Which is to say – thank you for highlighting this for the benefit of all, in all our lovelinesses

Incidentally, SALGA usually is able to march in the India day parade (at least was able to up to a few years ago), but only because it goes to the local community board which then will refuse to grant a permit to FIA (the parade organizers) unless they let SALGA march. It wasn’t really a fight as much of a pro forma arrangement that felt very uncomfortable – i.e. going to the (mostly white, mostly wealthy) community board to force homophobic uncles and aunties to do what is necessary. I suppose it shouldn’t matter, but at the time it just reinforced for me how being a multiple minority can put you in smaller and smaller and more and more uncomfortable boxes until you just get superneurotic.

There were also varying feelings within SALGA about whether it made sense to march in a nationalist parade (particularly since there was not, the year i was part of it, much effort to get into the pakistan day or other south asian parades). We had a nice conversation about the politics of marching in the India Day parade after Queens pride (which is the REAL queer desi pride). I would guess there are still varying feelings and approaches to the issue within SALGA.

Don’t blame the messenger. I pulled that directly off of SALGA’s site. I am also not one to defend Bollywood music. To each their own.

Interesting. Does that weirding out get any worse if the Indian in question is female? I personally have little patience or tolerance for closeted folk in the US myself. It’s a cop out and a lie, for any ethnicity or gender.

As to the article- awesome that SALGA gets their place, but Bollywood music? I admit to owning a few tracks myself, but there’s a rather awesome array of desi (not just Hindi) celebratory music out there…kinda lame to narrow it down like that.

I was about to say the same thing. It’s seem that beating up gay people has become the new in thing for young punjabi males here in Vancouver. Just saw a picture of 2 suspects in papers last week in a gay bashing and they turned out to be 2 young punjabi males. A few months ago a another young punjabi male is goint to jail for 17 months for beating up a gay man. And I have heard countless stories from friends in the gay community about being harrassed by south asian males in the downtown Vancouver area on Davie Street.

this is a fair point. but i have poked through the WVS data, and within societies the secular are never more conservative than the religious, so that’s why people generalize to between societies. westerners, who are preconditioned toward secularism and liberalism going hand in hand over time are ill-conditioned to comprehend that east asian societies which have long had weak institutional religions (this is one reason that enlightenment philosophs idealized imperial china, with its relatively unsuperstitious confucian elite). that being said, in china itself there isn’t that much of a difference between the religious and irreligious, in general both are what we’d consider socially conservative.

Why? Who told you that religion is the only source of socially conservative, traditional values? That would be the only reason I can think of that you’d be “thrown,” and that is of course incorrect. The Chinese are not religious folk, in the main, but they are quite traditional and, like most traditional societies, are based around male-female marriage.