A story about gay Bangladesh does not begin with focused community action and does not describe LGBT venues, social clubs or bars or discos. 
The reason is simple: there is virtually no publicly identifiable Bangladesh gay community.
More significantly, such a report is subsumed by the density of life in this overflowing country: vast entrenched poverty along with intense overpopulation (140 million people in an area the size of New York state or England and Wales without Scotland), widespread under-education, bamboo-hut slums, chaotic traffic in the streets, high levels of malnutrition (nearly 30%), tangled corruption in the halls of government, frequent electrical failures and subsequent water shortages, and a powerful web of family traditions that allow no place for or knowledge of something so unusual as same-sex romance.
Homosexuality as a viable social issue in 21st century Bangladesh is faceless and invisible with no constituent voice from any leader, activist or politician. It is a much hidden, invisible transparent way of life that is shaped and colored by an intense palette of Islam, low-wage manual labor, unbreakable family knots, ox-plowed rice paddies, extensive fish farms and sclerotic roads packed with honking traffic.
A short walk around a few blocks in the capitol of Dhaka or other major cities such as Khulna or Chittagong provides harrowing evidence of the daunting life most people endure daily with little variation. Barefoot beggars aged 10 to 80 tug with skinny little fingers at the sleeves of a tourist. Construction laborers dismantle a building manually with hand-held sledge hammers and chisels wearing no hard hats, boots or masks while others on the site squat on their haunches pounding bricks into small pieces because the country lacks gravel quarries for making roads or cement.
Countless bicycle rickshaw drivers dressed in worn longis (a skirt-length wrap pulled tightly around the waist) and rubber sandals look with pleading eyes at a visitor hoping for business. A mile long ride through polluted trash-strewn streets that risks being crushed between a swerving battered bus and an equally swerving overloaded truck will reward them with less than 50 cents. Traffic lights mean nothing—red, yellow and green are mere suggestions as countless vehicles crush forward into intersections with predictable tangled results. Road lines are ignored as five or six rows of traffic crowd along three-lane streets, every vehicle honking at the other as if they can get out of the way. The rickshaws’ only defenses in such a mob are quick wits, fast turns and the tinkling of their bicycle bells.
Bangladesh is also countless dark faces, young and beautiful, old and weathered, most with no future except today’s meager earnings that average $1 a day, a communal home with dirt or cement floors, a rough-hewn bed (shared with one or more others), perhaps running water or a local hand pump, a collective squat toilet. (photo right: my bicycle rickshaw driver)
In rural villages traffic is relieved but there is often no electricity or running water in the rattan and thatch-roofed huts. Rice fields are commonly plowed with water buffalo. Crops are taken to local markets on bicycle carts loaded high with hay, sugar cane, burlap bags of rice, green vegetables, melons or kindling wood. Fishermen ply the countless rivers, waterways and coastlines of Bangladesh from dawn to dusk netting fish and shrimp and, sadly, an occasional river dolphin.
The southern half of the country is a vast alluvial delta for the rivers that flow out of India and Burma to empty their polluted waters into the Bay of Bengal. The images are intensely colorful, crowded, noisy, energetic and grim—except for the very few wealthy ones who drive through the city in chauffeured air-conditioned Mitsubishi SUV’s on their way to make deals in the free-enterprise chaos of the city.
Finding Gay Life
Where in this harried congested maze of excess millions does one find something as strange as ‘gay Bangladesh’? Of course, same-sex attraction happens anywhere and everywhere so my search for a gay community led me to Dhaka, the capitol of 14 million where, like the rest of the society, gays are separated into classes based on birth and money.
It is virtually impossible for an outside casual gay visitor to access poorer class gays, unless by accident or an offer of money, both of which are very unlikely since homosexuality as a mutually intentional sex act is indiscernible among the semi or uneducated underclass in Bangladesh. This doesn’t mean all premarital guys have no sexual experience; furtive erotic moments happen especially since same-gender friends hold hands and sometimes share the same bed, but in the morning there is nothing said and ‘romance’ built around such tentative moments is mostly imaginary. (photo left: young workers at the Chittigong shipbreaking yard)
Nevertheless, in huge metropolitan centers every kind of night-life proliferates. Sex can be found for sale but it’s mostly of the hetero variety. There are particular areas in large and small towns where ladies are available (often with the knowledge of their husbands: poverty forces unwanted choices) but certainly no other woman would dare go to such places looking for lesbian contact. Indeed, lesbian contact in Bangladesh is as invisible as the evening star at dawn.
Male prostitution is unusual but not unheard of in the shadow life of Dhaka. It happens: poor young people looking for a way out of rural life or desperately in need to help their families or as a gay person in need of escape from a suffocating straight life. A clandestine male brothel called ‘Sibling’ is alleged to operate somewhere in the bowels of Dhaka where men–mostly likely closeted gay or bisexual husbands–feel urged to go for moments of pleasure, risky as it may be either from disease or blackmail since it’s believed the place is owned by a mafia-like underground gang.
It was easier, indeed necessary, for me to access middle and upper class Bangla gays especially via Internet groups such as BoysOnlyBangladesh (described below). This particular Yahoo group, started several years ago is a treasure for anyone looking for friendship or a pickup. I posted a notice on the site (by joining the group) and requested help and information about gay Bangladesh and received a dozen replies within a few days. The following interviews were conducted with people who offered their own personal stories and insights about being gay in their country.
