A Beautiful Mind

Kashish Chopra’s parents could not be more proud of her college studies, beauty pageant win, or musical talent. It’s her homosexuality that they don’t understand.
By Scott Lajoie | March 14, 2004
www.boston.com [Click here to read the article]

Of all places, it was on a stage at a Ramada hotel in Edison, New Jersey, surrounded by dozens of other beautiful young women she barely knew, all of them competing for the title of Miss India USA, where Kashish Chopra found the acceptance she has never been able to get from her own parents. Attired in a flowing grape-and-white satin gown, she played classical Indian music, flashed her perfect smile, and walked away as Miss Congeniality.

Pageants can get pretty stressful,” Lisa Mehta, Miss Illinois, said after last August’s pageant, “and she was so supportive of all of us.” Chopra, a senior at Boston’s Suffolk University, has been openly gay since the eighth grade, and she was out to all of her fellow contestants at the pageant, so her homosexuality hardly registered a blip there. But it was when she gave an interview that appeared on a website called www.AfterEllen.com that the flood of e-mails began, most of them from women in such far-flung places as Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. They wrote in desperation, complete strangers, detailing their own struggles to find an identity in their homeland. In Chopra, they see hope in a young woman who has challenged an entire culture’s traditional mores. In her own small way, she is forcing her people to examine whether the time has come for old values to give way to modern culture. This is why she has spent hours answering those e-mails, because she knows that coming out isn’t easy. Especially when you’re Indian.

For Chopra, whose family is from the Punjab region of India but who was born and raised in the States, art imitated life in last year’s smash independent film Bend It Like Beckham. In the movie, an Indian character finally announces to one of his friends that he is gay. The friend is puzzled, not disapproving. “But you’re Indian,” she says. While gay and lesbian screen characters and celebrities seem to become more “in” the more they come out, there have been few Indians in such roles, and few Indians in our workaday world who have come out as gay — for the simple reason that Indian culture has remained so conservative. But Chopra, who hopes to pursue a master’s degree in philosophy and eventually a law degree, did not come by her celebrity status through a film or television show. Out of curiosity, she entered the Miss India New England beauty pageant last spring. As a runner-up, she advanced to the nationwide competition. That was where her face went from being just another pretty one on a Boston campus to a potential lightning rod for an entire culture.

The 20-year-old Chopra met me for tea in Washington’s famously gay Dupont Circle neighborhood, not far from where she grew up in a family of doctors in Wheaton, Maryland. She came out unusually early to her classmates, while attending Catholic school, but she says her adolescence was as directionless as that of the women now sending her e-mails. She rebelled as a teenager, clubbing around D.C., experimenting with drugs, even contemplating suicide at one point. “I couldn’t fathom being gay,” she says. “It was a living hell at first, but it drove me to what I am today.”

A beautiful 5-foot-5 with long brown hair, high cheekbones, and deep, dark-brown eyes, Chopra walks along Beacon Street by the State House almost every day on her way to class, a walk that became harder for her last month as gay-marriage protesters and supporters stood outside waving banners and drowning one another out with their shouts. She kept to herself, not wanting to be late for class, but it wasn’t easy for her — that’s not her way.

Though she has accepted herself, her parents have not, and she says they are still in such denial about her sexuality that she asked me repeatedly not to call them. “When I get home, it’s like I am in quarantine,” she says of her visits to her parents’ house. “Any conversations we do have are very superficial. The reason they invite me back is to change me. They want to pull me close, but they want to banish me. Over time, I can only hope they’ll accept me as their daughter.”

She says her parents remain culturally stuck in India, where many gay and lesbian Indians participate in sham marriages, never come out of the closet, and still consent to arranged marriages. Her parents think she’s going to finally meet the right man, Chopra says, as if it’s all a phase, like the so-called heteroflexibles or LUGs (lesbian until graduation). On one recent visit home, she says, her father came into her room and put a Washington Post article about LUGs on her desk, hinting that things would change for her after graduation. When she read the piece, she broke into tears. “I wish they could read the letters I get,” she says. “The American Indian community as a whole has a problem. It’s tough knowing that my parents are part of the community I want to change.”

The more Chopra speaks out, however, the more she hears accusations that she’s doing it only for the publicity, that she was born in America, not India, and is hardly the person to be at the front of such a seismic shift in India’s traditions. Chopra, who speaks fluent Hindi, simply points to examples of how she embraces cultural traditions, including sitting on the steering committee of Boston-based MASALA (Massachusetts Area South Asian Lambda Association, a gay and lesbian group). Chopra’s support has come from some other family members, including her older sister — who often asks if she’s dating someone (she’s not) — and her cousin Sam Arora. “I was so impressed Kash would come out the way she did,” says Arora. “The older generation believes in the traditional family unit and cannot understand their gay and lesbian children.”

Chopra says that when her father calls her, the conversations inevitably turn uncomfortable. “He says, ‘You’re going to find a nice boy, right?’ It’s not a suggestion.”

Scott Lajoie is a freelance writer living in Alexandria, Virginia.