A bizarre advertisement that appeared in the classifieds section of a national daily claims to determine whether someone is gay or lesbian ‘before marriage’ over the phone. The advert even claims to heal conditions such as cerebral palsy, schizophrenia and ‘austism’ through ‘distance cosmic therapy’.
Columnist and LGBTQ+ activist Harrish Iyer called the number and asked the guy how he proposes to ‘cure’ homosexuals and according to the guy, he can do that from a distance.
According to the guy who refused to give his name, a person becomes homosexual because their parents allow them to use ‘electronic apparatus like cell phones’ from a very young age. He asserted that mobile phone receive ‘ultraviolet rays coming from phone towers’ and their excessive use turns people gay. He even went on to claim that many prominent people namely Baba Ramdev, Congress President Rahul Gandhi, BJP MP Varun Gandhi, Deepika Padukone and Shweta Nanda are all gay. According to him, 40% of Americans and 60% of Indians are homosexual.
When asked how he proposes to ‘heal’, the guy had a very simple answer. He would ‘reverse electronic waves from a distance’. The person also proposed to use the method of ‘Dowsing’ which, according to his site, ‘is a method, where a pendulum is used on a set of cards. If one is not attached to the results, it is simple to find correct answers to any question’.
We called the number as well and tried to figure out how the guy would know if someone is gay or lesbian over the phone. He asked the age of the fictional person we had invented and his profession. He then went on to say that the person became gay ‘because he has more testosterone from his mother than his father’ and said that those women who have ‘higher testosterone levels’ were clever and even more manly. After some pause, he said he won’t be able to ‘cure’ the person because the person didn’t turn gay because of the use of electronics and he can’t do anything about his ‘internal organs’.
Iyer panned the sales team of the newspaper which, according to him, refused to put up a gay male matrimonial ad but allows ads claiming to determine or even cure homosexuality. This comes just days after the Indian Psychiatric Society (IPS), which is India’s largest body of mental health professionals, asked its members to ‘stop considering homosexuality as an illness’.
