The same organization that published a study into workplace discrimination in Hong Kong has launched a guide to help employers in India create an environment for LGBT workers to flourish.

Community Business launched the guide at an event in Mumbai yesterday and will host another launch in Bangalore on Friday.

Co-author of the guide Community Business project manager Kevin Burns told Gay Star News the reaction at the launch was ‘absolutely positive’. He said:

‘The one theme that really came through in terms of feedback was that the companies were excited to have a very thorough guide. For example the business case we presented with multiple different arguments and rationale for addressing this issue in the workplace.’

Forty-five people from 25 different multi-national organizations attended the launch in Mumbai and 80 people are expected to Bangalore.

The guide, Creating Inclusive Workplaces for LGBT Employees in India, was sponsored by major corporations Goldman Sachs, IBM and Google and put together with the help of local NGO Mingle (Mission for Indian Gay & Lesbian Empowerment).

‘With changes in legislation and the emergence of a more visible LGBT community - not just in India but across Asia, we believe companies need to address this issue,’ said Community Business managing director Kate Vernon

‘We know, both anecdotally and from our own research at Community Business, that LGBT individuals in India face discrimination and challenges in many aspects of their lives – including in the workplace,’ said Burns.

‘Our view is that companies have a critical role to play in creating workplace environments that are safe and open – and that it makes sound business sense for them to so.’

Community Businness’s next projects include a sexual orientation diversity workshop in Lebanon and more research into the experiences of LGBT employees in Asia.

Yaariyan, the youth wing (ages 18 to 28) of Indian LGBT activists Humsafar Trust is running a queer photography competion open to everyone around the world.

Prizes will be awarded to the best image which highlights ‘queer culture, passion, symbolism, uniqueness and diversity’.

Participants (over 18 only) can submit up to five photographs of a minimum of five mega-pixels each that have not been digitally altered beyong standard optimization.

Winners will be chosen partly via online voting (40%) and by a panel of expert judges who will award for orginiality, technical excellence, compostion, overall impact and artistic merit.

To inspire, Yaariyan included this quote from California photographer Ansel Adams:

‘You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.’

Photographers who want to compete in the Yaariyan Qlick competition should mail your photograph/s, with a 100 explanation for each, to yaariyan.qlick@gmail.com before 20 October.

Interesting interview and sounds like an even more interesting book. Must add it to the reading list.

Q.

With vivid depictions of a transexual beauty pageant in Thailand, a gay nudist hotel in Bali, the ugly forefront of the fight against the HIV epidemic in Burma and a happy-clappy Sunday service at a ‘gay cure’ church in Malaysia, Adventures in Gaysia has more color than a Pride march in Mumbai. It’s also hilarious and serious.

Gay Star News talks to Australian magazine journalist and author Benjamin Law about the inspiration, the ups and downs and why there’s no need to take notes on penises.

Why did you decide to write this book?

First of all, I’ve been gay and Asian for as long as I can remember. My parents are both Chinese, my dad was born in the south of China and my mum was born in Malaysia and they moved to Hong Kong at a young age and spent a lot of their youth there before moving to Australia. 

I think most of us with an imagination wonder what it would’ve been like if we had been born during our parents’ time. When you’re a child of migrants that question is magnified to another level where you often ask, what would my life be like if I’d been born in another country?

A lot of the news stories I’m interested in are queer stories set in Asia: queer events in China being shut down mysteriously, the decriminalization of homosexuality in India. And whenever I read news stories, my instinct is always to wonder about the human side.  I want to know, if there is a transexual beauty pageant going on in Thailand, what are the lives for those transexual women actually like?

How much traveling did you do? How long did you spend in each place? How long were you travelling for in total?

Overall I spent 18 months going in and out of Asia. I didn’t do it all in one block. I found I needed to come back to Australia to get some perspective. 

When it came to the countries I set myself a minimum of a month in each country. But a month’s quite short as well so in some countries I found I had to spend longer. For China, I spent two months in Beijing. But I was glad for that because China proved more difficult to access their queer stories. In a place like India, everyone wants to talk but in a place like China, you really do need to earn people’s trust. 

What were the most challenging countries to travel in and to write about?

Every country posed different challenges. Japan was super easy because the infrastructure’s so great as it’s a developed nation. But so few people spoke English fluently and Japanese society is very much quiet and reserved. They’re not necessarily willing to confess their entire life story and secrets.

So Japan was an easy country to move around in but really difficult for the interviews. Whereas a place like India is so challenging as a traveler sometimes, but, great for interviews, because everyone’s so animated and they’ve got such great stories. 

One of the most challenging countries was Burma or Myanmar as I call it in the book. I’ve traveled in Asia quite a bit before writing this book but Myanmar was the first country where I felt quite a bit of culture shock. When I was there Aung San Suu Kyi had just been released from house arrest, but no one was allowed to be the country as a foreign journalist. It was in that transition stage. The country’s so poor as well, I don’t think I’d experienced that level of poverty before.

When I started speaking to people, the chapter on Myanmar focuses on HIV infection, just trying to digest the extent of the horror there when it came to people’s health was difficult for me. At the end of that chapter one of my interviewees who was an HIV positive transgender sex worker, turned the tables on me and asked me what I could do to help.

When you go to write a book like this about important issues you think ‘well I’m doing a very noble act by writing a book’. But you realise when people turn the tables on you and start asking questions like ‘what are you doing here and how can you help us?’ that writing can only get you so far. The enormity and the sheer scale of the HIV situation in Myanmar still plays on my mind. 

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Police in Hyderabad, southern India, have refused permission for the city’s first gay pride parade.

Organizers say the parade promoting gay, bi, trans, queer and intersex rights was ‘flatly refused’ by police.

But they argue they have a ‘fundamental right’ to hold the event on 14 October and that permission should be granted as a ‘matter of course’.

LGBT organizations Wajood and Prathibimb along with several other groups were trying to set up the parade.

But the event is scheduled for the same time as the international Conference of Parties biodiversity meeting in the city, which has almost 8million residents.

This has, however, not deterred the organizers making arrangements for the event.

They have advertised for costume designers and artists. And they have been seeking accommodation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex activists who have committed themselves to attend from other parts of India.

‘While we want support from various groups, we do not want to be under the umbrella of any particular group as it might camouflage the priorities of those participating in the pride,’ they said.

The parade’s focus was to include the demand to uphold the quashing of section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes gay sex. Homosexuality has been legalized in India by the courts but judges have said politicians need to make a decision on the long-term future of 377.

It also wanted to promote making schools friendlier for LGBTs and campaign against forced marriages

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Blackmailer who targeted around 100 gay men over 10 years arrested in Delhi, India

A 25-year-old man was arrested on Sunday in Delhi for extorting thousands of Rupees from men after having sex with them to keep their sexuality a secret.

Rahul David’s blackmail came to an end when he asked a company director who had already given him 35,000 Rupees ($625, €516) for more money to keep quiet about their sexual encounter.

The director reported David to the police.

Under interrogation David told police that regularly visited parks in south Delhi looking for men to have sex with and visited their homes to blackmail them afterwards.

The social stigma associated with gay sex in India was enough to extort thousands of Rupees.

The Times of India reports that David extorted money from around 100 men over 10 years.

The Koovagam Festival is hundreds of years old (Photo: Project Edgar on Flickr)

Koovagam, the largest transgender festival in India, and in Asia, has opened in the eponymous village near the south Indian town of Villupuram, roughly 160 km southwest of Chennai.

The annual celebrations, also known as Kuthandavar-Aravan Festival, constitute a tradition that is thought to be centuries old, though it has become more well-known in recent years thanks to online popularity, and increasing visibility of LGBT campaigns in India.

The festival commemorates the myth of Lord Krishna adopting the female form to marry Aravan (or Iravan), a warrior who fought with the Pandavas against their rivals, the Kauravas, in the Mahabharata War. Aravan, during the battle, offers to be sacrificed for Pandavan victory, but desires to marry and spend a night with a woman before he dies.

To mark these celebrations, tens of thousands of trans women, cross-dressers, hijras (or kothis) descend from all parts of India, and hundreds of participants in recent years from abroad, to the town of Koovagam, where they re-enact the myth over three days, where they symbolically marry the soldier-deity, and then, on the final day, attain widowhood which they bemoan and bewail together. Koovagam contains the largest temple in India erected in honour of Aravan.

Although locals in Koovagam and Villupuram are tolerant of these celebrations, businesses tend to be more reserved in their reception of these tourists, often to the point of violence and discrimination.

The official celebrations will end on Wednesday, but, unofficially, the festival lasts at least a fortnight. The festival will also include a beauty pageant, which will crown a Miss Koovagam.

BY ROB SALERNO - A photo exhibit by Indian-Canadian artist Sunil Gupta was censored by Indian police following an anonymous complaint that the pictures were obscene. 

The exhibit, titled Sun City and Other Stories: Paris-San Francisco-Delhi, was on display in the New Dehli Alliance Française, and opened to a positive response Mar 23, according to The Hindu. It consisted of 16 still colour photos taken in Paris, highlighting the city’s gay life. 

Following a complaint, the Delhi police sent in an inspector to speak with the Alliance management. Apparently, the Alliance decided to close the exhibit following the inspector’s visit although an official with the Alliance claims that the decision was made in consultation with Gupta. 

Gupta claims he was only told by a third party that the exhibition would be shut down.

One of the obscene photos from Sun City.

Xtra has previously reported about Gupta’s work in Canada and his recently published book, Queer. 

India is the world’s largest democracy by population. Although unofficial discrimination is still common, gays recently won a court case decriminalizing gay sex, which is slowly changing attitudes on the subcontinent and has led India to emerge as a growing gay tourist destination. 

Unfortunately, a challenge to the decriminalization case has been brought before India’s Supreme Court. The Court recently decided to reserve its judgement in the case, meaning a decision will not be rendered for several months. 

The federal government of India has had an apparent change of heart about gay sex

In an apparent change of heart from the position it adopted three years ago, the Indian government has said that homosexuality was tolerated in pre-colonial India, and it was only the British who imposed their Victorian values of morality on what was a largely liberal land. 

India’s chielf law officer GE Vahanvati told the Supreme Court that it was only in Britain that homosexuals “were widely despised and buggery was a capital crime until 1961,” quoting from a book on the British Raj by Lawrence James.

The statment, made on behalf of the federal government, further added that “for many British onlookers, Indian erotic act was a revelation of practices which were all but unheard of in their homeland, or condemned as deviant and depraved. There was group sex, oral sex, sex in every conceivable position, buggery and masturbation.”

Yet, only a month ago, the Additional Solicitor General PP Malhotra had submitted to the Court that gay sex was “highly immoral and against social order and there is high chance of spreading of diseases through such acts.” India’s Home Ministry quickly retracted the statement, however, calling it a “miscommunication,” when there appeared to be an immediate and widespread backlash to the comments, and for which it received a rebuke from the Supreme Court.

Furthermore, the government had, in the original case which overturned the ban on gay sex, opposed the decriminalisation, on the grounds that public opinion was overwhelmingly against it. But, the Delhi High Court in 2009 overturned the ban, saying it was a “violation of fundamental rights” and an “antithesis of the right to equality.”

The current appeal in the Supreme Court was launched by an astrologer and a yoga guru, both of whom want the ban reinstated, and has the backing of all the major religious groups in the country.