An open letter to GLBT Pride organizers in the Maldives

(In response to a message: “In order to avoid a civil unrest among the citizens of the Maldives, please report the event ‘Dhivehi Gay Pride March’ for the purpose of bringing it to the Facebook Management’s attention and urge the organizers of the event to call it off as it is in violation of the Islamic Shari’ah and Law.”)

This is the essential problem with “Islamic Shariah and Law.”  So much of our religion says that no person may judge another in matters of religion; that only God can judge, so when people set themselves up as religious lawmakers and judges they effectively make themselves partners of God. 

Of course the state holds all the cards so any theological argument falls by the wayside in the face of practical safety considerations.  Is this in fact worth the risk of violence and imprisonment?  Any serious struggle for freedom has to face those risks.  Having been beaten and arrested, many of my friends and I are in very illustrious company with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi – but I don’t necessarily recommend it.  We have legal assurances in the US that may not exist in the Maldives.  You can only decide for yourselves when the risks are worth taking.

If you do go through with this heroic act I do hope that you will honor your own culture and our religion and NOT make it like an American GLBT Pride Parade, at least not like a contemporary one.  I was at the first “Stonewall March” in New York in 1970, the year after the Stonewall Uprising and we simply marched.  Some were in drag, most were not, and we kept our clothes on.  There is, after all, a difference between pride and shamelessness.  Over the years the whole affair, in a typically American pattern of commercialization, has become a crowded affair of commercialized sexuality, pornography, and alcohol.  Vendors (more straight than gay) crowd the “rally” to sell trinkets and promote large companies that have done nothing to advance our cause, but pay lip service to “equality” just because our money is just as much desired as any heterosexual’s.

Bare breasts and bare butts show off bodies that are worked out and sculpted in what might be seen as an apollonian ideal, but few of these musclemen know what “apollonian” means.  They are aspiring to the “standards” set by pornographers, and the peer pressure to “measure up” pushes young gay men to focus on their bodies, to ignore their souls.  Steroids are commonly used to build muscle, but those have very dangerous effects on the internal organs and the inner spirit.  Drug addiction and alcoholism are very high in our community as crutches for men and women who pursue shallow ends and ignore their deeper, spiritual needs. 

Our American gay community has been much shaped and developed within the context of American capitalism, a milieu of sexual exploitation and dehumanization.  We see the same thing among heterosexuals, but a “gay community” defines itself by sexual values. We are often cut off from our families and/or otherwise have to define ourselves without the continuity and baselines others take for granted, so we SHOULD think hard and seriously about what our community should be.  The early gay liberationists of the 1970’s did that, but AIDS killed our best and brightest and that leadership lay dead and buried as the exploiters took the lead. 

You have an opportunity to create something truly different and new.  I pray that your Maldivian GLBT community will not blindly mimic our commercialized frenzy for instant gratification, but rather will work on integrating sexuality and spirituality in a healthy, positive way.  Respect for your traditions and religion is absolutely necessary, not in a hidebound slavish repetition of what your grandparents did, but in a thoughtful way that appreciates where you have come from, allowing those traditions and values to grow, to be a basis for more freedom and personal responsibility, not the chains that prevent that growth. 

The American GLBT community has many great strengths and accomplishments, but we also have many flaws, very deep problems.  Please, look critically at both and take this opportunity to learn from our successes and our mistakes.  Perhaps you can create a community that can teach us how to be better than we are – InshaAllah! 

by Jack Fertig

Posted in: Letters