Gay prince

[jfalkon]

I just say this story on television a few hours ago. Its part of a series on family secrets. This week one of the stories was about a prince who came out after an unsucesful arranged mariage. He is now openly gay and much happier. (His mom is still passed.) http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=3337841&page=1

[BeaStKid]

I just say this story on television a few hours ago. Its part of a series on family secrets. This week one of the stories was about a prince who came out after an unsucesful arranged mariage. He is now openly gay and much happier. (His mom is still passed.) http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=3337841&page=1

While his mom is still p*ssed, his father has accepted him....

[Graeme]

I read about this back in January:

 

Prince is out but not down from the L.A.Times.

[Bondwriter]

Nice complement to Ieshwar's Standing At Crossroads; or rather, thanks to Ieshwar, this makes more sense.

[jfalkon]

I read about this back in January:

 

Prince is out but not down from the L.A.Times.

 

Now that you mention it that title sounds familiar. I probably just forgot.

 

The story also reminded me of "Standing at the Crossroads". I enjoyed that story.

[BeaStKid]

Doors slam on royal who came out of the closet

 

Janaki Kremmer in Rajpipla, India

 

 

AT 41 he is still not sure how to make a cup of tea - there is always someone to do it for him.

 

When he was learning to drive, he braked the car so hard that a servant in the back was thrown forward and broke two teeth, but no one bothered to get the dentistry done.

 

Almost all is forgiven if you are royalty.

 

But when Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil of Rajpipla, a small principality in the western Indian state of Gujarat, announced he was gay, the reaction was quite different.

 

His mother disowned him and tried to have him disinherited. She also threatened legal proceedings against anyone who referred to him as her son and heir.

 

The people of Rajpipla, who commonly pray at the feet of statues of their kings, burnt photos of him.

 

Seating his lanky, 180-centimetre frame in an armchair in one of the large, now sparsely furnished, halls of the pink and white Victorian palace, Manvendra looks around uneasily.

 

"I don't really like coming here any more, partly because I know that even the servants' loyalty here is not to me, but to my mother and my father," he says.

 

It is now routine for Manvendra, who "came out" in 2002, to warn the palace of his arrival from his home in Mumbai: this gives time for tea-making and for family members to flee if they wish.

 

He has not spoken to his mother, Maharani (Queen) Rukmani Devi Gohil, in about four years, and they use separate staircases if they happen to be there at the same time.

 

Before this, his mother tried to rid Manvendra of his "problem". She had dragged him to see Hindu holy men and, when that did not work, demanded that he remarry (his first marriage at 25, arranged by the family, was annulled a year later), or that he become celibate.

 

Manvendra enraged her by doing neither, and continued working for Lakshya (Target) Trust, an HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention program he helped set up in Gujarat. Through it, Manvendra hopes to raise awareness of homosexuality and stop the spread of HIV/AIDS among men who have sex with men.

 

But, he says, "Indian gay men are not interested in coming out, and most of them could not care less about gay rights".

 

"They are only keen on parties and lots of sex, then most of them go home to their wives or their mothers, or both, and are waited on hand and foot. They don't want to lose their status in society."

 

In a typical collision of modernity and tradition in India, the Government has allocated about 9.70 billion rupees ($280 million) in the 2007-08 budget to fighting the disease but has so far refused to legalise gay sex.

 

While rules against homosexuality are rarely enforced, they still result in subterfuge on the part of young gay couples and blackmail by the authorities.

 

Manvendra says he is the first royal to come out of the closet and says he receives messages of support for his courage from gay royals from as far away as Europe.

 

He is also a pin-up boy for some young gay men in India who find the combination of good looks and aristocratic lineage intoxicating.

 

But it's not just foreign royals and young gay Indians who want to get in touch with the prince. On a recent trip to Mumbai, Michael Kirby of the Australian High Court waited in the baking heat at a railway station for half an hour for Manvendra to arrive - and then carried the prince's bags during a brief sightseeing trip of the city.

 

■ Reuters reports: The number of people with HIV/AIDS in India is 2.47 million, less than half the previous official estimate, a new United Nations-backed government estimate released yesterday says. India was thought to have the world's highest number of HIV infections, with 5.7 million, but the new estimate puts it below South Africa and Nigeria.

[Ieshwar]

Now that you mention it that title sounds familiar. I probably just forgot.

 

The story also reminded me of "Standing at the Crossroads". I enjoyed that story.

 

Thanks!

 

I had read it around January too. Coincidentally, during that time, I was writing the second chapter of Standing At Crossroads. But I didn't know that there was arranged marriage in this one too.

 

She had dragged him to see Hindu holy men

Unfortunately, I can say that if a guy comes out here in Mauritius, this is very possible. Hope my mother doesn't do that. I sincerely hope not!

 

Ieshwar