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Society
Ain't No Cure for Love
By Vinay Chandran
A self-identified homosexual
in India gets used to being judged and condemned through three
morality-tinted glasses: religion, law and medicine. Religion demands
guilt, law pronounces guilt and medicine reinforces guilt.
This brings us to a
fundamental question: why is medicine so obsessed with 'curing'
homosexuality? If life for the homosexual is limited to choices between
prayer, punishment or therapy, where's all the good stuff?
In the US, the homosexual movement that emerged in the mid-20th century
sought to wrest control from psychiatry, by demanding deletion of
homosexuality from the list of diseases that needed cure. Having
achieved this in 1973 in America, the movement gradually took on debates
around gay marriage, adoption rights and other issues. Now, therapy and
cures for homosexuality find major backing largely from religious
groups.
In India, however, the homosexual movement is still very young. Here,
health professionals in many places still offer behavioral therapy -
going by names like aversion therapy and conversion therapy - to
homosexuals. (In aversion therapy, for example, the 'patient' is shown
same-sex nude images with an electric shock being administered whenever
the patient feels aroused. When images of the 'desired' gender are
shown, no shock is administered. The therapist hopes that the person
will eventually associate pleasure with cross-gender attraction - and
pain with same-sex desire - and thereby become 'normal'.)
Other therapies co-exist with behavior therapy. Many homosexuals speak
of being provided psychiatric drugs used routinely for schizophrenia or
epilepsy in order to 'cure' their homosexual desire. Male homosexuals
who are considered effeminate have been given hormone medication to
increase their 'masculine' behavior. Religious therapy, where prayer and
faith alone are used to 'convert' homosexuals also finds several takers.
The move to control or alter human sexual desire is not a recent
phenomenon. While religion and law compete with each other every year to
reach newer and more sophisticated levels of moral control, medicine has
a more complicated history. Richard Krafft-Ebbing's classification of
various sexual desires as perversions and diseases in the 1890s and
Sigmund Freud's more ambivalent attitudes are beginning points. Then
Sandor Rado and Irving Bieber, in the mid-1900s, took a more vehement
stance against homosexuality, believing it to be caused by pathogenic
families or as a result of phobic responses to heterosexuality.
With this began decades of experimentation to treat homosexuals of their
'condition'. This included transplanting testicular tissue from
heterosexual men into homosexual men (who had been castrated);
hypothalamatomies, part or complete removal of the hypothalamus; and
hormone treatments, since homosexuals were considered to be either
inadequately masculine or overly masculine. Of course, none of these
therapies were successful and resulted in either individuals whose sense
of self-value was completely destroyed or those who were permanently
physically and physiologically mutilated.
But it was physiologist Pavlov's experiment on 'classical conditioning'
- the source for behavior therapy - that gained a hegemonic status in
the 20th century. We have all read about Pavlov's dog, which salivated
when a bell rang though no food was provided, after being conditioned to
that response by repeated exposure to food while a bell was rung. This
was the concept used by psychiatrists and counsellors to treat
homosexuality.
Behavior therapy revolves around one fundamentally uncontested
assumption: the normality of heterosexual desire. To study homosexual
desire with heterosexuality as the frame-of-reference - and then find
homosexuality abnormal - is not a scientific conclusion based on
scientific methods. It is simply heterosexism in practice.
And it is this pathologisation of homosexuality that has led to numerous
problematic responses from the Indian medical sector. A short study on
the medicalisation of homosexuality conducted in Bangalore with various
mental health professionals - including psychiatrists, clinical
psychologists, sexologists and lay counsellors - recorded several such
responses. (Arvind Narrain and Vinay Chandran, 'It's Not My Job to
Tell You, It's Okay to be Gay' (Research supported by Sarai, New
Delhi), 2003)
When these practitioners, restating public opinion, describe
homosexuality as immoral and unnatural, it betrays their connections
with religion that has colored their personal opinion. Believing that
there is a natural process of sexual development, pre-ordained by a
higher force (whether God or Nature) that should be enforced, conflicts
with an essential need for medical objectivity.
When homosexuals visit mental health professionals bearing the burden of
a society that refuses to acknowledge their desires, their distress is
not settled with reassurance and empathy. Instead, there is a
reaffirmation of social morals from the counsellors. One response by a
Bangalore-based psychiatrist represents the attitude that most
counsellors display in such a setting. When asked why a cure for
homosexuality was being offered, he responded that it was not his job to
tell his patient that it was okay to be gay, and that a homosexual who
came to him with distress over his identity obviously needed his help.
There is no examination of the cause of that distress. If social values
oppress the homosexual, why should the homosexual be the one to change
and adapt to society? Why can't the oppressive values of society be
changed?
In the last few years, however, science has shifted its focus. Instead
of attempting to redefine and understand the history of the word
'normal', it attempts to read the origins of homosexuality in our genes,
throwing up a whole new twist and struggle within the gay rights
movement.
The most striking theories came from a couple of psychiatrists in the
Bangalore study. These professionals mentioned that there were
possibilities of discovering which gene in the human DNA sequence
determined sexual preference. Once this is discovered, by scientific
means much like suppression of other genetic flaws, this 'gay-gene' too
could be suppressed. But the dangers of such a theory are easily
foreseen. We can imagine a future where the creation of the ideal man or
woman includes the suppression of 'socially unwanted' desires,
reminiscent of so many sci-fi theories.
Is it all gloom and doom, though? Admittedly, the movement has taken
many steps forward, and there is hope in the way mental health
professionals have been reacting. Many professionals proactively update
themselves on advances in the world on gay and lesbian rights and know
both the futility and danger that aversion therapy can bring to
homosexuals. They advocate the removal of homosexuality as pathology
from mental health.
In addition, homosexual support groups have emerged as part of the
larger movement, offering safe spaces for men, women and others to
become comfortable with their identities. Rather than pathologising
their lives, support groups offer homosexuals a space to express
thoughts and feelings without making them feel like they need to change.
This is where the good stuff is; it is really from these spaces that
homosexuals can draw hope.
It is time we abolished the prayer, punishment and therapy framework to
all things sexual. It hasn't worked before, and it never will.
April 9, 2006
(Vinay Chandran is Executive Director of
Swabhava Trust, a Bangalore-based NGO that works to provide
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender populations with access to
support services.)
By arrangement with
Women's Feature Service
Top
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The Week of April 9, 2006
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The Zero That Was India by Kamesh
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Ancient Mangroves in the Womb of the Present
by V.K. Joshi
Celebrating Culture by Neha Girotra
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The Poetry in the Moors by Dr. Amitabh
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Ain't No Cure For Love by Vinay Chandran
The 'Feminization' of Menswear by MH Ahsan
Liberating the Nuns by Mehru Jaffer
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Apa's Survival Mantra : A Profile of Angela Gomes
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