First openly gay guy from Balochistan; I love the US, but not the American Taliban

My ancestral homeland in southwest Asia, Balochistan –land of the Baloch--, also has the dubious distinction of being the land of the Islamic Bomb. It was there, in southwestern Pakistan, that a nuclear device was tested in May 1998. Most Americans may not have heard the name, Balochistan, a France-sized territory that the British colonialists left divided among Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. Though extremely rich in resources and having a sexy strategic location as the northern lip of the Straits of Hormuz, the majority of its inhabitants belong to 200-plus Baloch tribes who eke out a living herding goats. Some are still nomads, wandering the region's huge expanses with their camels.

I come from the Gorgej-- grave diggers-, a Baloch tribe that spans the Balochistan areas of all three countries. Fleeing poverty and hunger, my grandfathers — my parents were first cousins — and their two brothers left their homes in Bahu Kalat in what later became the Iranian part of Balochistan, to go to Karachi, now the commercial capital of Pakistan. In search of greener pastures, they went from there to Australia (Perth) and India (Assam) and finally to Burma in 1902, where lady luck smiled on them and they became extremely rich quarry and rubber estate owners. Among the first few successful Baloch business people anywhere on earth, my family enjoyed celebrity status back home.

I was born in Burma like both of my parents. My eldest sister was classmates all through her school years with Burmese leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi; in Burma this is considered to be like being best friends. Exactly one year after the 1962 military coup in Burma, my family went back to Pakistan. We were reduced almost to paupers. I was just three years old.

Baloch Values

Despite the fact that my grandfathers and parents lived elsewhere for any years—Australia, India and Burma--, my family continued to adhere to many tribal values. They remain committed to the Baloch struggle for freedom, back in Pakistan-occupied Balochistan, having paid a heavy price due foe it. Punitive actions of the state followed as my uncles were accused of bankrolling the 1973-77 insurgency in Balochistan, even though prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto knew our family from childhood. In fact when slain premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto secretly married his second wife Nusrat Sabunchi, my uncle was among 10 or 12 people invited and the couple borrowed my uncle’s car for three days for their secret honeymoon. At the same time, like the rest of the Baloch my family is also fervently anti-gay due to some tribal norms.

"Bugga" is the derisive term tribal Baloch people use for gay men like myself, who play bottom. The word is actually synonymous with the English epithet, "faggot." In Baloch culture, no male person is considered worse than a bugga. Duzzi makkan buggayee diggay durah rawaa eey is a Balochi saying which translates, “Do not steal nor take the passive role in gay sex with another man, other than that everything is okay.” Like neighboring Afghans and Iranians, Baloch culture does not stigmatize the man playing the "active" role in gay sex. The cultural stigma of homosexuality is further compounded by Islam's threat of hell for gays, as most Baloch are Muslims.

As a child, I heard family gossip that my dad's eldest half brother was a cross-dressing gay in Burma. Other family elders never forgave my uncle for that. They cast him in the role of a villain and outcast, and used his example to brainwash me against gays. This played havoc with me when I began grappling with my own homosexuality, growing up in Pakistan as a middle-class teenager. I was not interested in the opposite sex and did not know why. Baring just one dream, in all my happy dreams since I was eight, I saw hot men. 

Pakistan dictatorship

Pakistan was a poverty-ridden society wallowing in dictatorship, and ranking as low as 147th on the United Nations development scale. Pressure to conform to societal and family expectations was so intense, I actually married a woman from a well-known political family of Sindh. In fact her uncle the late Senator Ahmedmian Soomro, who hosted Barrack Obama when he visited Pakistan as a young man, was madly in love with my late mom but each of them got married off to their first cousins. Such marriages are common among feudal families in Asia. The main goal of such marriages bordering on incest is to keep the family wealth from being divided.

The marriage with the Soomro woman of high political status was the cardinal sin of my life, which makes me feel like a criminal to this day. The night of the wedding, when grooms in the East are supposed to "do and show," was the most tormenting night of my existence. It is wrong to assume gay men cannot have sex with women, though. My wife later gave birth to my son, but the stormy marriage was dissolved within three years.

I was severely depressed afterwards, empty as never before, until finally, with medical help I began to accept that I was gay. To my pleasant surprise, my doctor himself came out to me as gay, greatly helping with the healing process, and introduced me to the highly secretive gay community in Pakistan. From my doctor I came to know about an IRC channel where gays could date called Gay Pakistanis. I couldn't believe there were so many others on the Internet. In fact I also attended two gay parties in the posh Defence Housing Authority in Karachi.

Earlier on, I had enrolled in a medical school and then in psychology classes to understand what was wrong with me, but dropped out as there were no ready answers in either field of study in Pakistan. The head of my psychology department, to whom I went for clinical counseling, actually told me that being gay or straight was like some preferring "tea over Coke," and that the tastes could be changed by practice.

Nuclear tests in Balochistan

In 1997, after a decade of work in Pakistan and Gulf newspapers, I became an Internet journalist writing for online publications in the US and elsewhere. My worst nightmare began after Pakistan's top intelligence agency, ISI (Inter Services Intelligence), began blackmailing me so that I would censor my own articles, including those denouncing the nuclear tests in my home region.

The nuclear tests in my ancestral Balochistan were horrific. While Islamists were celebrating those tests out on Pakistan streets, I was drinking heavily and weeping; I used to drink heavily in those days as a means of coping with my sexual orientation. At the test site itself, where the beautiful black mountains were turned into lifeless pale color, the television channels showed the Pakistani war mongers were raising the slogan Allahu Akbar. As I wept, words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Father of the Atomic Bomb” were ringing in my mind’s ears. After creating the bomb, Oppenheimer recalled words from the Bhagavad Gita:  "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.Ii was really mad at Pakistan generals for killing my people mercilessly,  d looting our resources rapaciously, killing my people and pauperizing my family, and on top of that destroying a huge chunk of my homeland.

Like most old-time secular families, mine was opposed to the 1947 separation of Pakistan from India, which was supposedly done for religious reasons, as part of post-World War II British machinations. Though my family elders had their fortune in Burma, their political clout was in Karachi, Pakistan—the largest Baloch city in the world. Baloch formed the majority in Karachi and we enjoyed lot of clout as my grandfather was the Amirul Qaum, or leader of the Baloch nation. We suffered a lot after the 1947 Partition Holocaust when the affluent Sindhi Hindus left for India.

I had no love lost for Pakistan and had dreamed to see a free country for the Baloch since I was 14; now I am 58. With such renegade political beliefs defined as "anti-State" in Pakistan, plus my writings critical of the nuclear testing, the ISI's threat to reveal my sexual orientation, along with their threats of physical harm, meant that I had no freedom of expression. I was in serious harm’s way and left Pakistan to arrive to the freedoms of America.

Imagine my happiness on October 20, 2000 when I landed in the US, land of the free and the home of the brave, which ranked quite high on the international freedom scale until the 9/11 terror attacks. I landed at JFK airport  fully drunk, after consuming half bottle of J&B whiskey that I bought during the layover at Manchester airport. I can't describe the awesome feeling when I saw the Stars and Stripes and the Statue of Liberty. Outside New York's JFK airport, dressed in my native shalwar-kamiz, the baggy shirt and trousers, I turned around to see if someone was watching, lest they think of me as crazy, and I kissed the US soil. I was like a bird out of the cage, migrating into heaven. Here, I could proudly say that I was an open "bugga", the first from an entire ethnic group of over 30 million Baloch people, including the diaspora community. It was indeed my one-way ticket to the moon.

America I love you!

To see women driving Greyhound buses and trucks, couples kissing in public in big US cities, and gay couples in underwear kissing in bars, all of it was like a dream for me. I felt like the tribal woman who, seeing a light bulb glow for the first time in her master's home, back in Na’al, Balochistan, asked, "Master, what is this magic? May I take it home for my children?" From the cradle to the grave, millions in my ancestral Balochistan never see an electric light bulb glow. I'd never seen gay men so visible.

Even before the ISI blackmail strengthened my resolve, part of me had always wanted to be honest and open about myself. It was probably in 1979 when I first read about the gay pride march in San Francisco. I had repressed my homosexual desires then and was in shock and awe how people could March on the streets of San Francisco to declare their sexual orientation. Once in the US, when I went to stay with relatives in Ohio, I came out to them. Overnight, I was no longer welcome in their home. I found shelter in a halfway home called Buckeye House, in the small town of Troy, Ohio. They took me in and even treated me rather regally. The other guys were in a large common room, but they gave me a private room. Imagine a brown person from the Third World being treated better than white Americans.

Divorced from family, relatives and friends I was in desperate need of comfort and support. I remember going to a Pentecostal black church which appeared to be quite progressive as there was lot of talk about Martin Luther King, music and shaking of the booties. I went to the pastor and told him that I wanted to join his congregation and also that I was gay. The pastor said I would first have to change myself before being admitted. I wanted to tell the idiot if I could change myself, I would have kept my ass in Pakistan, which I call Cluster Fuckistan. Later, St. Paul's United Church of Christ in the nearby town of Piqua, Ohio, accepted me into their congregation even though I told them I was gay. The pastor there too had requested me to keep things under the wrap. That said, majority of them made me feel welcome. Most people at the church — all of them white — were very kind, warm and welcoming. For me and America, it was love at first sight.

Ravages of war

My first indication that not everything was "bold and beautiful" in the US was a group home in Piqua for US veterans where I volunteered after staying 50 days at the town's halfway house. It gave me a horrific glimpse of the ravages of war. Homeless soldiers from World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the first Gulf War, were picked up off the streets so they could have a roof over their heads and three meals a day. The derelict porch and the unkempt garden adjacent to it were strewn with innumerable cigarette butts. One veteran jokingly compared them to soldiers discarded by the Pentagon after its occasional wars.

Still, my confidence in my beloved new country remained unshaken. I never hid from anyone in Piqua that I was gay, not knowing the extent of homophobia in small towns, and in America, in general. "Curse of the generations" is how one very well meaning missionary described my condition when I told him frankly that I didn't want to hide my sexual orientation here in the US, since it was in my genes. I was stunned when a second pious Christian told me God would not answer my prayers because I was gay. Another pastor gave me a booklet that said AIDS was a divine punishment for gays.

Finally, I was gay-bashed one Saturday night. When I walked back home, four white men whom I had seen in a gay-friendly bar and told them about myself followed me in their car and attacked me. My jaw was broken and wired shut for two months, but the St. Paul's UCC helped a lot. The episode emboldened me and two weeks later, when an evangelist made an anti-gay speech at a public rally—deploring the US was fast becoming the gay capital of the world--, I returned with a pink placard that read, "God loves all--Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgendered and Blacks." Right in front of the entire town. I later came to know, some diehard Christians in the crowd had wanted to rough me up again.

My immigrant infatuation with the United States took a real downturn after the terrible tragedy that befell the country on 9/11. I was still in Piqua when it happened. I liked the people there, even if many would be dismissed as "rednecks." They remind me of my Baloch people: shy, reserved, proud and straightforward. But to my utter dismay, I began facing nasty remarks and suspicious looks. Some even yelled on my face, “No more towel heads.” Editors of the U.S.-based Environment News Service, for whom I had been working while I was in Pakistan, helped me relocate to Las Vegas.

American Taliban

This was the word I first used in 2003, American Taliban—now it seems, the word has gained currency- or Christians who deem it America's holy duty of invading other people’s homelands. In many cases, when the United States joins forces with Islamic states and the Vatican to undercut international AIDS programs, erode women's health programs, and deny human rights to lesbians, gay men, and transgend folks, these actions are supported by the American Taliban.

As a sympathizer of a gay humanist and universalist agenda, I had detested the Taliban of Pakistan. To my utter dismay, there are millions of Christians just like them in the US, the American Taliban. I saw it with my own eyes when I went to attend a gay pride march in San Francisco in June 2004. There was a Christian fundamentalist holding a placard just behind me. It read, "Gay, homosexuals, faggots-- they are all fooled and controlled by Satan...." 

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GRAPHIC: Torture being inflicted by Pakistan army on Baloch youths in a Pakistan dungeon.