Announcing Khush-Baltimore

February 16, 2008

Hi All,

I would like to announce the formation of Khush-Baltimore, a new Yahoo group (i.e. listserv). Khush-Baltimore is a discussion, social and support group for LGBT people of South Asian descent and their friends. This group will make it easier to set up group events in the Baltimore area such as potlucks, dinners at restaurants, educational and health-related discussion meetings, etc.

The creation of this group was long overdue, especially now that there is a 'critical mass' of at least a dozen LGBT people of South Asian descent living in the Baltimore area. The group details are as follows:

Membership: Real and Known People

While membership to the KhushDC yahoo group (i.e. KhushDC listserv) is open to anyone who requests membership, I think membership to Khush-Baltimore should be restricted to 'real and known' people. This restriction certainly excludes virtual robots: programs that pose as people and join just to spam the group with commercial ads and/or sexually explicit posts.

It also excludes closeted people - i.e. people who may well be South Asian LGBT Baltimore residents, but who have never met or spoken to any of the existing group members. Excluding such people will deprive them of the chance to post messages to the group, join in the group discussions and derive voyeuristic delight from reading other people's posts without ever having to reveal their own identity. This restriction would also make the group into a 'somewhat-safe' space - if not an 'ultra-safe' space; it will certainly be a 'safer' space than the KhushDC yahoo group.

The 'Real-And-Known' restriction is easy to implement. A person requesting membership can say, "I know person X from this group, and X knows me." The group moderator/owner can verify that with X, and then approve the membership if X knows the new person.

Membership: Open to All

I think the above 'Real-and-Known People Restriction' should be just about the only membership restriction. Membership to this Yahoo group should NOT be limited to those who live in the Baltimore area; it should be open to all regardless of where they live. Many of us - including I - live in DC or in a DC suburb, but we have friends in Baltimore and would like to attend Baltimore events and participate in the group discussions.

Group membership should also be open to non-South Asians and non-LGBT people - as long as they too are real and known!

Free Speech

I would like the Khush-Baltimore yahoo group to be as accepting of free speech as the KhushDC yahoo group is. That excludes spam and commercial postings. Since the KhushDC-Baltimore is not categorized as an 'adult' group, I think Yahoo's policies also exclude sexually explicit and prurient postings. Once these rules are in place, the term "Group Moderator" becomes a misnomer, since the moderator's duties consist mostly of approving memberships rather than censoring postings.

Passing the Baton

While I'm all in favor of an open membership - albeit restricted to real, known people - I think it's best if the Moderator(s)/Owner(s) of this group is/are LGBT South Asian, Baltimore-area residents. That automatically disqualifies me from being the group moderator. I am LGBT and South Asian, but I don't live in or near Baltimore.

Deejay - an esteemed Baltimore-area LGBT South Asian - has graciously agreed to be the group's moderator. I would like to have at least one more group moderator, so please let me know if you're interested and if you're a Baltimore-area resident.

As the creator of this group, I am currently its moderator, but I shall hand over the reins to Deejay and the other person(s) in a little over a week - by Monday February 25th to be precise. Until then, I'm going to use my dictatorial tendencies and high opinion of myself to supervise the birthing process of this group!

After that, it will be up to the moderators and the group members to set the group's policies such as membership criteria, whether the group's postings are moderated or not, etc. My thoughts on those matters that I've expressed above are just my thoughts; please do not feel obliged to follow them. Come February 25th, the ball will truly be in Baltimore's court.

Splintering and Parallelism

Some of you may see in Khush-Baltimore a rival to KhushDC, and therefore as a direct threat and an alternate power-center that can splinter KhushDC or abrade from it. You may decry the necessity of a "parallel discussion group, when KhushDC should suffice."

My experience leads me to the opposite conclusion. Almost ten years ago, a couple of us started a gay group ostensibly for Marathi-speaking people, but which ended up being more of a group for LGBTs who grew up in Mumbai (Bombay). At first, some folks attended only that group's events and stayed away from KhushDC events. As those folks came to know more about KhushDC from meeting other members of the Marathi group, their interest in KhushDC was piqued and they eventually started attending KhushDC events.

I like to think that absent the Marathi group, those people would have stayed away from KhushDC to this day. The Marathi group served as a springboard for them to join KhushDC.

To be honest, there are a few people who attend only Marathi group events and not KhushDC events to this day. Again I like to think that absent the Marathi group, these people would still not have attended any KhushDC events; now the Marathi group's presence leads them to participate in at least one South Asian LGBT group, even if that group is not KhushDC.

I do not know a whole lot about KhushDC-Girls, but I won’t be surprised if the scenario with that group is similar to that of the Marathi group. The creation of subgroups - whether based on language, gender or geographical region - may well appear to weaken KhushDC, but I think it actually strengthens KhushDC and the South Asian LGBT community in the long run. I don't think Khush-Baltimore will be an exception to this trend.

Air of Inevitability

Regardless of whether we look favorably or unfavorably upon DC-Baltimore area South Asian LGBT subgroups, I believe the creation of such subgroups has an air of inevitability about them. As the area's South Asian population surges and more and more people become comfortable with coming out, they will seek to participate in narrower subgroups - either in addition to joining KhushDC, the umbrella group - or in lieu of it. In either case, it will strengthen - rather than weaken - the community.

Subgroups may well remain word-of-mouth, loosely structured and anonymous for several years (for example, the group of DC-area Bengali-speaking LGBT) or they may "come out" in the open - as Gay-Marathi-DC, KhushDC-Girls and Khush-Baltimore have. But the spawning of such subgroups will continue into the future.

I am reminded of a similar splintering and spawning that took place on an international stage about 15 years ago. In the beginning, there was just one 'listserv' (i.e. the email group) in the world for South Asian LGBT people, the 'khush-list' listserv. Eventually, new listservs were created based on geographical area: one for San Francisco, another for New York, one for KhushDC, etc. as more LGBT people started coming out, became Internet savvy and as it became easier to create listservs. A number of people bemoaned that splintering and thought it weakened the international South Asian LGBT community.

I just hope the subgroups don't become so narrow that we eventually have a subgroup for say - "DC-area LGBT - but not Q - Hindu transplants raised in Delhi belonging to caste X, subcaste Y who went to a Catholic high school and got their undergraduate - but not graduate - degree from Aligarh Muslim University."

To Sum Up

My apologies for this long post. The passage of time has robbed me of my innocence and my brevity. The loss of the latter is far more sorrowful than the loss of the former. And besides, who can resist make much of an ado about nothing?

Do visit Khush-Baltimore by clicking:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Khush-Baltimore

To subscribe, please send an email to Khush-Baltimore-subscribe @ yahoogroups.com. You need not be LGBT or South Asian or even a Baltimore-area resident, but you better be real!

--Ninad Jog

KhushDC Board