Tamil sexual minorities are Tamil people who do not conform to heterosexual gender norms. They may identify as LGBTQIA. It has been estimated that India has a population of 2.5 million homosexuals, though not all of them are Tamil, and not all Tamils live in India.
There are currently laws that criminalize homosexual sex implemented in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Mauritius, all of which have Tamil as an official or recognized language, and have referenced Section 377 of the British penal code as far back as colonial times. Sri Lanka and Mauritius have implemented anti-discrimination laws, whereas Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu provide support to transgender people. The law in Sri Lanka is legally dormant.
The entire political spectrum of Tamil Nadu supports transgender and third gender people. A Buddhist movement and the INC both openly support reforming the colonial law criminalizing gay sex, but the remaining parties have been silent on the issue. Nevertheless, a number of politicians from across the spectrum have taken part in events to support the welfare of the LGBTQ+ community.
History
The famed festival for the deity Aarvan, the deity worshiped by transgender and third gender people, is descended from folklore established prior to the advent of the Tamil-Brahmi script and celebrated at Kuvagam. The story behind the festival is often heard in modern times through the Hindu epic Mahabharata, but more commonly as a separate folklore in Tamil culture.
The Manimekalai a literary work, written by Buddhist poet Satthanar, that told the story of how Buddha would show compassion to people of a city, which included a man cross-dressing and a Jain monk as main characters.
Age of Empires
Several religious statues created during this period, such as at Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam, some of which depict explicit homosexual acts, are attributed to the Chola era. The temple at Brihadisvara also has examples of religious references to transgender people and third genders through depictions of Ardhanarishvara.
European colonialism (1500 CE) A number of artwork and records exist that can attest to the freedoms enjoyed by homosexuals prior to colonialism, including religious statues such as the ones at Tanjore. Similarly Buddhism has no significant history of condemnation of homosexual acts.
Homosexuals are catered for in the Kama Sutra and other Hindu medical books. The Kama Sutra was written around the 2nd century AD by Vātsyāyana, and it says that homosexual sex "is to be engaged in and enjoyed for its own sake as one of the arts" and devotes a chapter to describing the acts of homosexual and third gender sex.
Estado da Índia
Portuguese India had territorial control over only certain parts of modern-day India's western coast and the island of Lanka, with the remaining being settlements in Southern India (including Tamil Nadu), with these settlements and the island of Lanka being captured (or transferred) to the British later on.
Upon arrival to the island of Sri Lanka, the Portuguese invaders painted the local population as "backwards" and "sinful", explaining that the "horror" of homosexuality was present on the island, characterizing the island's king as being frightening for allowing the act of sodomy on the island, and even accounting that the king himself partook in gay sex.
British Empire and British East India Company
It was during this era of British colonial rule that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was implemented by the British Raj. Ruth Vanita, a scholar and historian, firmly defines the nineteenth century as ‘a crucial period of transition when a minor strand of pre-colonial homophobia became the dominant voice in colonial and post-colonial mainstream discourses’, and the CERA explains that the set of laws were part of colonial efforts to impose its values on its colony’.
The indigenous arts suffered during this era, as ethnomusicologist Anna Morcom points out, 'As modernity, nationalism, and colonial and bourgeois morality began to sweep definitively across India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, performing arts changed radically' with anything considered morally 'repulsive' such as erotic dancing and gender fluidity being swept under the carpet.
Établissements français dans l'Inde
French establishments in Tamil Nadu included Pondichéry, Karikal and Yanaon on the Coromandel Coast. The act of homosexual sex would have been decriminalized in the late 18th century as part of the Napoleonic Code's view on the privacy of people and state intervention, which applied in the French colonies of India at the time.