Sunil
Pant,
director of Nepal’s only organisation for men who have sex with
men, speaks to Gus Cairns about promoting safe sex in the mountain kingdom
The young, bearded, Asian guy raised a few eyebrows among the market traders of east London’s Brick Lane. What was he doing buying cheap lipsticks, plastic jewellery, and gaudy sari material? He looked too young to have a teenage daughter. And when he started asking for gay movies from the dodgy video stall, well...
The ‘girls’ Sunil Babu Pant was buying trinkets for were, in fact men: the cross-dressing service users of the Blue Diamond Society, in Kathmandu, capital of Nepal. The society is Nepal’s only organisation for men who have sex with men.
Sunil, 31, returned to his home country in 2001 after studying IT in Belarus and working in India. During the day he donated his skills to a women’s organisation, selling native handicrafts. But at night he visited Ratna Park in the centre of the Kathmandu valley, a tiny oasis where up to 200 men cruise late into the night.
 Once-hidden Nepalese cross-dressers are starting to coalesce around the society provided by Sunil |
At Ratna you find metas, men who dress and act feminine to attract the tas, johns, masculine guys who like boys. But being a meta in Nepal is a part-time occupation. Here family life is all and there is little cultural sanction for a transsexual way of life that you will find in say Thailand. Ratna Park cruisers, butch and femme alike, are largely married men, living shadow lives away from the glare of the street lamps. Others are younger, and selling sex, often as the only way to keep their families together, sometimes when parents have died (average life expectancy is 57).
And, as Sunil soon discovered, they didn’t know anything about safer sex and HIV, and were taking it home to their wives. Nepal’s HIV rate is thought to be about one per cent and climbing rapidly with possibly 230,000 already infected. UNAIDs reports that infection is concentrated among sex workers, girls trafficked abroad and the Kathmandu cruisers. “I started off just by chatting to some of them about safer sex and offering condoms,” says Sunil. “Soon a group of us got going. We’d go around in pairs and talk to the guys there and in other cruising areas.”
 Once-hidden Nepalese cross-dressers are starting to coalesce around the society provided by Sunil (pictured left with baseball cap). |
Eventually, thanks to a tiny bit of seed corn money from Family Health International, (FHI) Sunil found a house to use as a centre in Kathmandu. The dynamic young man registered his Blue Diamond Society as a ‘men’s health organisation’ as there was no mention of gay men in Nepalese law.
“ My father signed the application - he still doesn’t know it’s a gay organisation,” says Sunil. He thought he’d be lucky to attract several hundred service users. But in the last two years, Blue Diamond (blue because it’s the gay colour in Belarus, and diamond, a Buddhist symbol of the enlightened heart) has had queries from 10,000 men. They now run a full programme of events, ranging from regular Saturday movies on gay issues (hence the video shopping) to a free STD clinic. The clinic, a partnership with FHI, Red Cross and the US HIV peer-led complementary therapy organisation FIAR, has given out 23,000 condoms. There are regular discussion groups, and basic education and computer training.
Gay life in Nepal is still dangerous. As well as the family shame, there is the constant threat of violence and blackmail from the police, or men who pretend to be police. But the metas have started hitting back. In Kathmandu’s ‘Stonewall riot’ in April 2003, a group fought back at the police when some were arrested. Sunil follows up every complaint of police harassment with the justice ministry. A group recently disarmed a man who had regularly raped some of them at knifepoint.
 Kathmandu’s first gay pride. |
Slowly, he says, a group of men who are in some totally Nepalese way ‘glad to be gay’, are coalescing round the society meetings. Kathmandu saw its first gay pride festival last year. And in November the society held a 3D (Diwali, drag, dance) extravaganza party, where members performed traditional Nepalese dances, paraded in drag, and hosted a dance party for Nepalese and foreigners to raise money for the queer video and book library.
“ We’re a grain of sand in the ocean”, Sunil says. “The security situation, with Maoist guerrillas ruling parts of the country, makes it impossible for men to come in from other areas. It’s even dangerous to travel around town outside daylight hours.” As if founding Nepal’s first gay group was not enough, Sunil has set up an orphanage in his native village for children orphaned by the civil war, for the children of guerrillas and security officers. “I want the next generation to grow up to know each other”. Including, he might add, its gay men.
