The Rubin Museum of Art has scheduled five Wednesday night events in Gay Pride Month focusing on gay, lesbian and transgendered issues in the Himalayan region.

Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m.
Box Office: 212.620.5000 ext. 344
Online tickets: http://www.rmanyc.org/out
RMA members receive up to 25% discount on tickets




Wednesday June 2, 2010 at 7:00 PM
A Buddhist Perspective on Homosexuality
$20

Jeffrey Hopkins, Buddhist scholar and author of Sex, Orgasm, and the Mind of Clear Light: The Sixty-four Arts of Gay Male Love, charts a personal course as a gay man in a Buddhist world.

Jeffrey Hopkins is Professor Emeritus of Tibetan Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia where he taught Tibetan Buddhist Studies and Tibetan language for thirty-two years from 1973. He received a B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1963, trained for five years at the Lamaist Buddhist Monastery of America in Freewood Acres, New Jersey, and received a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Wisconsin in 1973. He served as His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s chief interpreter into English on lecture tours 1979-1989. At the University of Virginia he founded programs in Buddhist Studies and Tibetan Studies and served as Director of the Center for South Asian Studies for twelve years. He has published forty books (which have appeared in twenty-two languages), including edited translations of fourteen books by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the latest being How to See Yourself as You Really Are and Becoming Enlightened. In 1999 he published The Art of Peace: Nobel Peace Laureates Discuss Human Rights, Conflict and Reconciliation, edited from a conference of Nobel peace laureates that he organized in 1998 for the University of Virginia and the Institute for Asian Democracy. In 1992 he published a translation and analysis of Gedün Chöpel’s Tibetan Arts of Love which in 1998 he adapted as Sex, Orgasm, and the Mind of Clear Light: The Sixty-four Arts of Gay Male Love. Hopkins was born in Barrington, Rhode Island, and has received three Fulbright Fellowships.

Wednesday June 9, 2010 at 7:00 PM
Lesbians of Yunnan
$15

Featuring a film-in-progress Ma & Yi by visual anthropologist Liu Yi, this program explores minorities-within-minorities in the Himalayan foothills of China.

The lush province of Yunnan boasts a startling biodiversity as well as having the highest concentration of ethnic and cultural groups in the whole of China. Ma and Yi are lovers. Yi is of the Yi – an ethnic group once predominantly animist. Her girlfriend Ma is Hui, and a Muslim. The once-large Muslim population came about when Chinese converts fled the cities of the southeast coast of China to escape persecution. Liu Yi’s film looks at the relationship of two young women in a country whose official stance on same-sex relationships seems to be “no approval, no disapproval, and no promotion.” Ma and Yi’s college friends are now all getting married, and the two young women long for a wedding ceremony of their own. The film documents their reaction to and reception at the weddings of their Muslim friends.

The visual anthropologist Liu Yi has lived, studied and worked extensively in China, Switzerland, Scotland, Germany and Liberia during the last decade. She is now based at the East Asian Institute of Visual Anthropology at Yunnan University with particular focus on minority populations in Yunnan, notably a Chinese Thai village and young Chinese Muslims.

Wednesday June 16, 2010 at 7:00PM
Hijras: the “Third Gender” in Pakistan
$20
Guru Hijra Bobby and Chicago-based poet and Pakistan News editor Ifti Nasim will engage in a dialogue about living as a member of the ‘third gender’ in the Moslem state of Pakistan.

On the bottom rungs of Pakistan's social ladder, the eunuch-transvestites or "Hijras" scrape out a hard existence. Historically Hijras were members of the Mughal Empire court. Nowadays, Hijras earn their living as beggars, dancers and prostitutes. Though often reported on in India, the Hijras of Pakistan are relatively unknown outside of that country. Most Pakistani cities have sizable Hijra communities, divided into clan groups living mostly in slums and presided over by a leader or guru. Hijra means hermaphrodite in Urdu, but most Hijras are homosexual transvestites, some of whom have gone through a crude sex-change operation. The Hijras are both feared and pitied in Pakistan, feared for their supposed ability to place curses, pitied for being outcast children of Allah. Most Hijras leave or are ejected from traditional Pakistani families around puberty and then join the Hijra community for life. Many have also reported that Hijras will kidnap young men, forcibly castrate them and force them into prostitution, gaining income for the community. More Hijras, however, earn their living by begging, and by dancing at carnivals, weddings and births. To provide a living detail of the Hijra experience will be Syed Ghulam Abbas, better-known as “Bobby.” Sharing the stage will be Ifti Nassim, Chicago-based poet and inductee to the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.

Wednesday June 23, 2010 at 7:00 PM
Sex and Gender in Buddhist Monasticism
$15
A talk by Janet Gyatso, Harvard University Divinity School's first Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies

Janet Gyatso is a specialist in Buddhist studies with concentration on Tibetan and South Asian religious culture and is Harvard University Divinity School's first Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies. Her books include Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary; In the Mirror of Memory: Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism; and Women of Tibet. Her current book project is on traditional medical science in Tibet, its relation to modernity, and its relation to Buddhism. She has also been writing on conceptions of sex and gender in Buddhist monasticism, and on the current female ordination movement in Buddhism. Previous topics of her scholarship have included visionary revelation in Buddhism; issues concerning lineage, memory, and authorship; philosophical questions on the status of experience; and autobiographical writing in Tibet. Professor Gyatso was president of the International Association of Tibetan Studies from 2000 to 2006, and is now co-chair of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion. She teaches lecture courses and advanced seminars on Buddhist history, ritual, and ideas, and on Tibetan literary practices and religious history. In both teaching and writing she draws on cultural and literary theory, and is concerned to widen the spectrum of intellectual resource for the understanding and interpretation of Buddhist history. She leads an ongoing reading group for graduate students in Buddhist studies, and is the faculty director of the Buddhist Studies Forum. She is currently the director of Graduate Studies in the Committee on the Study of Religion, and is also a member of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations as well as the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies. She has chaired the Committee for the Study of Women and Gender, and is leading the development of a new track for the training of Buddhist lay ministers and leaders in the master of divinity program at the Divinity School.

Wednesday June 30th, 2010 at 7:00 PM
Will Gay Marriage be Adopted in the World’s Youngest Democracy, Nepal?
$15
Sunil Pant, the first openly gay Nepali parliamentarian, is not satisfied with that achievement: he aims to make Nepal flourish through “pink tourism” and be the first Asian nation to adopt equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians. Here he talks about the hurdles that face him and his Blue Diamond Society.

On April 10, 2008, Sunil Babu Pant secured one of the five seats won by the Communist Party of Nepal (United) in the 601-seat assembly. In the previous year he had petitioned Nepal’s Supreme Court to demand the defense and legal protection of human rights of sexual and gender minorities and the abolition of all discriminatory laws and policies. The Court ruling was a indication of Nepal’s radical political change: it declared that sexual minorities were ‘natural persons’ deserving of protection against discrimination and ordered the government to come up with legislation guaranteeing civil rights for homosexuals. A government commission was also to be established to study legalization of same-sex marriage, and to make official documents such as identification cards and passports include a third option for a person's gender.

OUT in the Himalayas is presented with support from the Arcus Foundation.

EGO Magazine is the media sponsor of OUT in the Himalayas.