From an Indian commenter: “Indians need to know about this so that they understand that people can do great things regardless of whether they are gay or not. They need to understand that sexual orientation is totally irrelevant to an individual’s character, and what better way to illustrate this than by showing that the so-called greatest Indian ever was gay? You cannot combat the effects of ignorance and lack of education by holding back even more information and knowledge.”

Yet more proof that love & ahimsa knows no bounds.

History books may have suppressed the fact, but Shiva bless: we’re living in a somewhat more open and tolerant age, now.

According to a new biography, Gandhi had a youthful love for a German bodybuilder named Hermann.

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal:

Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi’s organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom,” he wrote to Kallenbach. “The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.” For some reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were “a constant reminder” of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might relate to the enemas Gandhi gave himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about “how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.” Gandhi nicknamed himself “Upper House” and Kallenbach “Lower House,” and he made Lower House promise not to “look lustfully upon any woman.” The two then pledged “more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.”

More (including photo of Hermann) at Gawker (of course).

PS: Gandhia was also a huge hypocrite (according to Stephen Colbert, that is).