Rear View Mirror – A story from 2009

Creating a space for voices which are seldom heard has been the passion for Myna Mukherjee, director of Engendered, a New York-based human rights organization which recently held the first ever South Asian Queer Leaders Summit in New York.

You heard some strong, individual voices including those of Sunil Pant, Nepal’s first openly gay parliamentarian who worked to get same sex marriage rights for the community there; South Asian historian and gay rights activist, Mario D’Penha, and Mala Nagarajan, Co-Director of the National Queer Asian and Pacific Islander American Alliance.

The gay community is rich and diverse, no doubt about it. Where else would you have Roopa Singh, an award-winning professor of law and hip hop poet who has worked as a legal journalist in the US Supreme Court? Or Mesma S. Belsare, who is a bharat natyam dancer, choreographer and art-museum educator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA?

A visual sidebar to the event was Purdah 2.0: Body Matters: the powerful exhibition of gay and gender perspectives including the work of Sunil Gupta, Marcus Leatherdale, Farida Batool, Salman Toor, Raghava KK, and Anwar Saeed,  curated by Amina Begum Ahmed and Priyanka Mathew.

It included site specific works by Shailja Gupta and Amir Parsa. This exhibition was held in the beautiful space of Halvai Gallery, a luxury carpet showroom in Soho. Issues which have traditionally been swept under the rug and festered there like a sore were now brought up and proudly hung up, like jeweled carpets, for all to see and admire. The human body, in all its complexities, is finally being loved for what it is – human.

Interestingly, ‘Halvai’ also means a seller of sweets: In a sweet, triumphant ending to the conference, came the news from India that the Delhi High Court had ruled that Section 377, which criminalizes gay sex among consenting adults, is a violation of fundamental rights.