January 2011 ~ The Rainbow Maldivian

via Hilath.com

This video uploaded to Rainbow Maldives YouTube channel is probably the first openly gender-bending Dhivehi music video to be aired publicly, on a public forum by a private party/person. I heard that, like the Vilureef “wedding” video, which included a lot of gay and other sexual slurs, this was also a video uploaded by a Maldivian for “fun” but what we actually get to see is, at least, Maldivians’ unexplained infatuation with cross-dressing men, be they the transvestite-wannabes at your average circumcision festivity in Male’.

The important thing is that this video has been out and Rainbow Maldives will not be removing it from YouTube. The other noteworthy thing about it is that, whether for spoof or sarcastic or mockery purposes, the video still plays like your average Kasauti hetero love song — complete with a “woman” (the cross-dressing man with long hair or wig perhaps) and (real) man who acts the “man’s part” to another otherwise heterosexual romantic love song.

Today morning another funny thing I came across was while walking by Olympus Theatre in Male’, this poster of Dhivehi film “Udhabaani” which is to be re-released to mark its Mega-Hit status!

A reporter friend of mine wrote this in his review of “Udhabaani“:

And now for the twist. Once you see the twist, things make a bit more sense. Not much, but more than before. You see, it’s not really Amira the sea-monster is after. It’s Eyoopee! Maybe the sea-monster was gay or maybe it was female, you can’t really tell with all that stupid makeup on, but it was one hell of a twist. Take that, Shyamalan!

Now I know what you’re going to say, but hear me out. It gets better. Consider the victims. First to go is the Dad. By putting Dad out of the picture the monster paves the way to break up Eyoopee and Amira. Next is Eyoopee’s best friend, who spends waaaay too much time with Eyoopee. Then it’s the Fanditha-man, who sadly was totally oblivious to Eyoopee’s subtle advances and hints about ‘sleeping alone’ but the horny sea-monster saw through it. Others died too but they were just scare tactics to get Amira to run away from Eyoopee. Ultimately the horny sea-monster’s plans fail and he decides to face off with his rival once and for all in an ultimate love showdown to win Eyoopee’s love.

I took this close-up shot from a nearby wall and possibly the poster being stuck on a pink poster is probably a coincidence — as is the sudden surge in Maldivian young men sporting the very very gay skinnies and pink shirts and pink T-shirts.

Pink, said by some scientists to be the most “peaceful on the eyes” seems to have transformed into a “feminine” color during the world’s Feminist Movement – according to some analysts. And, due to the twisted educational system of Maldives, most Maldivians, too, automatically relate pink to the Feminist and Gay Movements.

Though the Maldives Constitution is anti-Islamic — in that it tries to “spread Islam by the sword” by prohibiting Maldivians from freely embracing other religions — the Constitution (surprise surprise) protects sexuality rights of Maldivian Citizens, including gay and lesbian and other gender rights, as pointed out to Fandiyaaru Kakuni (he told me) by none other than a gracious Maldivian Judge:

Retention of other rights.

(a) the enumeration of rights and freedoms in this Chapter are guaranteed equally to female and male persons.

(b) the enumeration of rights and freedoms individually in this Chapter shall not be construed to deny or negate other rights retained by the people which are not specified in this Chapter.

Article 62, the Constitution of the Maldives

(Source: maldivesinfo.gov.mv)

As I said earlier, I am not sure why suddenly some Maldivian male youth are boldly wearing pink. Are they making an open statement? Or are they damn clueless? (heh heh… I am writing “damn clueless” because that adjective seems more “masculine” rather than “simply clueless” perhaps because of the funny Alicia Silverstone movie, Clueless):

Hence, I do wonder whether the average Maldivian male teenager is really aware that their Conservative-media-brainwashed parental generation would probably think that there is something queer about their sons who wear pink when they are instead supposed to “perform masculinity” by “acting like a man” and probably preferably where black, which again, if you know, is considered a gay color in some circles. There’s no escaping it! heh heh … Perhaps Mezzo Mohamed should be aware of this, as I haven’t seen him wear anything other than black:

Of course, Tedry is one of the few Maldivian male directors who don’t seem to have any homophobic issues and quite interestingly is not afraid of pitching the man as the sex object rather than the woman:

If Maldivian male teenagers are in fact making a bold statement by wearing pink and black, in open defiance of their Conservative parents, then good for them. I salute them. And last I heard, Rainbow Maldives is recruiting daring and courageous Maldivian youngsters to openly fight for gay rights and perhaps hold Maldives’ first Gay Pride March – across the capital Male’s main street Majeedee Magu perhaps, what a sight that would be!

This peer and social pressure to “perform masculinity” is, I believe from my personal experiences in the Maldivian Underground Networks, the root cause of the anti-social attitude which is creating a criminal class of youngsters. As I’ve said in countless blogposts, it is self-evident that religion and sex are the two very personal things for every human being, and if peers and the society prevent the individual from achieving his/her religious and sexual goals, he/she will automatically start resenting his/her family, peers and the society at large. Period.

If you look at their background, they would have suffered from some form of psychological, physical or sexual abuse or neglect, resulting in them to act anti-social and operate in gangs and unleash gangsterism – just to spite their family and society which they feel resulted in their “arrested development.”

I can’t help but feel empathy and sympathy for these damaged kids and be protective for them. To you they may be the unthinking ruthless knife-stabbing addicts but to me they are a blatant mirror that shows me the true – and ugly – face of this sick society we call the Maldives, and every time I see them is a stark reminder of how our families and the society failed to do their duties to us as children and adolescents.

So, I believe that all Maldives’ current social woes have a gender issue behind them. If our parents and peers stopped defining for us what it means to be a man, or a woman, or some other gender, it will be less stressful for us as kids. It’s time you self-righteous Wahhabi and other Conservative parents left alone your kids to believe in whatever religion they want to and also not only allow but to actively encourage them to develop whatever kind of sexuality they like or prefer or they think naturally comes to them. Or if you are afraid to encourage their individualness, then at least leave them alone because their sexuality and sexual life is none of your business!

Look at these repressed kids: if they have sex with a girl, it’s a sort of “gang-rape” call “buffet” (yes, the English word has become a Dhivehi word) to mean maybe even 10 or more guys having it with one girl, after everyone is drunk on alcohol, or marijuana, or heroin, or all of them.

Their wives and girlfriends are nothing more than baby-making machines sitting at home to uphold the “heterosexual and patriarchal family” image that the hypocritical Maldives society expects of them. These guys almost all the time hang out with other guys, meaning they really enjoy the company of guys and not girls, and engage in men-only physical contact games like Baibalaa:

During one of the sacred nights of the last fasting month of Ramazan, one of the most unholy and shocking homoerotic images I saw on MNBC One (not the above video though) was when the cameraperson zoomed in on the guy running out of the ring, and as his loosely stitched clothes (which would give Elizabeth Hurley a run for her money), come off, grabbed by the opponents’ hands, it was like a male strip show disguised as a “sport”. The underlying concept is similar to this:

As I was sitting at a cafe at the harbor, it was a most surreal image: a well-muscled guy’s clothes (the shirt and shorts held “strategically” in clasps, like Hurely) dropping off one by one as other males make a grab for him — and MNBC One showing the replay of the scene in slow motion, in the end he running out of the ring in only skin-tight tights which leave nothing to the imagination as to the shape and size of his crotch.

At this point, a very useful article about Gender Identity Disorder is found again on Fandiyaaru Kakuni’s blog. Read it. It really gives an insight on why sex and gender – male and female – is not clearly defined, not to mention the obvious fact that all human beings would have received both male and female genes because we are the product of both a man and a woman.

“Perhaps there is no one answer, that sexual orientation, whether homosexual or heterosexual; gay, straight, lesbian, or bisexual, all are a cause of a complex interaction between environmental, cognitive, and anatomical factors, shaping the individual at an early age.” (Homosexuality: Nature or Nurture by Ryan D. Johnson)

Thus the unnecessary pain and unnecessary hatred created in gays and people of other genders and sexualities – Heterophobia – towards their friends who, quite openly in public, enjoy “strictly heterosexual privileges” that are “taken for granted” by the larger society:

Gay people know all too well that we take a risk and we face a decision when we display affection in public, come out as Queer, talk about our significant other, or even just being who we are with regards to our gender expression.

How do you feel about heterosexual privileged, people who don’t need to think twice about their actions, and how can we make the world a safer and more tolerant place for us?

Indeed, I have to salute all the “bangaalhees”, the unskilled male expatriate construction workers in Male’ who don’t give a fuck to the gay slurs aimed at them by the homophobic male Maldivian teenagers, simply for the fact that South Asians, especially the Indian Subcontinent, where the multiple genders and sexes of human beings are not only tolerated but accepted and promoted.

You might find this surprising but it is Western narrowmindedness which has actually created the label “gay” which means “men who have sex with men”. Come on, there’s more to that. Anybody who has seen Sholay does not automatically think that Darmendra and Amitabh were gay to sing “Yeh Dosti” (“This Friendship”) while hooting on a motorcycle in a mixture of masculine and feminine expression of joy. In fact, to Indian and Maldivian audiences, this is one of the most moving scenes in Indian cinema (English subtitles included) and there is nothing gay about it in the narrow Western definition:

People should stop “categorizing” things and people into “black and white” generalizations because ultimately, nothing in Nature is straightforward. The Universe we exist in is indeed complex.

So, hats off to all Hijras (the “third gender” in Pakistan) who don’t feel ashamed to be who they naturally are:

So, what is the choice left to “effeminate” (and therefore supposedly automatically gay) people like me? Straight acting?:

We have all done it, know someone who does it, or have varying understandings of what the term means. “Straight Acting” is when a Queer person is not exhibiting any mannerisms that appear to fit an LGBTQ stereotype. For example a gay man who tries to fit in by avoiding seeming effeminate, or a lesbian who tries to avoid seeming overtly masculine.

“Straight Acting” is a controversial and deeply divisive topic, especially among gay/bisexual men where femininity is seen as weakness. Society divides us into gender roles and any variation from it is seen as taboo. This goes back to our earlier discussion on Gay Assimilationists versus Queer Liberationists. Some may see trying to fit in as a good thing, while others may see this as a false attempt to deny ones true identity. Others may feel it is essential for safety and security purposes to cover up their identity.

Should I try to blend in? Well, I’ve tried to “masculinise” myself to a great extent by learning from a male friend “how to walk properly like a man.” But of course, there’s still the issue of my becoming very animated – and subsequently effeminate – when I get excited while having an interesting intellectual debate or discussion. But I keep trying anyway :-)

This is perhaps the last frank blog post I can write about sexual rights in Maldives: the Religious Unity Regulations are now pending with Ibra, and I don’t expect much good to come out of it when it is published in the Government Gazette next week becoming law, since as I pointed out earlier, the spirit of this Adhaalath-backed Regulations is to stifle criticism of Wahhabism only, and protect only Wahhabism, and establish, like in Iran, a Supreme Islamic Council whose head will become the Ayatollah (Spiritual Leader) to whom even President Mohamed Nasheed will be required to answer by law. In other words, mark my words, these Regulations when passed next week, will officially make Maldives a theocracy.

Already, “thanks” to DhiTV, I’m now supposedly very “famous” as the “gay rights champion of Maldives” as the homophobic Dhivehi Post and Himeyn-Ingilaab love to point out.

Ever since DhiTV’s mischief – by unfairly claiming I was behind an anonymous letter on homosexual rights published on Minivan News site which I haven’t even read to date – and other anonymous Wahhabi propaganda, a lot of people ask me directly (and also I came to know that they ask people who are my friends or who have been in contact with me through cyberspace) whether I am gay!

It amuses me. Why are all these people interested in my sexuality?… unless perhaps they want to do it with me! I don’t see any other reason why a person should be interested to know about another person’s sexuality unless he/she is interested in “having a fling” with that particular person :-)

Keeping an ambiguous sexuality and playing tricks on your minds will surely entertain me till the day I die but then, let me deflate your balloon: as I said in my earlier blogpost, Thoughts on absolutism – the virus of Maldivian minds, my background life story is that, my family feared that I would go “astray” by going into drugs and sex, so it was only in grade 8 that I was allowed to go out of home and allowed to make friends (either male or female).

Never mind that at that time, at Majeediyya, it was only a boys’ school and our fellow female counterparts were kept sex-segregated — at the girls-only Aminiya school. So, the key definitive years of adolescence and teenage were “lost” to me and I grew up “socially and culturally illiterate and disabled” (not autistic) and couldn’t easily relate to other human beings because I didn’t know “normal behavior” like how to “hang out, engage in idle talk” etc. In fact, if you know me even now, I don’t normally “tick” with other people unless there is an intellectually stimulating discussion going on – to which I feel comfortable in contributing by engaging in conversation. It just “doesn’t come to me” how to relate to other people and bond with them although socially I may be outgoing but I think, to be honest, that is also an act and performance just to be nice to people and to observe society’s expected norms and etiquette. To please a hypocritical society, I had to be hypocritical myself. What irony.

I don’t want to be as explicit as Azazel or even the “harmless” Warm Pixels, who recently is not proving to be as innocent as he earlier seemed and has now curiously decided to become more explicit, complete with sentences such as, “I don’t know how long it lasted, but yes, after a while, he rolled off of me, and there was a pop as his gigantic glans came out” – for artistic or dramatic effect, I’m not sure.

Curiously, he also seems to have disabled the “Adult Content Warning” function but then again I also have always felt that such cautionary notices are redundant because parents are expected to first check the content of websites before allowing their under-aged children access to such content. In fact, since the Internet has so many anonymous and irresponsible explicit sites, I think all parents should consider the “Adult Content Warning” from the moment their computers are logged onto the Internet. It is the parents’ responsibility to censor content, not the government’s or the state’s. Parents should start acting more as responsible parents the moment you decide to have children.

I am saying this because the first (and homophobic) anonymous commentator to that blogpost of Warm Pixels made the following comment:

Pls put up a disclaimer to this website. Children might accidentally enter this filthy hole of sewage and germs. What if they ask about this website from their parents?? How are we supposed to answer?? So keep your pride and ur sin-boasting to yourself and leave us normal people alone!

May Allah show u the straight path (if not, may you rot in the Fire)

But as this is probably the last explicit blogpost I will write about the issue of sexuality and gender identity in Maldives, I would like to reiterate again that since I haven’t still properly slept with a person (of either gender), I’m not sure what my sexuality is. So, I’m neither gay nor bi nor hetero nor asexual or whatever else.

But, for the largely heterosexual and bisexual audience out there, who seem to be continuously pestering my friends by continuing to make “informal inquiries” about my sexuality, let me say that, yes, I’m stimulated by visuals of vaginas and breasts and I generally watch hetero porn :-) My favorite part of the female body is the neck line and I like fine wavy straight hair on women (now you know why I hate the buruga! This picture of Kylie Minogue should give an idea of “my type” of female heh heh):

Now that we are all clear about my sexuality, or lack thereof, I hope people (both male and female) will stay out of it! The last five years has been hell for me approached by all kinds of closeted people: gays who want to experiment and then be off for good; straight girls who want to experiment what it is like to have sex with an effeminate or gay man, etc, etc.

No sex for me ever. I’m so very very tired living in this dazed and confused society:

I’ve decided not to make new Maldivian friends, male or female. And from the already existing network of friends and acquaintances, I have decided to openly ignore people (men and women) who show signs of homophobia (though they may not be repressed gays themselves) because I find their curious and queer looks and stares at me as unnecessary irritation.

These are my disturbing but earnest thoughts about the reality of sexual identities in Maldives small society where everybody is related to one another. If you want to humor yourself, you could read my close friend DCJ’s sarcastic take on sexuality (and especially homosexuality) in Maldives, from his blogpost, If football is gay.

One word of cautionary advice to all well-meaning siblings: if you have a sibling (brother or sister) or cousin (male or female), for example, whose sexuality you are not sure about, do not express your “inherent phobia” and do not talk and belittle gay or transvestite or other gender or sexuality people in order to make your sibling feel that it is only desirable to be strictly heterosexual and you become a less human being for being gay or lesbian or bi, etc.

I say inherent phobia because I believe that, like racism, it is just another natural in-built defence mechanism naturally inherent in all of us — a survival instinct playing in the form of fear that is created towards the Strange, the Unknown, the Unpleasant and most importantly, the Unexplained.

So, like how we suppress our racism from surfacing though everybody knows it is inherent in us (due to our fears of people of races that are not us), people should now learn to expect that heterosexual people will naturally harbor disgust and phobias against gays or people of other genders and sexualities. So refrain from expressing your disgust because we already know you disgust it. The least you could do is be nice about it and not express it outright when we are around.

Because words do hurt. More than you can ever know because you happen to be “lucky” to have been born to the dominant heterosexual majority of the society.

Even though I need not rudely point out that you do not have the right to belittle us, if you claim to be the humane human being you are, then at least have the courtesy of keeping your disgust and homophobia inside yourselves.

Because when our own siblings belittle gays, if we are gay, we always live in constant fear, of giving out “bad (gay/effeminate) vibes” and we always tend to think that if you, my siblings, found out that I was gay or something whatsoever other, I would be less of a “man” and also less of a human being, because you never seem to tire yourself out pointing out the “fact” that sex is “only” meant for reproduction although science has shown that sex have multiple purposes. Of course you can access such material on the Internet, but in order to plug in your own insecurities, and in order to belong to the “herd”, you deliberately disregarded my emotions and feelings and forced my sexuality to get stunted even before it could blossom.

Having liberal siblings and cousins who not only tolerate but accept and promote their gay friends’ lifestyles, this is a major development and progress in Maldives’ human rights record. Now the only step would be for these well-meaning liberal friends to make sure that their own siblings and cousins have no fear to be anything other than themselves. Live and let live. Some of us Maldivians do believe that their is no afterlife and that this is the only life they get in the Sea of Eternal Time, so, even if you chose to be a believer, let these unbelieving sisters and brothers have the happiness they think (rather than you think) will make them happy in this life which they believe to be short and the only one they’ll ever get. It is their right and let it be.

So, with this impending disaster called a Religious Unity Regulation, I’ve decided to become a total recluse. No friends. Just my PC and work to support myself financially and other harmless entertainment like going to the sea. Since I’m willing to go to the extent of not even making eye contact with you guys and gals because obviously you feel uncomfortable by a potential “effeminate” or “gay” gaze on you might transform yourself into anhendhula firihenkulhin (effeminate gays) or firihendhulha thagarin (masculine lesbians) or worse, you feel you might be seduced by such effeminate gays, I guess this saves you guys and gals from much trouble too ‘cos from now on you don’t have to deal with me in any way because I’m going to leave everyone in peace. Not even eye contact I promise.

Goodbye cruel world.

But of course, I’m not going to commit suicide. In 3 years at the maximum, I will leave this hellhole called Maldives and I will sit rather far far away, enjoying observing you confused Kasauti people mess up your no-lives and fuck up this terminally ill society. There is no saving this Maldives. Better make the exit while you can. Your beloved liberal and tolerant Anni will not be here forever.