Sejal. P - The Lesbian Hunt or What Would People Say?

 

Growing up in Bangalore in South India, my only exposure to the LGBT community was in offensive Bollywood movies that featured clearly heterosexual actors pretending to be gay by wearing floral prints and speaking effeminately. [audience laughter] But the,n I moved to America. College greeted me with a group of liberal friends who would say, “Love is love.” And I would go to Lady Gaga concerts and scream, “Baby, I was born this way” [audience laughter] and feel completely empowered. But then, I would go home to India for the summer or the winter and people would ask me, “Do you have a boyfriend? And have you thought about your future and your partner?” And I would say, “I just haven't found the right man yet.” 

 

See, I knew in the back of my mind that even though I came out to all my friends in my junior year of college that I would explore my sexuality for a few years and have fun and discover this side of myself. And then, eventually, I would make it work with the man. I was kind of bisexual, right, so I could do that. [audience laughter] See, coming out to my parents, my family, it never really felt like an option to me. It felt like the end, the death of so many things that I had imagined. The end of my relationship with them as I knew it, the death of the future that they had always imagined for me. 

 

So, as I tried to avoid this inevitable ending, I told myself all these things and told myself the sacrifices that they had made for me and the pain that I really did not want to cause them. But it turns out that I'm not as bisexual as I thought I was [audience laughter] and I probably can't make it work with a man. And so, two years ago now, I did end up coming out to them. There was no anger, there was no questions of whether they still loved me or not, which I'm very lucky to have, but there was a lot of pain, agony really. My mom cried, my dad cried, which he never does. And then, my mom wrote me an email that made me cry the next day. 

 

And she said, “Dear Sejal, you know, I'm proud of you for being as brave as you have been in telling us about this after keeping it a secret for, I don't know, how many years. But I am begging you to think about a future with a man and think about if you can make it work. Because in your 25 years of life, papa has never asked you for anything, and I see that he is completely broken and that makes me completely sad. If you're with a woman, I don't know how I would accept it. I don't know what people would say. I can just imagine them feeling so sorry for us and us having to hang our head down in shame. I'm so sorry if I am not as open minded as you would have liked me to be, or I'm not as liberal or I don't understand this, but I don't. I will still always love you and admire you.” 

 

It was a very hurtful email, but it was not a hateful one. I could tell that she was struggling as much as I was. And so, after weeks of feeling pretty helpless, I started to realize-- My parents and I still talked three times a week, four times a week. I started to realize that a lot of their fears, a lot of their insecurities came from them never actually having met an openly gay woman in India. They thought homosexuality was something that happened to Americans and to men. [audience laughter] 

 

I was like, they've never seen a happily married, successful Indian lesbian. So, I was like, “I just have to find them a happily married, [audience laughter] successful Indian lesbian, and then maybe they'll see that this is something that a future that they could imagine for me.” And so, naturally, I turned to where we all turn in these times, Tinder. [audience laughter] And I contacted. I actually contacted a lot of women that I had gone on, like, one, two, three dates with and I said, “Hey, so I just came out to my parents.” I explained. I wrote a very sincere message basically saying, “Do you know any Indian lesbians that might be able to relate to what I'm going through?” 

 

I didn't have a very big LGBT community back then when I just moved to San Francisco. What was funny was I got a couple of dates out of the Tinder messaging, [audience laughter] but I didn't really get someone that I could speak to or could speak to my parents or whatever I was imagining. And so, I didn't want to give up. So, I started contacting wedding photographers that had LGBT weddings on their website with Indian women. These photographers, all of them replied. One of these photographers put me in touch with Archita, who lives in Philadelphia, came straight from Calcutta in India to UPenn, went to business school at Wharton and now works as a management consultant at BCG. I was like, “I hit the lesbian jackpot.” [audience laughter] 

 

And incredibly, she effortlessly understood everything that I was going through, even offered to meet my parents. And even more incredibly, my parents agreed to meet with her. On the way to meeting Archita at this cafe in Philadelphia, when my parents were visiting the East Coast, I was texting her, worried about all the worst-case scenarios, I was like, “If they ask you about how you're going to have your baby or she was pregnant at the time or anything. I am so sorry.” Worried about if they might say something homophobic. But when they got to that cafe, my mom offered her a box of Indian sweets, mithai. And my dad hugged her and congratulated her on her baby. And in that moment, I realized that Archita was helping my parents understand me better, but she was also reminding me of their humanity. And so, it was an end, but it was an end to a future that never would have worked and I was much more excited about the one that was beginning. Thank you.