Google Searches That Dare Not Speak Their Names

Long, long ago, and far away, I took Psychology.   I know I've forgotten much of it, but I can tell you at least one of its basic principles:  When you forbid something, people want it--or are at least curious about it.  That, of course, makes it profitable for someone.

How is it that the "soldiers", if you will, in the War On Drugs don't understand something so basic?  Most of them have college degrees and, I would assume, took Psych 101:  Probably the only course more college students take is English Composition, as nearly every college requires it.

But I digress.  Once you are aware of the basic psychological principle I've just mentioned, a news story I saw today makes perfect sense.

Here it is:  According to studies--and nearly every human rights organization--Nigeria and Pakistan rate at or near the top of the list of homophobic countries.  At any rate, they have some of the most draconian legislation against same-sex relationships and against people living in, or even expressing the characteristics of, the gender to which they were not assigned at birth.  

Yet Pakistan is "by volume the world leader for Google searches for the terms "shemale sex," "teen anal sex" and "man fucking man", according to a Google Trends report.   I find it interesting, to say the least, that "shemale" comes up so often in searches from Pakistan.

Both Pakistan and Nigeria rate in the top five for searches of "anal sex pics" and "gay sex pics".  Kenya, another notoriously anti-gay nation, rates first in  both categories.

The Huffington Post article in which I first encountered the story attributed such high volumes of LGBT-related searches in those countries to the fact that in those countries, most LGBT people are--not surprisingly--in the closet.  Also, the article alluded to the fact that because homosexuality is not discussed or is denied in the countries I've mentioned, many men have sex with other men--and seek out gay porn on the Internet--without considering themselves gay. That phenomenon seems like a mirror-image of the "down low" in the African-American community.

While "love that dare not speak its name" probably has much to do with the high level of gay and transsexual porn searches on Google in Pakistan, Kenya and Nigeria, I somehow don't think that it explains all of the searches, as the article seems to imply.  As I mentioned, whenever something is forbidden, the people to whom it is forbidden will often develop a fascination, even an obsession, with it.  I think now of the news dealer in Park Slope, where I used to live, who sold porn videos.  Although a lot of lesbians were living in the neighborhood back then (the 1990's), he couldn't recall one buying lesbian porn. "The men--the straight ones, I think--buy it all." 

When I thought about it, it made perfect sense.  Probably nothing is more "off-limits" to a straight man than two women having sex.  Most straight men will never see it, so it is left to the realm of their fantasies.  And, to admit a fascination with it to anyone but another straight man was--and, to some degree still is--a cultural taboo.  

To be so obsessed with such a sexual fantasy ultimately renders the object of obsession as a lurid fascination.  The people involved in such a fantasy, whether they are lesbians, transsexuals or cross-dressers, become freaks--and, thus, all the more an object of obsession--in the mind of the one holding the fantasy.

When you think of it, pornography is a culture's freak show, one that contains whatever is forbidden in the families, communities or societies of the people who look at it.  If I were to meet that newsdealer today, I might tell him that lesbian porn really isn't porn at all for lesbians--or, at any rate, it's nothing more than men's fantasies about what women do when they enter a room and close the door.  And, what can pornography be for straight people but other people--whether they're straight, gay or bi; cis- or trans-gender--doing whatever they can't or won't do in their relationships?

Really, finding out that there are so many LGBT-related Google searches in Pakistan, Nigeria and Kenya is no more surprising than having a woman whom men used to pay for S&M tell me that some of her most frequent customers were clergymen and other men who were considered "pillars" of their communities and had to keep up squeaky-clean reputations. 

William Blake put it best in his "Songs of Experience":

Prisons are built from stones of law,
Brothels from bricks of religion. 

  
 

Hijras: From Scorn To Running For Office

The first thing I read--a long time ago--about hijras made it seem as if they were accepted, or at least tolerated, in their native South Asian cultures until said cultures were "corrupted" by Western/Christian influence.

I wish I could find that book just so I could quote it more accurately and learn more about who wrote it.  I think he or she was a cultural anthropologist who somehow was warped by one of those gender theorists who said things like "gender is performative".  Or, perhaps, he or she was one of those gender theorists but was trying to pass him or her self off as a cultural antrhopologist.

Whatever the case, I thought it was suspect then.  Now I realize my instincts were right.  For one thing, Indians and Pakistanis I've met have told me otherwise.  Their stories have been confirmed by other readings I've done on the subject.

"Hijra" has been translated as "transgender."  Until recently, people used "transgender" as a  catch-all term  to include post-operative transsexuals, hermaphrodites, people who were born male but live as female and  cross-dressers.  That is more or less the way "hijra" has been used, which is probably the reason why it was so translated.

In India and Pakistan, they have long faced scorn, ridicule and even violence.  They live apart from the rest of society, as non-citizens, and have traditionally worked as circus performers, sex workers, dancers and beggars.  Sometimes they are paid to perform at wedding ceremonies, bless babies (In India, their prayers were considered especially powerful.) or simply to stay away from "respectable" communities.  But it has been rare to find any employed in the same ways as other members of society.  

Standing for elected office was out of the question--until now.  Last year, the Pakistani Supreme Court ruled that hijras could obtain identity cards that identified them as neither male nor female.  In essence, a "third gender" was created under law, and people could register to vote, work--and run for office--under it.

Now, a handful of hijra candidates are running for local and national offices in elections that will be held tomorrow.  "Before, no one cared about us.  There was no benefit for politicians in paying us any attention," says Naina Lal, one of the candidates.  "But now they are calling me, asking what we want and how they can help."  

It's heartening to see that Lal actually has support in a conservative Muslim country like Pakistan.  It's even more of a sign of change that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, one of the most conservative elements in Lal's hometown of Lahore, are courting Lal and other hijra candidates.

But somehow it's not surprising.  After all, Lal and other hijras are campaigning on issues like the high rate of HIV infection, skyrocketing food costs and frequent power outages: things about which hijras care just as much as everyone else.

Transgender Day of Remembrance: For The Truth About Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.  For those of you who are just learning about it, this day commemorates those who met violent deaths on account of their actual or perceived gender identity and expression.  It commemorates the 1998 murder of Rita Hester in the Boston suburb of Allston.  


Like so many murders of transgenders--and that of Matthew Shepard, which preceded hers by a few weeks--it was notable for its gruesome overkill.  For all of those who think that we're trying to make our deaths, and the ways in which we are victimized, seem more important than crimes against everyone else, I want to say just a couple of things.


First of all, murders of transgender (and other gender-variant people) have some of the lowest "solve" rates.  When I wrote an article about the issue five years ago,  92 percent of such murders committed during the previous 30 years hadn't been solved, according to Interpol. That has much to do with the fact that they are not taken seriously by authorities in many places; among those in law enforcement and criminal justice, there is too often the attitude that we "had it coming" or that no one will miss us.  The latter notion is, too often, true, for many of us have been cast aside by the families into which we were born or the ones we made.  (In that sense, I am luckier than most, as my parents have been supportive even though they don't entirely approve of what I've done.)


Second, as I've mentioned, our deaths are some of the most gratuitously violent.  In those cases in which investigators actually investigate our deaths, much less take those investigations seriously, police officers and coroners as often as not say that our murders are the most horrible they'd seen.  As an example, just two weeks ago, a cross-dresser and a eunuch were tortured--Their eyes and nails were removed--and burned beyond recognition.  


You might be tempted--as I would have been, not so long ago--to say, "Well, that's Pakistan.  Things like that happen there."  Indeed it is a conservative Muslim country.  But there, as in India, there is a class of people--of which the two murder victims may have been part--called the hijra. They have been tolerated if not afforded equal status, but they have been increasingly marginalized, and even stigmatized, during the past sixty years or so.  Still, the fact that they were even tolerated--if only for their usefulness as sex workers--makes them without parallel in most of the Western world.


(Ironically, "Hijra" is also the migration of the prophet Mohamed and his followers to the city of Medina in C.E. 622.  Most Americans and Europeans know of that journey by its Latinized name, "Hegira." )




To his credit, the Police Superintendent Syed Amin Bukhari has actually formed separate investigative teams for each murder.  And while some people still seem to think that they brought it on themselves by "bringing misery to the streets," as one commentor said, others have lamented the brutality of those slayings.  


However, to find any of those attitudes expressed, or to know how brutal the murder of a gender-variant person can be, one needn't go to Pakistan.  At least, I don't need to.  All I have to do is ride my bike about half an hour from my apartment to Ridgewood, Queens, where Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar lived and died in March.  Hers is one of the (too) many names being read at Transgender Day of Remembrance events this year.   


Somehow, I don't think this will be the last time I mention her name.  I know that there are others--some of whom I saw at the vigil held in front of her apartment--who will also keep her name, and thus her memory alive, for themselves and in the minds of those who investigated her killing.  Even though they made an arrest and are to be commended for their work, I don't want them to forget, for her sake as well as that of anyone else who meets a fate as terrible as hers.  


And I want to remember, and be sure they remember, her and the others because of what Voltaire said:  On doit egards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la verite:  To the living we owe respect; to the dead, we owe nothing but the truth.