Private Life not longer Private

First it was Uganda and now India. It seems to me that it is very hard to have a private life. If you recall, the country of Uganda had published a list of “top homosexuals” which not only included their photo, it also included their names, and addresses. Recently, a gay rights activist whose name was published in this list was murdered in his home near the capital. Now we have the Indian TV network TV9 Telugu indulging themselves in a website where men browse through different profiles in search of sex.

Check these articles here and here!

The TV network dared to stream some images, phone calls with different users and messages that they shared. I personally believe this is awful. It is my understanding that being gay in India, while is not as bad as some other places, it is also not praised. I think that the whole purpose of this was to make a segment about the gay community in India. Whatever the reason might be, they will not be able to fix what they have done. Not only they used those men, they also presented themselves under false pretenses in order to get the results they wanted.

Moreover, there have been reports that some of those men that had been streamed into the TV had been harassed and "victimized “on the work place. My question surfaces, how are they going to fix this?Is a harsh hit with reality but I do not think that they will. They will never be able to re establish the respect that these men have lost. They will never be able to compensate for the multiple attacks they had received, but what seems to matter the most is that they will never be able to feel what it felt like.

I wonder, if these so-called “journalists” that ran the story stopped for a second to think and process the consequences of their actions. I, in one hand, think that in order to maintain some sort of respect for those in that website they would have censored or distortion their faces so that at least they would be unknown to the world. Sadly, this was not the case. Here we are, left with not only a shameful and derogatory view on the gay community, but also with the perspective that it is a wrong thing and that is obscene.

All I know is that if it were I in that situation, I would probably be going through the same thing. Miserably, even in these times our society does not look good on the gay community not to mention the aspect of gay sex. I can’t seem to imagine that a story dealing with a website that was aimed towards a straight pool would have the same impact as this. Even if it was not India, and this story happened in the US I think the reaction would probably be still the same. Even if as a community in congruency with the other communities, progress systematically, its acts like these that somehow discourage many of us to think twice about expressing our ideas.

We have to remember that, everybody deserves respect, we all have that right. Whether is about religion, ideas, politics, etc. We have to respect the others point of view. Because if I do not respect other people’s ideas, who is going to respect mine?