Lakshya: The Farmer Prince Comes Out

The coming out of Manavendra Singh Gohil as a gay man has caused quite a stir in Gujarat within the circles of the erstwhile princely families: specifically in his native Rajpipla.

My friend, Vivek Raj Anand, has written a wonderful piece on Manav (as we call him) on the Gay_Bombay Yahoo! list.

Manav is a royal by birth and an earthworm-farmer by profession as Vivek writes, but his heart is with his organization, Lakshya. He received hints from his family to give it up, but he responded: "How can one abandon one's child?"

Lakshya, a registered public charitable trust, is Gujarat's first and only community-based organization (CBO) working for HIV/AIDS prevention among men who have sex with men.

In the year 2001, after a successful needs assessment study of MSM (men who have sex with men, a clinical umbrella term used for a range of sexualities and sexual behavior including gay and bisexual men) in Baroda and Surat, Lakshya was awarded two independent targeted intervention projects each in the two cities.

Since then, the two drop-in centers of Lakshya Trust run counseling services, weekly clinics for treatment of sexually transmitted infections, libraries and provide a safe, comfortable atmosphere for MSM. The work of Lakshya also includes condom use promotion, behavior change communication and creating an enabling environment for HIV prevention. This includes sensitization of professionals like doctors and society at large about issues around MSM. In Surat, Lakshya has been working among the transgender population too.

Apart from work on HIV/AIDS prevention, Manav's trust is trying to make the MSM population financially self-reliant by sourcing out and creating employment opportunities like tiffin services, handicraft making (through linkages with the Khadi Gram Board), etc. It also provides technical support for encouraging other MSM CBOs in different parts of Gujarat. Lakshya is now working towards starting a hospice/old age home for gay men and others.

Lakshya is now almost six years old--it was born on July 29, 2000 at the time of Gujarat's first MSM conference at Rajpipla, (which is in the Narmada district and home to Manav) with technical support from the Humsafar Trust. The conference had 45-50 MSM from all over the state and also representatives of Gujarat State AIDS Control Society (GSACS) and Daman SACS.

It was the first time in the history of Gujarat that MSM felt the need to come together on a single platform to deal with the problems of police harassment, marriage pressure, discrimination and other social and legal issues that affect them.

Manav and Lakshya in general have been active in international and national bodies--Lakshya is a member of the India Network For Sexual Minorities (INFOSEM). It is also a founder-member of Sexual Health Action Network (SHAN), a network of Gujarat's HIV/AIDS NGOs. The other partner NGOs of the Gujarat State AIDS Control Society have started utilizing its services in helping the MSM group within their own target populations.

Manav's life would in fact make a wonderful subject for a film and a documentary may be in the works already.