I have a friend. He’s gay. I call him the Man With a Crooked Pinky. Now before you denounce me as homophobic and what else, let me tell you that I didn’t just pull that out of thin air or from inside my transcendental soul. He was the one who argued for it. He said he had no choice in the matter of being gay. “Genetics” was the word he used.

Now “gay” sounds quite serious. It doesn’t mean a man who is turned on by men. That’s bisexual. “Gay” is a man who is not turned on by women. You can see how serious this sounds. If everyone suddenly had male offspring with the gay gene, humanity would cease to exist. Well, that was before. In a time long ago when we didn’t know that sex between a man and a woman in a certain way brings about conception. Now we know this. So if the gay gene sprung up in all our male offspring, we’d teach them how to conceive so even men who aren’t turned on by women can reproduce. If some of them lack the imagination to do the deed, we’ll just test tube some babies for them. That’s where we are now in 2011.

So that’s why I call him the Man With a Crooked Pinky. Cos he’s got a genetic “quirk”. But in this day and age, it ain’t such a serious one. Just a crooked pinky.

Now I don’t envy this friend at all. You see, he’s got a crooked pinky but most of the time he has to hide it. A little bit of body language adjustment and a whole lot of lying and you won’t even notice a crooked pinky. The reason he has to hide his crooked pinky is cos there are a whole bunch of people who refuse to believe that his pinky is crooked and accuse him of “just doing it cos you’re silly”. Seriously. A whole bunch of people who can see his crooked pinky but refuse to believe that it is crooked! Some of them even try to pin him down and straighten it! Most of them simply look down on him as being crazy for lying about a crooked pinky, for attention and what not. Poor gay. I don’t blame him for keeping his pinky in the closet most of the time.

The crazy part is that these people who refuse to believe that my friend’s pinky is really crooked have passed laws to prevent him from showing his crooked pinky. Not only that, they’ve also made it impossible for him to establish a family and raise young ones. They say that the crooked pinky is actually a syndrome, that can be passed along if people had contact with the crooked pinky. You can imagine how silly this is, someone catching a crooked pinky. But these are the same people who don’t truly understand that sex between a man and a woman in a certain way brings about conception. They don’t understand that if everyone turned gay, it won’t be the end of mankind. So they kinda think it is not a pinky that is crooked, but that my friend is actually a mongoloid paraplegic vegetable. You can imagine the level of intellect that my friend has to put up with. So I am saying it again, I don’t blame him for keeping his pinky in the closet most of the time.

The worst part about all of this is that I think God may actually be making more and more men with crooked pinkys. So that every child has a family. You know what I mean? These men with crooked pinkys don’t really get caught up in the whole “I must reproduce from my own genes” obsession. They end up adopting most of the time. So that’s less biological babies and more papas and papas. You know what I mean?

So here’s a cheer for my friend, the Man With a Crooked Pinky. You can stay in the closet as long as you like but when you do come out, you know some of us out here don’t really care about the colour of your sex, in this day and age. You’re one of us.

Khabir Dhillon is an Advocate & Solicitor of the High Court of Malaya and a Nationalistic Malaysian. He likes to think that he has useful things to say but many say that it is only he who thinks...