great show of pretending to be engrossed in an unrelated article on a facing page. So, it was in this illicit, conflicted way that I first came to read and learn about homosexuality, about my homosexual self, the self of my intense yearnings, as well as of self-loathing and despair.

So absolute was my lack of formal knowledge about the issue that every article came as a revelation. Despite studying at India’s leading school and college, I had never come across the slightest scientific information on homosexuality, not even in biology textbooks. The sum total of my reading on the subject had been a handful of sexual passages in Harold Robbins’s potboilers and Gore Vidal’s oddball Myra Breckinridge, along with milder allusions in Jacqueline Susann’s books. The only other context it found mention was in the disparaging comments made by my peers at Doon and Stephen’s, as well as my father and his friends. All my life, so far, I had been trapped in a prison of ignorance and prejudice constructed by others. 

The articles that I read most attentively, almost greedily, were those reporting on the roots of individual sexual orientation, a matter of obvious personal relevance. I knew nothing at all about it. Indeed, until I read these articles, I had had no way of knowing that the study of sexuality, including sexual orientation, was an established field of research. In Europe, it had dated back a century to Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, followed by the sympathetic work of Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld and Sigmund Freud. Alfred Kinsey’s research in the US in the late 1940s marked another watershed, like Freud pointing to how widespread same-sex attraction was between men and between women.

As it happened, the early 1980s saw major advances in research on sexual orientation, led not just by mental health specialists but also by a broad range of sex therapists and researchers. Hence, I was faced with a bewildering onslaught of information to digest. At that point, research began to show that sexual orientation, including homosexuality, had complex origins that included genetics and hormones as well as psychological dynamics within the family and society. The older and cruder ideas — that homosexuality was a mental illness or was caused by traumatic heterosexual experiences — were finally giving way to more sensible theories and understandings.

I was riveted by the arguments put forward for one set of causes or theories, as well as the rich counter evidence. Thus, at that time, results from several major studies suggested that gender non-conformity in childhood —‘sissiness’ in boys and ‘tomboyish’ behavior in girls — was a clear marker for homosexual orientation. This theory instinctively made sense to me, given the strength of my feminine traits as a child. But I read that even this theory was hotly disputed, as other studies showed that gender non-conformity was not a necessary prelude to homosexuality because many homosexual men were masculine during their boyhoods and many lesbians feminine as girls. While I couldn’t resolve these often-conflicting arguments, I felt enormous relief at seeing that homosexual attraction was discussed in reasoned, matter-of-fact terms, as part of a scientific effort to understand a complex human issue, instead of the prejudice that characterized every mention of it back in India.

I also remember my relief at realizing from these articles that the consensus among American psychotherapists and sexuality researchers was that same-sex attraction was not an abnormality or a mental illness but a normal variant of human behavior. This had been one of my strongest dreads — that my homosexual desires meant I was crazy or deviant. I read that nearly a decade earlier, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association had removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in response to protests by homosexual men and women as well as to the wealth of research that found no difference between the happiness and well-adjusted nature of self-identified homosexual men and heterosexual men. I was equally relieved to find that most American mental health experts now felt that the goal of therapy with homosexuals should not be to convert them to heterosexuality, but to help them become happier with their orientation.

My other recollection about those articles on homosexuality is that, with a few exceptions, they were grim, both in subject matter and tenor. I read with disbelief the numerous articles about the hate and persecution faced by gay Americans. Everything I had absorbed in my teens from American and British novels, movies and even pop music — not just the sexy purring of Donna Summer and Barry White but also Baez’s ‘Love song to a stranger’ and Dylan’s ‘Love is just a four-letter word’— had made me imagine that Westerners had wonderfully free sex lives, irrespective of the form it took, unburdened by notions of shame or by censure from others, let alone criminal prosecution by the government for such things as adultery, pre-marital sex or homosexuality.

Prominently in the news at that time were legal battles over US laws that criminalized homosexuality, and this was where I learned that homosexuality was a serious criminal offence in over half of the fifty American states, including Massachusetts (where I was studying then). Astonishingly, men were being arrested even in the privacy of their homes for having sex with their boyfriends or other men. Convictions could lead to jail terms of up to twenty years.

Other articles reported on how homosexual men and women lived in terror of being thrown out of their jobs and homes, and being socially destroyed if their sexual orientation was discovered. This forced them to lead double lives — outwardly ‘straight’, and ‘gay’ only to others like them — or move to urban ghettos to find a semblance of community and acceptance.

An extract from No One Else written by Siddharth Dube and published by Harper Collins