Q & Ass with Rahim Thawer

Rahim Thawer works at a sexual health clinic in Toronto doing counseling with gay and bi men. He also works at an AIDS service organization doing bathhouse counseling. On July 1, he’ll be with Toronto’s Ismaili queers as they march in their first ever solo Pride contingent. Here, he talks with Denise Balkissoon about fetishes, racialization, HIV and, of course, The Ass.

DB: Why do south Asians need their own HIV prevention campaigns?

RT: A lot of people think that HIV/AIDS is still a gay white man’s illness, but in Toronto the rates are growing among women, including racialized women. What ethno-specific HIV organizations try to think about is, how can we reach our very unique communities? We’re working very strategically to do outreach in our cultural and religious communities. As great as some of the more mainstream organizations are, I just don’t think they  have the capacity to tap into the important cultural nuances.

So this ad is a new campaign by The Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention (ASAAP) called “Protect Your Love.” That’s me in the train scene, but initially I was hesitant to participate. I thought it might be too reserved. I didn’t know what kind of messages it was sending out, whether it was trying to promote monogamy, or sell a particular version of same-sex love, etc. But, you know, it’s not. And it has some really important cultural nuances that can reach far and wide.

I think that racialized and historically marginalized people putting out their own messaging and doing outreach in their own communities is probably the most effective approach. It’s what community development really is.

DB: Do you meet very many non-white guys in your counselling practice who aren’t out, or don’t consider themselves “gay”? Who are they?

RT: Short answer, yes. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not only racialized men who aren’t out and perhaps married to women or leading otherwise “straight lives.” Our tendency to over-culturalize the phenomenon exposes our subtle racism and negative assumptions about these men.

Having said that, for the guys whom I have had conversations with that are non-white, they often talk about a range of things, from having fallen in love with their current (female) partners to the importance and value of having a family, to fulfilling family duty. Many speak about not having the option to “come out” at a younger age, or not ever considering same-sex attraction as a long-term relationship possibility.

White Women and Everything You Dream Of

by Navneet Alang

So there I was, blissfully happy, sitting next to a beautiful white woman. For some reason, it’s her toes, painted bright red, that stick out in my memory. And if with that I evoke slightly queasy echoes of the fetishistic, then at least I’ve started at the right place.

It was a few years ago now, this improbably idyllic summer romance. That day we were on a beach in the west end on one of those hot, pale Toronto mornings where one’s sense of time fades into the hazy space between lake and sky. We sat like two teenagers who, the morning after a first kiss are suddenly shy, bodies hesitantly brushing against each other. I remember the milky white skin poking out from under her dress and then a sudden burst of perfectly brushed red. Like something from a movie. Like an image cut out of a magazine.

I can only ask you to forgive me these unpleasant, adolescent clichés. I know, quite well in fact, that they are wrong.  This is the thing, though: you can spend your life arguing against “objectification” and “Eurocentrism” and still be unsure if you fell so hard for someone simply because of who they were—or because of what they, their looks and the colour of their skin represented. This uncomfortable, unavoidable truth hits home especially hard for people of colour: desire doesn’t care what your politics are.

There’s a perfect scene in Undercover Brother just after the film’s hero sleeps with Denise Richards’ “White She-Devil” character. Returning to the headquarters of black power group “The Brotherhood”, the reaction Undercover Brother receives there perfectly captures the strangeness of cultural desire. Dave Chappelle, playing the militant “Conspiracy Brother”, isn’t betrayed or shocked—he’s jealous. “Was it everything I dreamed of?” he asks, incredulously.