Guest Editorial: An ode to my gay mum.
I was thirteen when I found out my mum was gay. My mother and I have a complicated relationship, you see.
She was a bright and colourful woman, with brown hair, cut just short enough for the people around her to call it “boy-ish”. I remember the days we’d spend wrapped up in quilts while monsoon rain bucketed down on the windows of our farmhouse. The adventures; that’s how I remember her story-telling. She’d weave her experiences and history together in the same way golden thread held together the quilts that kept us warm. She was a tailor, an ice-cream truck driver, a business owner, a writer, a Geography major, and a mother to many. Three beautiful adopted daughters, and three with my dad didn’t seem to cover it. She was a mum; to the street kids without homes, to the children of the green grocer who didn’t have enough money to cover their sick child’s medical bills, to the baby she helped deliver in a rural village, and to her own chubby squealing brown grandchildren.
But she was also gay. I never knew. I was a bit of a naïve kid to be honest, and just figured the “girl friends” she spoke about travelling the world with, were just good friends...
The day I finally figured it out was well after she’d died. I received a hand me down suitcase overflowing with photos and journals; each pic dated and the women in them named, each page filled with diary entries, poems, love letters and naked film photos. So many naked film photos... Fuck she was really gay, eh?
As I poured over this treasure trove of insight into who my mum was before she was a mother, I felt a red-hot pain in chest. I can’t pinpoint exactly what emotion it was, but it was intense. I cried, I sobbed, I screamed internally, and I missed her.
It was five years later that I finally came out to myself. Growing up in a brown household in a remote rural Indian village, I can tell you that gay people were few and far between. The only trans people I ever met were street performers known colloquially as “hijra”. These were AMAB people, and sometimes intersex, who self-identify as “Kinnar”, a neither man nor woman mythological creature who excelled at the performing arts. A western feminism lens would call them third gender/third sex. They have existed forever, and in relation to the South Asian subcontinent, forever really does mean 10,000s of years. Most people in this community survive on the very fringes of modern post-colonial society by extortion, performing at ceremonies, begging, and sex work. It is a hard life, but I always understood them to be hired entertainment. They would perform for ceremonies; sing, dance, and play instruments at weddings and births, and wail at funerals. I remember them being there for important occasions, like the birth of my young brother, and then after my mum’s funeral.
My parents never acknowledged queerness in any way or in any sense of the word. Still, getting to be whoever the fuck I wanted, wear whatever the fuck I wanted, and hang out with whoever the fuck I wanted is pretty queer of my parents if I may say so myself. The thing you have to understand about India, and particularly where I’m from, is that tradition is everything. There was no space for gender non-conforming and non-heterosexual people to exist as equals. Looking back at my childhood, it always felt so free and open, but as an adult I realise even my parents were constrained in how they could raise us. My family were oddballs; an older brown Indian man, a white af New Zealand woman, raising three cross-culturally adopted Bangladeshi refugee girls, and having three mixed kids of their own. On a farm nonetheless. It was more than just the language, culture, religion, colour differences though. The way we did things was whack; rebellion every step of the way. I wouldn’t say the mum conformed to the traditions of my Punjabi Sikh family, she reveled in it. She spoke Hinglish, a mixture of Hindi and English, and for all intents and purposes was described as the perfect in-law who dressed appropriately, and spoke respectfully.
Don’t get it twisted, she was a force to be reckoned with. We only ever fought properly once, and she handed me my ass for being a self-absorbed twat. I came home from school later that day to find she’d made me a drawing on a rainbow with a message I can recite by heart having read it countless times since the day she wrote it.
Rimu Lawrence Bhooi, you are a fine and genuine person. When you feel like others are getting to you, try and stand in their shoes, imagine what confusion they might be feeling. You are every colour in the rainbow and I love you with all my heart xx
It never meant much, until it was all I had of her. A confused and grief-stricken little girl pushed down whatever gay experiences I’d had as a child fooling around with “girl friends”. It never once entered my head that maybe watching Troye Sivan’s coming out YouTube video on repeat was a sign. That I’d only ever felt close to women, that I only ever had girl best friends. Boys were annoying, and rude, and girls just had their shit together. It took me 18 years of going around the sun to figure out and admit to myself that I didn’t want to be the women I admired, I wanted to be with them.
I reckon my mum knew, or at least that’s what I tell myself. I feel closer to her here in Wellington that I have felt in a long, long time. She lived in Petone with her partner, and ran a world famous in New Zealand fabric business (side note she supplied the Silver Ferns their fits for one of the Olympics). She was an activist and vocally gay. In the pile of history in that suitcase, I found a photo of her in Petone for Pride 1993, the year the Human Rights Act Te Ture Tika Tangata passed. As I look at the photo again, I can’t help but notice the similarities. I celebrated India’s legalisation of gay sex only recently, and I remember the fear that plagued me for the year I was out and it was still illegal to be gay in my hometown.
She was a formidable woman; a creative, an activist, a storyteller, and a lover of everyone and everything.
The only difference between us is that I don’t fit into this whole woman identity very neatly, though I think if she was alive today, she’d probably would want to identify differently too. Two very queer people, linked through lineage. Like mother, like daughter?