Happy and Gay

I was reading a supplement of the Economic Times last week in which I came accross an article which talked about the life of gays/lesbians in the corporate world (I am going to use only the word gay from now on in the post but it includes lesbians too). It talked about the way gays are handled in companies and how they are coming out the closet. But the corporate world only covers a small portion of the world's gay population.

I was wondering whether we as Indians are ready to accept the concept of gays. A lot has already been debated about this and conclusions drawn. Though we would like to be liberal enough to embrace them its only a wish and we want to show the world that we have no problems with the concept. I feel its not the gays who need to come out of the closet but its the society. Now society in itself is a very large collective noun and so in order to understand I thought I would break down the word.

Let me consider only a small cross-section of society - my friends circle. Let me assume that one of them is gay and we get to know it. Let us say we get to know it without his knowledge. What would our reaction be. Would this change our behavior towards him? At the beginning maybe we would be in shock. Then his close friends might try to confront him with this knowledge to make him accept it. This might tarnish the relationship that he had with his friends. If the guy is pretty smart and cool about it then he may even choose to tell them the truth and make them understand that its normal. But that cant be expected always. He might become a loner. Some friends may start making fun of it. He might become the victim of all kinds of sexist jokes. And I am sure that other than his really close friends the rest of his so called friends will not be the same as before.

With all these possibilities will the guy be ready to come out of the closet. I think we have a long way to go.