So moving right along, the other thing that has me alternating between “amused” and “seething with badly suppressed rage” is the gay scene—or lack thereof—in Karachi. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. The socialising angle of being homosexual in Pakistan is an issue in and of itself, but the serious drama ensuing from the social angle is enough to make me start hurling kitten pumps right, left and centre at any and every queen unfortunate enough to cross my path. BegumNA.jpg

When I was growing up in Pakistan, being gay went beyond just being taboo; it was one of those “don’t even think the word” concepts, kind of like Dubya, only with, you know, actual concepts and not all conceivable mental processes. And over the years it started getting a bit better, but that coincided with growing up, with getting to know other gay men (and one and a half lesbians), with a slightly more liberal government regime, that sort of thing.

But regardless of anything else, there was a substantial lack of a sense of entitlement, of feeling that your parents, friends etc., were obligated to accept and tolerate your particular peccadilloes, whatever those may have been. Drinking, smoking, partying, fucking men—they were all lumped together in an odd smorgasbord of “if you’re going to do it, you make damn’ sure that no one in a position of familial authority finds out”, although the first three occasionally got a free pass, depending on how “fast” and “liberal” the family in question was. [In case anyone’s interested, there were a fair number of such clans.]

What amazed me most when I moved back to Karachi initially, was the degree of openness with which everything functioned. And it still continues to astound me. Alcohol’s not a guilty pleasure (much) any more; there are queens prancing about all over the place, and just the other day, I was listening to a young gay man tell me about how, when coming out to his mother, he (and I quote) told her to “piss off and leave [him] the fuck alone”.

More than anything else, I was astonished at the fact that he hadn’t spent the week following this statement collecting his teeth from around the room in which this statement was uttered. I mean, it’s not like my mother’s violent, but my “generation”—and I undoubtedly generalise here—would find this sort of thing conceptually inconceivable: not just coming out to a parent, but saying it like that. I’m pretty certain that my [hypothetical] grand-children would be counting the bruises well into their teens had I said anything along those lines to my mother.

I do realise this isn’t necessarily “newsworthy”…“Youth of Today Not Like Youth of Yesteryear” is hardly an earth-shattering realisation, and it may well remain irrelevant to the vast majority of people who read this site. And believe me, I understand. I just don’t understand the sense of—entitlement, for lack of a better word—that these gosh-darned kids walk around sporting. I mean, when I came out to my friends at…hmm…lawks, when I was 12 or so, and finally got onto the Internet at the age of 16, I spent all of time talking to people living in the US and the UK, becoming friends with men and women several years older than me. I also ended up empathising with them immensely—many had either lived through the 80s AIDS crisis, or were close to someone who had, and the whole “silence = death” motif really resonated with me.

Which all comes full-circle in that even while at university in the US, I found myself cruising crusading for gay rights, attending and being disillusioned by HRC meetings, really fighting for a cause. For goodness’ sake, I was nicknamed “The Queen Mother” on campus, frequently coming home late from classes to find random freshmen sitting on my couch and doing homework, or in the kitchen putting exam results up on my ‘fridge door, all clamouring for a biryani dinner. Since my return to Karachi, both then and now, my interactions with an increasing number of people have led to this perpetual red cloud, this miasma of anger at the sang froid with which I see people blithely dismissing the gay men and women of a different generation, failing to even acknowledge the difficulties that they…hell, that WE underwent, the shit we put up with and fought insofar as we could, the way we manipulated media and an assortment of social mores (and I assure you, we did, just by insisting on being who we were around our peers and their families, around our own families) so that being gay—while not overtly acceptable—was no longer one of those (pardon the pun) in-the-closet issues that no one would ever discuss or admit to. Baby steps sure, but important ones, and now I see what seems like an entirely different species nancying about, undoing everything that we tried to establish. That we weren’t attention-whores. That we’re not going to abandon the cultural values that define us because of something fundamental to our natures, but that we would try to integrate those values into the system.

Personally, I hate the idea of assimilation (although I continue to think that the Borg are rather wickedly cool), and “normalisation” will lead to sputters of indignance on my part (so much so that I was once asked at a campus Pride meeting whether I was planning to hack up a hairball). Yet at the same time, I feel that there has to be basic cognizance of the fact that in a primarily theocratic society—leaving cultural mores aside for the time being—very few people, myself included, are capable of really overturning the status quo, especially with regards to an issue that most people couldn’t give much of a fuck about. It is very much a matter of undermining the system from within, and all of a sudden, decades of work are being rapidly undone by Hello Kitty Princesses with too much attitude and not enough sense to realise that despite their oh-so-urbane and so-wildly-cosmopolitan exposure and airs, they’re still living in a country where being found making out with someone of the same gender could leave them steaming in a pile of shit so high that the entire nation could use it as fertiliser.

I sound like a complete uncle-ji, I know. And I’m not doing a very good job of explaining my ire, but let me try for an abbreviated (and somewhat clichéd) version: what’s with all the people losing their grips on (admittedly unpleasant and far-from-ideal) reality? I’m using homosexuality as an illustrative example here, but it’s not just the homos and the dykes; it’s the drinkers, the coke whores who, umm hello it went out in the 80s and just is NOT cool any more, the little shits who believe that because they watch MTV 24/7, that somehow grants them the latitude to go out and splatter other people all over the city. I look around at Karachi, or even Lahore, and I see cities and an entire generation spiralling out of control madly. Sometimes you can practically feel the whole thing unravelling like a cheap pashmina, and you wonder where the subsuming of a functional identity is going to leave everyone. I mean, kudos to Begum Nawazish Ali (pictured and linked above) for getting to pull a tranny routine on TV, but how necessary is it to reiterate the stereotypes of a gay man as an effeminate “woman stuck in a male body” or as a hijra?

My homily is coming to an end, I swear. I do have to return this soapbox before dawn, but I still feel afeard that I haven’t adequately expressed what I mean. I worry when I look around me, and see a cohort of Pakistanis who not only refuse to give a shit about what went before, but seem equally oblivious to what they’re setting themselves up for. And this sounds hypocritical, I know, given how many parties I go to and how much I drink and manage to sleep around, but here’s the critical difference (that most desis, I suspect, realise): what goes on behind the scenes doesn’t matter as long as basic appearances are met. And when those are swept aside, you get the 1980s under Zia back all over again, a decade of martial law in which there are 9 p.m. curfews, religious zealots rampaging through the streets, six-year-old kids in schools being taught how to deal with schooldays that are punctuated by lynch mobs and bomb threats (hide under the desks and pretend you’re not around, in case anyone’s curious), and everything that’s been somehow—no matter how discretely—accomplished, is left meaningless.

And believe you me, starting from scratch is a bitch and a half.

Now if one of you could help me get off this stepladder because I’m done getting over myself bayta, that would be very nice indeed.