India’s first openly gay prince, Manvendra Singh Gohil, recently shared his experience after he came out of the closet, saying his parents wanted him to undergo brain surgery to change his sexuality.
Gohil, the heir of the Maharaja of Rajpipla in Gujarat, in an interview with Sky News, said that he was humiliated when his parents sought medical help to “convert” him after he informed them that he was gay.
He said, “It was an absolute case of discrimination and violation of human rights. Whether I’m a prince or not a prince, parents have no right to put their children through [this] kind of torture.”
The prince also added that his parents visited the doctors in the US, hoping that they could “perform a surgery on my brain, and even make me undergo electroshock therapy”. However, doctors refused pointing out that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, he said.
“Fortunately for me and fortunately for them, the American Psychiatric Association had said that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, so they were not successful,” Prince Manvendra said.
“It didn’t happen but imagine how much harassment one has to go through, how much humiliation one has to go through, just to endure this pain and suffering at the hands of parents – and this is happening to so many individuals in India,” he added.
The prince first came out in the open as gay in 2006 at the age of 41, and he has been fighting against conversion therapy, which is banned by law, in the Supreme Court.
He got married to Chandrika Kumari from Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh in 1991, which ended in divorce, when he revealed his sexuality, according to the Lakshya Trust, a charity for LGBT+ people founded by him. He eventually married his husband Duke DeAndre Richardson in 2013.