Pride Month 2023: Zeenat Aman allies herself with the LGBTQIA+ community; urges conservative 'straight folk' to 'choose love over hate, and reason over prejudice'

Zeenat Aman, Pic/Instagram

The month of June is globally celebrated as Pride Month - a month for acknowledging, honouring and celebrating queer lives, struggles, identities and stories.

Veteran actor Zeenat Aman took to Instagram today to share a moving post on celebrating Pride Month, and giving advice to straight people on accepting the many forms of identities and forms of love and companionship that can and do exist.

"When @googleindia reached out to me to be a part of their #searchforchange campaign, my first instinct was to suggest they approach someone from the LGBTQIA+ community. As a straight person I have not lived any of their experiences and so cannot speak for them. I do however consider myself an ally. I have befriended, known and worked with many talented, creative, artistic and wonderful people from this community," she said.

Aman talked about how Pride is not so much about straight people adding their own opinions to the discourse, but listening to members of the queer community, educating themselves and learning more from their experiences. "My message thus is not for the LGBTQIA+ community; they know their own experiences best. My message is for straight folk, especially those older generations who are struggling to accept, or are outright denying, the existence of queer identities. Culture and nature are the two banal arguments that I hear cited against such relationships time and again. I am no anthropologist, but I know that healthy cultures are ever evolving. Neither am I a naturalist, but I know that queer relationships exist in a diversity of species. Beyond this is the simple matter of free will," she added to the caption.

The Satyam Shivam Sundaram star urged people, especially the older generations of India, and all those holding onto contempt and prejudice about the queer community to change with the times and respect privacy and choice, especially in matters as sensitive and intimate as love. "My own philosophy has always been to live and let live, and it perplexes me that anyone should take offence to the personal choices of another when it does them no harm. That too in matters of love."

Knowledge is the need of the hour, and what better moment that Pride Month to foray into educating oneself about queerness and the LGBTQIA+ community? Zeenat Aman emphasized on the importance of letting go of generationally instilled attitudes and myths and to open oneself up to learning about new ways of being and loving. "If you are someone who carries apprehensions about queerness, I urge you to not be a slave to the dead habit of hate or ignorance. The times are (always) changing, and with it so can our thoughts. The shame lies not so much in being ignorant, but in choosing ignorance. We have the tools at our disposal to know better."

She also mentioned a Tagore poem in her post -
"Do you remember that beautiful Tagore poem ‘Where the Mind is Without Fear'? It is a rousing vision of freedom, and I would like to quote from it in the hope that it will encourage you to choose love over hate, and reason over prejudice. Tagore calls for a world:

"Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action…"