SANJIDA is a 21-year-old Muslim and Puja is a 16-year-old Hindu. These two girls have fallen in love and run off to be together. Scandalous? Maybe, Puja is young, after all, and the girls come from different religious backgrounds. Dangerous? Absolutely. Last July 23rd, the police were called after Puja’s father reported her missing. They found the girls married according to “Hindu law” and living in the capital. But this is not America or even India. This is Bangladesh, where same-sex relations are illegal and punishable with ten years of hard labor or life imprisonment.
In Bangladesh, seventy percent of the population live in poor villages. Village elders are more feared than the police, who are ineffective in an emergency if they respond at all. Like Pakistan, Bangladesh is overwhelmingly Islamic (at ninety percent of the population), and there is little tolerance for homosexual behavior, which can be subject to brutal punishment.
Syeda Mortada, writing for the Bangladeshi English political blog Alal O Dulal, points out that while the rights of women are championed and campaigns against violence toward wives receive much-needed public attention in Bangladesh, the GLBT community remains neglected and has no laws to protect its members. There have been calls for the repeal of Section 377, which outlaws “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” but it’s unlikely that this law will be overturned any time soon.
It’s no wonder, then, that the gay community is largely closeted. While researching her doctoral thesis on Bangladeshi sexuality in 2012, Suchi Karim went through tortuous “friend-of-a-friend” routes to find a sample of nervous gay men and women willing to be interviewed. Interviews were often conducted in public places—especially with lesbians, who felt the anonymity comforting along with an escape route if needed. As she became known in Dhaka as “gay-friendly,” some gay men became wary of being associated with her in any way.
And yet, there is a growing number of Bangladeshi gay men who are coming out—at least partially—and embracing their sexuality. Bangladesh is a patriarchal society where girls are expected to stay close to home, so men have always found it easier to move around and meet one another. But the number of lesbians is also increasing. Karim suggests this is a by-product of women’s increasing contribution to higher education, moving out of family homes for better jobs.
Asia News estimates that between 1.6 and 4.8 million Bangladeshis are gay—larger than previous estimates, but still a small minority in a country of 160 million. Many will go through life never openly acknowledging their sexual identity. The Internet has helped tremendously over the last twenty years, giving more opportunity than ever for isolated gays to meet and socialize. GayBangladesh.com, the first on-line gay forum, appeared in 1999 and quickly attracted more than 1,000 members, but it closed after its founder was killed in a traffic accident. Others, including the popular BoysOfBangladesh.org (BoB), took its place, though they are far from secure, having survived several attempts to shut them down. On balance, however, the Internet has done more to help the GLBT community than anything else.
Lesbians, however, continue to communicate underground rather than use the Internet. Even in the virtual world, women are more protective of their privacy than men, because they have more to lose. The penalties for a woman caught in an “unnatural” act are very harsh indeed. Mortada notes that once Sanjida and Puja were arrested, the media lost interest in the case, and no one seems to know what happened to the two girls.
Through the Internet, access to the rest of the world means growing awareness of Muslim gay rights movements such as the American Al-Fatiha Foundation. This group argues that the Koran condemns same-sex lust but is silent on the matter of same-sex love. Al-Fatiha says you can be Muslim and gay—a lifeline in Bangladesh for the millions who want to be both.
It comes as a surprise to foreigners when they see so many men in Bangladesh holding hands in public, hugging, and even stroking one another. This is considered perfectly normal behavior, yet a man would be in serious trouble if he brushed against a woman. When I first arrived in the country five years ago, it seemed to me all Bangladeshi men were gay! I was assured by more experienced friends that this was not the case.
A lot of gay activity takes place so far off the radar screen that the participants would be appalled to be considered homosexual. “What I do with my friend in my room is just friendly playing around,” one Bangladeshi friend told me soon after I arrived, “it doesn’t mean anything.” An adult unmarried man enjoying shokha (friendship) with another man, so that resting his head on a man’s shoulders, holding hands, being alone in one man’s room, even “experimenting” in one’s parental home is considered completely acceptable. If by chance one is caught in the act, the worst that will happen is that the pressure will increase to marry a woman.
It isn’t just the state religion that prevents most men and women from coming out as gay. Karim believes that social class and location make a big difference. If you’re middle-class and living in Dhaka, your prospects for coming out are much better than if you live in a poor village. One notable exception are the transgender hijras, who are normally poor and uneducated. This classification is so well-established that when a Bangladeshi is discovered to be gay, the tendency is to assume (erroneously) that he or she belongs to this class. In a land where wives can be beaten for failing to produce sons and girls are attacked with acid for displeasing their mothers-in-law, you might think that men dressed in women’s saris were asking for trouble. Instead, there are hijras throughout Bangladesh who are tolerated, albeit somewhat ridiculed. According to Karim, gender-bending behavior is quite commonplace among children, and cross-dressing is tolerated and even encouraged. A boy who continues to dress as a girl into puberty can expect to be teased, but not to the point of distress or trauma.
Bangladesh is an amazing world of contradictions lived out daily and publicly—a world where men are sexually intimate yet abhor homosexuality. As the country becomes increasingly digitalized and more people interact with the international community, there is hope that tolerance and acceptance of sexual variation will become something more than just a distant dream. Unfortunately for Sanjida and Puja, that will come too late.
Ken Powell is a British freelance writer who lived in Bangladesh for five years. His first novel is due out later this year.
