People's sexualities are always fluid: Gay rights activist Altman

Your thoughts on being at the Kashish LGBTQ film festival?I think that a film festival like Kashish is enormously important for the marginalised. The fact that we are able to use cinema as a medium to show the struggle against religious, regional and cultural dogma here in Mumbai is very important. Cinema has a universal language and is able to reach out and connect with so many people at once. The festival, in that sense, becomes a big milestone in the march for integration and equality.Many feel that caste, religion and socio-economic milieu only add to the concentric circles of exclusion in India. As a child of Jewish immigrant parents do you see any resonance with that sentiment?India and Australia are very different countries. Australia is not only a relatively young nation but also largely a country of immigrants. I cannot see any resonances because there are no historical barriers and the sheer disparities in distribution of wealth which are such an important part of the narrative in India. There will of course be similarities in the exclusive experiences faced by homosexuals across the world but I agree India has its own unique challenges.Four and a half decades after your book - Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation – came out, it's still considered an important intellectual contribution to ideas that shaped the gay liberation movement. How did the idea for come about?In 1964, a Fulbright scholarship helped me go to Cornell University. This was a time when the LGBTQ rights movement was going through a critical phase in the US and I could meet and work with several leading American gay rights' activists. When I came back to Australia and began teaching politics at the University of Sydney, I began to gather my thoughts on the issue into a book.Can you elaborate on the psychosocial contemporaneity of your concepts of "the polymorphous whole" and "The end of the homosexual"?The idea of "the polymorphous whole" is not mine. It comes from Sigmund Freud who felt what makes an infant characteristically different from other stages of human life is that a child is polymorphously perverse. He felt it is ready to demonstrate any kind of sexual behaviour, with any kind of pleasure, without any kind of restraint and explained how "civilisation" emerges only after this innate, polymorphous perversity is restrained by psychological repression, social form, and custom. I have always felt that the people's sexualities are always fluid and in ancient civilisations and cultures, like that of India, there has always been a healthy acceptance of that. As for "The end of the homosexual", this is also the title of my book which came out two years ago. It connects what has happened within the changing queer world over the past four decades to larger socio-political and cultural trends. I know it seems impossible but I foresee a time when we'll get to point where homosexuality ceases to be important and stops being linked to identity.You have often spoken about your unhappiness with the current Australian government. Does this have to do with LGBTQ rights?There are many things about the current government that make me very unhappy. This has more to do with its stand on climate change refugees and the reasons it provides aid to other countries, than LGBTQ rights.But isn't incumbent Australian PM Tony Abbott against same-sex marriages? Do you see the community prevailing over this sentiment given how Ireland has now passed a law recognising the same?You are right. Abott has gone on record to speak of his personal discomfort with the idea of same-sex marriages. This is, however, not to say that he is unaware of the overwhelmingly large sentiment across Australia which is supportive. In that sense it's not a question of whether but when. I have a strong feeling that such a change in law could be seen before the year runs out.Do you feel there are takeaways for India from the LGBTQ movement in the West?I feel it's the other way around. The West has a lot to learn from India where historically there's been a healthy acceptance of the idea that an individual can experiment with sexuality. While it's great to see the LGBTQ movements across the world stand up in solidarity with Indians against criminalisation of homosexuality, it is not their place to set agendas. India should work out its own operational definitions of change it wants. This change should come from India and be Indian in its ethos. Only then will it work.p_yogesh@dnaindia.net, @powerofyogesh