Thanks to Twitter, I end up having lots of mini-conversations with a bunch of random people on random topics. Today’s conversation was kicked off by this thread on PakPassion, a thread asking the question “How would you react if you discovered you brother/sister were gay or lesbian? Or even your son/daughter?”

As you might expect, the thread featured some fairly disgusting responses, ranging from “I’ll cut off contact and throw them out of the house” to the nicer and cuddlier “I’ll re-introduce them to the Quran to convince them to abandon homosexuality”. Notwithstanding the efficacy of these brilliant tactics, I found the thread fascinating but also very predictable. Pakistani society, if it can be spoken of as a collective, is a conservative Muslim society, and in conservative Muslim societies there tends to be rampant homophobia. That may be a bit of a generalization, but for the most part, it’s true. So yes, nothing new here.

Neil wouldn't find PakPassion legend-dairy. Photo:AP

Still, judging from some of the more vitriolic responses I got (which I chose not to respond to, because, well, there’s really no point), I gather that Pakistanis tend to think homosexuality is, like democracy and football, a product of the decadent Western civilization. Which is quite silly, because there are gay people everywhere, not just in the West.

As I said to my homophobic followers earlier today: no matter who you are, I guarantee you that you have either shaken hands or hugged or kissed someone gay in the last month. It’s simple math, really. Most estimates suggest that, depending on one’s definition of homosexuality, between three percent and 15 percent of human beings are gay. So odds are, if you’ve shaken hands with/hugged/kissed 20 or 30 people in the last month, at least one of them was gay. That’s really it. This is not a complicated question.

Moreover, this realization really gets homophobes, which is why I like using it on them. Since they refuse to consider gay people clean or even human, it really bugs them when they’re forced to ponder the fact that they’ve played video games with them, or had multiple meals with them, or night cricket, or math tuition, or tea from the same pot.

Of course, some people — like Iranian President Ahmadinejad — believe that, magically, their societies are free from observing the laws of statistics. How that is the case, I will never know. You can believe gays are evil and that homosexuality is evil and that anyone who dares to not stone them is evil, but you should at least concede that they exist, no? Or are we all just entitled to our own realities now?

What’s interesting to me about this whole thing is how socially-constructed the very nature of sexuality is. For instance, most men, I think, would consider having lots of sex with lots of other men “gay”. On the other hand, according to one Pentagon study on Afghanistan, plenty of Pashtun men have sex with other Pashtun men but reject the idea that they’re somehow gay (link via Twitter user @samadk).

Well, whatever the merits of such self-denial, I’m here to tell you, in case you didn’t know, that plenty of Pakistanis are gay, from fashion designers on Zamzama to the “masses” that visit Abdullah Shah Ghazi on Thursday nights. And, sorry, but throwing them out of your house or re-reading the Quran to them is not going to make much of a difference. If gay people could be straight, it would be entirely irrational for them not to be, especially in countries like Pakistan. Why invite all that trouble if you could have an easier and simpler life by being “normal”? So yeah, good luck with that.