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I WAS GANDHI’S BOYFRIEND by PAUL RUDNICK

According to a new biography by Joseph Lelyveld, the love of Mahatma Gandhi’s life was a German-Jewish bodybuilder named Hermann Kallenbach. “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom,” Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach. “The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.”
KOCHI, India—Gandhi is still so revered in India that a book about him that few Indians have read and that hasn’t even been published in this country has been banned in one state and may yet be banned nationwide.
—The Times.


I know that some people still don’t buy that Gandhi was gay, but let me tell you, from experience, Gandhi liked guys. I first met him when he came to see my ice show in Nepal, which was called “Holiday on Dirt.” Gandhi came backstage and he told me, “I very much enjoyed watching you pretend to ice-skate, in your tight pants.” I asked him, “Um, so why are you wearing a diaper?” And he explained that his outfit was a traditional Indian dhoti, and I said, “Well, you look like the New Year’s baby.” And he said, “You are so handsome when you are not speaking.”

Then he told me about how he made the fabric for his dhoti himself, on his spinning wheel and hand loom, and I said, “Whoa, are you, like, a Native American lesbian?” And he said, “I will tell you over dinner.”

So we do the dinner thing, and he’s all, like, “I’ll just have a salad,” and I go, “Wait, are you some sort of total vegetarian whatever?” And he says yes, that he doesn’t believe in killing living things for food, and I’m, like, “Excuse me, but I’m gonna eat the cow before it eats me.” And Gandhi says, “You are the only grown man I have ever met whose first name is Kelly.” And I’m, like, “Well, your first name is Mohandas, right? Maybe you should change it, so that people can relate more. You could be, like, Tim Gandhi or Gary Gandhi.” And he goes, “Oh, Kelly.”

But he’s kinda cute, you know, in a legendary-world-leader sort of way, and he’s telling me all about his philosophy of nonviolence—I mean, on and on, blah blah blah, until I just want to smack him. And so I say, “O.K., so what if someone, like, punches you—are you just gonna sit there?” And he says, “Yes. What would you do?” And I say, “If someone punched me, I would throw my drink at them. I mean, maybe you should try that with the British.” And he says, “You are so very wise, perhaps you should spell your name Kellhi.”

And I think that’s totally adorable, so I say, “Let’s go back to your place,” and he tells me that he’s celibate. And I’m, like, “Huh? ’Scuse me?” And he says that he believes in the purity of the body and the soul, and that sometimes he sleeps beside a naked young woman, and does not become aroused. And I’m, like, “Me, too.” And then he says that also he’s married. And I’m thinking, Kelly, here we go again.

So I ask him if he’s come out to his parents, and he says, “Oh, no, they’re all old-school Hindu and they wouldn’t understand.” So I say, “But wouldn’t it be cool if you could do a campaign with a poster of your parents hugging you, and the poster could say, ‘Staying in the Closet Is a Hin-Don’t’?” And then he tells me about how India has this, like, totally bogus caste system, and how they even have people called untouchables, and I’m, like, “You mean brunettes?” And he laughs and I say, “No, it’s not funny. You mean, like, brunettes?” And he asks, “Kelly, have you ever studied any world history?,” and I’m, like, “Excuse me, but I happen to be wearing an imported Italian cashmere sweater,” and he says, “You know, maybe I’ll think about a steak.”

Of course, he eventually dumped me for this German-Jewish bodybuilder, and I warned him, I said, “Hello, been there, and I know that at first it sounds hot, but pretty soon it’s all ‘Nein, I can’t stay out late, because I have to get up early for the gym,’ and ‘Nein, we can’t do your rally for South Africa, because we’ve got my cousin’s Seder, remember?’ And his mother will be all ‘So, Mr. Gandhi, I’m told you like to lie down in front of railroad cars, to demonstrate a political point. Can you make a living from this?’ ”

But Gandhi and I stayed in touch, because he really was a good person. And he’d give me advice on guys and stuff. Like, he told me, “I know he’s cute, with the mustache and all, but Stalin is not for you.” But do I listen?
SOURCE
Paul Rudnick: “I Was Gandhi’s Boyfriend” : The New Yorker

Thread Reported!!
 
Has been discussed to death. Him being gay or bisexual does not diminish his contribution to India and the world one bit.

He can not killed living animal for food but how many millions got killed during partition so all credit goes to him(baghal main churee aor munh main ram ram)
 
The intimate lives of our political leaders becomes part of history and politics ,so get your facts right son)I can give you plenty of proofs about gandhi being a gay but do you have any prove about our leader eating pork and consuming alcohol??It really doesn,t affects me if gandhi was a gay or not .Please think positive .

You should read Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins.

Freedom at Midnight: Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre, Frederick Davidson: 9780786104093: Amazon.com: Books
 
Go take a look at google search and then blame me for nothing) I just types "gandhi is " and see the next suggestions offered by google :D
I wanna post a screen shot here but don,t know how)



Go report against the plenty of western writers who proved that he was a gay,why this hate is just for me?? I just shared a piece of info ,i did not made it by myself .

We will also share about your founding father, there are many great info in net. Don't make people do that.
 
We will also share about your founding father, there are many great info in net. Don't make people do that.

Let the idiots have fun. What they think of Gandhi has no importance at all.
 
guys let it go a person dead and was aged then father of our grand father . just show some respect . i don't like these cheap shots . he can't reply us nor he can defend these allegations now . jo so gya usy sony do please ab kaber ki mitti ki beizati mat karo.
 
Gandhi, Kallenbach and the controversial ‘Vaseline’ reference


Presumably some of the elderly members of the audience had no idea what the speaker was getting at when the subject of Vaseline came up in his talk on M K Gandhi and Herman Kallenbach. They, after all, belonged to a time when Vaseline was still associated with skin care rather than as a means of facilitating homosexual intercourse. Other audience members must have squirmed a bit though; I know, I did. After an erudite discourse on the high idealism, striving for spiritual elevation and shared devotion to combating injustice that characterised the friendship between the two men, it was more than a little jarring to be confronted with the bare mechanics of what, in less enlightened times, was referred to as “buggery”.

To put everyone in the picture, in 2011 the writer Joseph Lelyfeld provoked a bitter controversy when passages in his new book on Gandhi (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India) were interpreted by some reviewers as inferring that he and the German-Jewish architect Herman Kallenbach were lovers during the time they lived together in Johannesburg. Such inferences were derived from certain letters Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach, in which he commented among other things that Vaseline and cotton wool were a “constant reminder” of him. Further meaning has been read into the practice of the two men of referring to one another in their correspondence as “Upper House” (Gandhi) and “Lower House” (Kallenbach). Lelyveld himself has rejected the gay interpretation of his work, saying that it did not say that Gandhi was bisexual or homosexual, but rather that he was celibate and deeply attached to Kallenbach. Even so, Great Soul has been banned in parts of India, and it continues, rightly or wrongly, to be primarily associated with an attempt at “outing” the Mahatma.

The speaker at the above-mentioned event, Israeli author (of Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Herman Kallenbach) and researcher Shimon Lev, debunked the homosexuality theory. Even prior to meeting Kallenbach, Gandhi had adopted a regime of strict celibacy and persuaded his friend to do likewise. Writing to his brother, Kallenbach confirmed that he had given up what had been an active heterosexual sex life (years later, he had at least one extended heterosexual affair, although he never married). The two men lived lives of the strictest ascetism, following a simple vegetarian diet, doing every menial physical chore themselves and in general limiting physical comforts to the barest necessities. So far as the “Vaseline” reference goes, this simply referred to how they treated the corns they developed through walking for many miles each day to their offices. (Gandhi once tried to persuade Kallenbach to burn his car. In the end, he simply left it unused in the garage for a year and then sold it. When the two men lived on Tolstoy Farm, they would walk twenty kilometres each day into the centre of town).

As for the terms “Upper House” and “Lower House”, Kallenbach was referred to by the latter because, like the Lower House in the British Parliament, he controlled the financial side of things, not just in their home set-up but in his largely bankrolling the entire Satyagraha (Indian Passive Resistance) movement. In Gandhi’s case, “Upper House” indicated the dominant role he had in determining the spiritual and philosophical development of the two men. Accounting for the terms even more simply, in the house they shared in Orchards, Johannesburg, Gandhi slept in a loft while Kallenbach slept on the floor below. So much for “Upper” and “Lower” being code words for active and passive sodomy. That people’s thoughts so readily stray in that direction nowadays probably says more about the times we live in than in this aspect of the Gandhi-Kallenbach relationship. Here, a white Jew and an Indian Hindu were able to transcend the formidable barriers of race, culture and religion to establish a remarkable personal bond, one characterised by a joint striving to live lives of the highest idealism. Today, it is all reduced to grubby speculation over who inserted what and where.

Some might ask why it is necessary to disprove the homosexuality theory, since even if there was a sexual component to the relationship that would hardly be antithetical to modern, liberal sensibilities. To that, there is at least one persuasive answer, namely that if there was a sexual relationship between the two men, then they were hypocrites and frauds since both claimed to be celibate. This inference would be bad enough if made solely against Kallenbach, a genuinely noble personality who devoted much of his life to fighting racial injustice in this country. It would be even worse if applied to Gandhi, someone who for all his undoubted eccentricities was undoubtedly one of history’s greatest leaders and thinkers who continues to inspire millions the world over.
SOURCE
Gandhi, Kallenbach and the controversial ‘Vaseline’ reference | Thought Leader
 
Gandhi's sexual preferences are of least importance to me.Politicians are humans,not celestial figures from heaven. What matters most is the contribution he made in the history of this subcontinent.He was the one who started an organised campaign against Imperialism first and If he was not there no matter how many political errors he had committed,our Independence was far from existence.

I've got a lot of respect for Gandhi, but let's be real, campaigns against Imperialism had been started well before Gandhi, and whether Gandhi existed or not, independence was bound to happen eventually. He was but one man (who definitely contributed a lot) among many others.
 

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