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.

Of Mice and Faceless Men

By Jaime Woo

When I’m bored or restless, I turn to my iPod and open up Grindr, the popular and mildly infamous cruising app for men seeking other men. The app is location-based and uses GPS to determine who else is around: within seconds, my screen is populated with scores of images of men tantalizingly nearby. It’s a delightful hit of instant gratification, a marvel of modern technology, and a progressive juxtaposition to a time when gay men hid in the shadows and bushes.

The land of plenty is not paradise, however. There is a cultural brouhaha amongst cruising app users: a divide between the Faces and the Torsos.

The Faces are the more familiar tribe, recognizable from other social media services like Twitter or Facebook. They present through self-portraits, some choosing close-up beauty shots, others going head-to-toe. Many smile, just as many pose, and an oddball contingent try to appear aloof, as if unaware of the camera’s eye.

The Torsos prefer chest to cheekbones, cropping their photos from the clavicle to just above the hip bones. Often (but not always) the men are lean or muscular, at once devotees to the societal signifier of male virility yet also a middle finger to that same society’s widening masses. The Old Spice Guy may have popularized the idea of comparing himself to the schlub you’re with, but the gays did it first (and did it better).

Shirtless men are hardly shocking: in gay clubs, attendees strip, strut, and sweat in great swarms. Being topless is the de facto gay male uniform. But on Grindr, Torsos make a willful choice to become literally faceless, one of an often interchangeable series of bodies. This withholding annoys the Faces, who see it as cowardly, brusque or disrespectful.

Growing up in a Chinese household, I heard a lot about face. To “bei meen” to someone, literally to “give face” in Cantonese, was to have respect for that person. As a child, I heard of people who were “without face,” those considered to have little social capital or hadn’t much respect for themselves. (The English saying to “save face” probably has similar roots.) When I first began to think of Grindr’s Faces and Torsos, I assumed that to be a Face was to give face.

Contents Under Pressure: A Queer Muslim Unsilenced

From the series "Illumination," by Yalda Pashai

By Rahim Thawer

Being both Muslim and queer always seemed like mutually exclusive identities to me. The ideological clash meant I simply could not be both. This wasn’t a satisfying way of looking at the world – I didn’t think I should have to repent for being a certain way. I began asking some big questions in high school and then really started to assert my own identity after moving away to university – somehow the academic space away from my family just allowed for it. It was a scary time of grappling with mixed messages and internalized fear and stigma.

Whatever Happened To My Homophobia?

By Jef Catapang

The phrase “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” has always bothered me. First, because what does that even mean? Second, because yes, you can. The idea that homophobia is entrenched in visible minority/immigrant communities bothers me, even if it’s true, because it is also entrenched in other, whiter households. And the idea that homophobia can’t be rooted out from our cultures offends me, because it means that our cultures are dead and ancient, written down and stove-hardened.

When I say I was homophobic in my early Mississauga high school years, I mean it. I don’t mean I just cracked gay jokes, or that I thought disrobing in the boy’s change room was pretty awkward. I don’t mean that I was homophobic in the way many young straight males are when going through puberty and facing real-life sex for the first time—the kind of homophobia that peters out at “ick” and doesn’t ever really go further. I mean that the idea of gay people disgusted me and I didn’t want any around me. I mean that I avoided good people I used to be friends with. I mean that being gay seemed to me one of the worst things a person could possibly be.

Down a Different Kind of Aisle

By Jaime Woo

Imagine a gorgeous autumn day, one where the wind gently sways the red and brown leaves on trees and the weather’s nice enough to go without a jacket, but you still need a fashionablesweater or wrap to be comfortable. I’m standing inches away from this amazing, wonderful guy, one I had no idea I would fall madly, deeply, truly in love with, and after a few weeks’—okay, maybe a few months’—worth of effort, we’re going legal.

Today is my wedding day and I’m dressed in something inappropriate, but so me—maybe, that backless tunic I love by Rad Hourani—and my soon-to-be better half is decked out in the John Varvatos I picked out for him. In a field are rows of chairs filled by an army of loved ones, of friends and family, of all different ages and backgrounds, who have come in support. There’s my mom, unable to hold back her tears of joy. My cousins are standing with their children in front of them, placing their hands on the shoulders of my restless nephew and niece to keep them still. (Like their uncle, they want to get to the dancing part already, or maybe even more like me, they’re itching to get back to their video games.) My best friend, one of the first people I came out to, is taking way too many photos, and I’ll end up with a few hundred “tagged photo” notifications on Facebook.

Love Letter to Juan Gabriel

By Kelli Korducki

When one mentions “the Ethnic” in the same breath as anything related to “the gays,” there are certain things we (as in, the royal, reading-this-right-now “we”) tend to expect. Attitudes influenced by religious and cultural conservatism, for instance. I’m not going to get into that, though. Instead, I’m going to talk about Juan Gabriel.

Juan Gabriel is the longtime darling of Mexican balladry and is, as my friend Bill would say, queer as a two dollar bill. At least, unofficially.

“Lo que se ve no se pregunta,” says Gabriel whenever questioned over his sexual orientation. Translation: “You don’t ask what is obvious.” From that, one might deduce a further translation along the lines of: “Mind your own business, asshole.”

In Defence of Minority Homophobes (Sorta)

By Navneet Alang

The decline of colonialism and eurocentrism in the 20^th century stemmed largely from two, mutually compatible ideas: first, that all humans are equally deserving of basic human rights; and second, that there is no objective scale by which you can determine the worth of cultures or cultural practices.

But while these two concepts formed the basis for many of the great moral victories of the past hundred years or so, there is still an unease lurking behind them. After all, one says “underneath, we’re all fundamentally the same”, while the other says, “hold on now – actually, we all have different ways of seeing things.” And it’s this discomfiture between what is shared and what is culturally specific that is the source of a lot of the tension within modern multiculturalism.

To get to a point where we could talk about ‘respecting difference’ at all wasn’t easy, of course. Much of it began when people started realizing that it wasn’t necessarily true that “west is best”. Despite being told for decades or centuries that their cultures were inferior, barbaric and backwards, people across the world began to ask themselves: why is my stuff considered not as good simply because it’s judged by Western standards?

Coming Out of the Cupboard: Q&A with my cuz

By Denise Balkissoon

I’ve got 50 first cousins. Yeah, you read that right. As part of the Ethnic Aisle’s Pride edition, here’s a Q&A with Clyde, the only one that’s openly gay.

Was there an actual day that you came out to your parents?

There was. I believe it was 1994, I was 21. I came home from classes on my birthday, which is October 11, which is also National Coming Out Day in the U.S. Oprah Winfrey was having a special where she talked to parents who were dealing with the issues raised by their GLBT kids. I watched the program with my mom. Afterward, I turned to her and said “And you know I’m gay, right?” She sort of sighed and said “are you sure it’s not a phase?” I said no, and she said ok. I kind of left her there with that.

Two days later, I was hanging around with my sister, Suzanne, and late brother, Andy, and mom came up to me. She gave me a hug and said “I don’t care, I love you anyway. I’m glad you came out of the cupboard.” This became a huge lost-in-translation joke.

Open Secrets

By Renée Sylvestre-Williams

When the question went out about whether we’d write something about minorities and the automatic presumption that most are homophobic, I said, “Sure! I’ll write something.” I just wasn’t sure what to write about since homosexuality was never really discussed when I was growing up.

Pride and (Gay) Prejudice

By Canice Leung

I think every person can pinpoint a moment in their lives when they begin to view their parents not as the role models and heroes you automatically trust and believe because they told you so, but as people with feelings, flaws, opinions and ideas that make you think more, less, skeptically or maybe just differently about them.

That moment for me came when I was about 15.

It was a Saturday morning (circa 2002/03, when the same-sex marriage debates and legal rulings were beginning in Ontario), and I had woken up and come down the stairs just as my parents came through the front doors. It wasn’t unusual for them to be up way before me — getting groceries, doing yard work, eating dim sum — but I immediately noticed the bright red T-shirts they had on. Here, to the best of my recollection, is what they looked like: