Plenary Session

Speakers:

• Lalitha Kumaramangalam, Praktri, India. Hearing the Missing Voices, Structured Violence & Structural Silence;
• Eugena Gonzales, Pinoy Plus, Philippines Gender, Sexuality and Adolescent Health;
• Geeta Sodhi, Swasthya, India Gender, Sexuality, Care and Treatment;
• Dede Oetomo, University of Aralinga, Indonesia. Cultural and Religious Barriers Around Sexuality and Health

This session dealt with issues of gender and sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, with speakers from Indonesia, India and the Philippines. A common theme was the gap that has emerged between official attitudes and the civil society and social movements that have arisen in these countries, often in response to the emergence of HIV/AIDS.

Lalitha Kumaramangalam, from Tamil Nadu in India, spoke about this in the press conference following the plenary. "We have in India, Section 377 in the Penal Code, which says that homosexuality, or sexual relations between men, is unnatural, and although this law has been rather dormant over the years, it hasn't been repealed", she said. "Recently we had an extremely unfortunate incident in Lucknow, in which some boys were arrested under this section. They were refused bail although this is actually a bailable offence. Now of course we never had Section 377 before the British came to India. But we still have it, although it no longer exists in Britain. Indian and other Asian politicians sometimes invoke the concept of Asian values in response to Western criticisms of these and other laws and practices in their countries".

But Dr Dede Oetomo, from Surabaya in Indonesia and one of the founders of the gay rights movement in that country, argued that these values are not in fact Asian at all. "If you look at our past, and not the very distant past either, I mean the Eighteenth Century, in literature and in iconography, we actually had a society that was more or less comfortable with sexuality", he said. "I am not trying to romanticise that society, there was shame here and there, there was some regulation, but it was quite fluid. It was the advent of colonialism", he said, "that led to the adoption of a more restrictive attitude to sexuality. In the interaction with colonialism, the elite of society, in order to retain their authority in the face of their defeat by colonialism, adopted the values of Nineteenth Century European society, including its Victorian morality. These values are not universally held, Oetomo said."If you talk to working-class people or people in rural areas, who have not been touched by modernity, you find that they have actually retained the old accepting, tolerant version of sexuality".

Lalitha Kumaramangalam agreed. "Many of the laws and practices we have retained are quite archaic. I don't know when they were framed, but they don't really reflect the changing social conditions of today." She referred specifically to India's Prevention of Immoral Traffic Act (PITA). She pointed out that these laws are extremely gender biased."Under this PITA law, women, when they are picked up from brothels or supposedly for selling sex, they book them under the "making a public nuisance" section. The men are never picked up, whether they are brokers, or brothel-owners or pimps, or even the clients. It's always the women."

Kumaramangalam also agreed with Oetomo that many current attitudes toward sexuality are not in fact Asian or traditional at all. "As you all know, we have in India the Kama Sutra. This book actually celebrates sex and sexuality - sex between men, sex between men and women, group sex. And it's a very joyous book, a joyous expression of sex. Then too we have the deva dasis, the temple dancers. In the past these were classical dancers, highly educated, very cultured women, with a very respected place in society. Today most of them have degenerated into sex workers".

Also in this session, Dr Geeta Sodhi, from India's SWAASTHYA Trust, a community-based non-government organisation for people living with HIV/AIDS, discussed how issues of gender and sexuality impact on the availability of treatments, particularly for women.

Geena Gonzales, a peer counsellor with Pinoy Plus, a support and advocacy organisation for people living with HIV/AIDS in the Philippines, spoke about her own experiences as a young woman living with HIV infection, and the impact of attitudes towards gender and sexuality on adolescent health. After the plenary, Gonzales told an astonished press conference about the Mayor of Manila, who does not believe that sex work exists in his city.