Mumbai: White coats to march for rainbow hearts

The pride parade is an annually-held event for the city's LGBT community. File pic

Mumbai's annual gay pride parade, a mobile statement by the city's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) community, will be held on Saturday, January 28. In a significant first for the march, the parade will see a new demographic amongst its rainbow-hued participants. This time, students from medical colleges across the city will be part of the parade. They will be marching under the banner, ‘Future Doctors for Equality' to prove that the doctors of tomorrow are sensitized and one with the gay cause. These students will be wearing, "white coats over regular attire, so as to identify themselves as medical students," says Topiwala National Medical College, second year medical student Preet Sharma, one of the movers and shakers behind the group.

Medical student Preet Sharma is a member of the group bringing medical students together for the march

Smash stereotypes
Says Preet, "We are going to be a group of medical students, and, these will include mental health students too. The idea germinated during discussions for the upcoming college festival for medical students called Aarambh 2017 in March. We decided to focus on LGBT rights, and celebrating ability, which means showcasing the talent in the disabled. The LGBT rights focus can start with marching in the gay parade."

Preet adds, "We expect at least 100 to 200 medical students on the day." Preet says they have a multi-pronged aim through participation. The obvious is to stand for "equality. We also want to push for employment for transgenders, create awareness about HIV amongst the community and finally, smash some misconceptions about the gay community within the medical profession."

Uneasy equation
Preet's last admission points to the exchanges between the community and medical professionals. In May last year, the gay community marked the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT) on May 17, with protests against doctors who make fat sums professing cures to homosexuality through bogus therapies.

Pallav Patankar from Humsafar, a Mumbai non-profit working for LGBT had said on the occasion, "There are many doctors, who claim that they can ‘cure' LGBT people. There is a lot of exploitation and mental harassment that happens in the process."

They even had a mascot of a person dressed as a duck at the Azad Maidan Press Club, with the ‘quack quack' signifying that docs who promise to ‘convert' gay persons, through electric shocks (part of aversion therapy) are quacks. It was a breakthrough moment in the Mumbai LGBT movement because it underlined the uneasy equation between some doctors and the community.

Marring the myths
Misconceptions may be, "also related to age, not just to the medical profession," says Dr Dhruv Ambegaokar (25), former Lokmanya Tilak Municipal Medical College student who has finished his MBBS degree. Ambegaokar came out of the closet while in medical college. When doctors march, "it does give the cause more legitimacy," says Ambegaokar. The public expects doctors to be more enlightened, better read when it comes to these issues. "Yet," says Ambegaokar, "Myths prevail in the medical community too amongst the older doctors especially. When I came out to my parents, both of them doctors, did not know too much about homosexuality themselves. They read up and became aware about LGBT. Now, they are so cool."

Conversion, aversion
Cool, are the Dr Ambegaokars but things get heated when the community and doctors have had confrontations. Gay rights activist Ashok Row Kavi says, "Doctors are the worst informed about homosexuality. At a talk I was giving a couple of years ago, stupid questions like, ‘Are there injections to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals' were thrown at me by doctors. I answered sarcastically, "I know of injections that turn heterosexuals into homosexuals!"

Equal rights activist Harish Iyer adds, "Sometimes (read most times) the ones we seek advice from are the ones who are most prejudiced." Then he says, "That is a thing of the past now... come to the Mumbai Pride 2017 and meet a fantastic group of medical students (future doctors) who would be marching the pride against prejudice and for equality." With the LGBT upbeat about a new dimension to their milestone march and an air of anxious excitement within medical students, the process of closing the gap between the two often acrimonious sides may have just begun.

The parade
The Gay Pride Parade will be held on January 28, 2017. It begins from August Kranti Maidan at 3 pm winding its way to Girgaum Chowpatty and back to the maidan, where it is slated to end by 6 pm