Happy Together

While a colonial clause is being argued in court, Nithin Manayath traces the upbeat and varied journey of India’s gay community in the last decade

NITHIN MANAYATH
Lecturer

In/Out Urban gay men negotiate tricky lines Photo: Priyadarshini John

I AM 30 YEARS OLD, a queer man who teaches in a women’s college in Bangalore. With the Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss and NACO both arguing that Section 377, the law that criminalises homosexuality, should be done away with, it seems like we ought to be looking at the present as a historic moment in the lives of gay and lesbian people in India. The euphoria in the sexuality movement and the day-to-day wartime reporting of proceedings in the Delhi High Court certainly lends itself to momentous events. But I am also uncomfortably aware that in the decade since I first met another gay man, a more complicated and colourful revolution has been underway without courtroom drama.

I was already wading through a series of sexual and romantic relationships before I read anew, at age 14, the word ‘homosexual’. I felt a ripple of identification. In the stodgy marriage manual that I read it in, it only meant a sexual act. It was later, in the mid-1990s, that the word ‘gay’ would suddenly illuminate for me why my schoolboy relationships never transformed into the forever of romantic love: because the other in each instance was never really gay. (I would have to wait till 2001, when an encounter with one of the most enduring figures of the sexuality movement in India would challenge this assumption.)

There was a random trickle of information that I look back at and think of as imperceptibly forming my own ideas of who I am and could be. The news reports of Leela and Urmila, two policewomen in Bhopal who got married in 1987. A photograph of 26-year-old Ashwini Sukthankar (the editor of Facing the Mirror — Lesbian Writing from India) holding a poster that read “Lesbian and Indian” with ‘lesbian’ written in saffron and ‘Indian’ in green exemplified for me the moment of a particular political visibility generated in response to Shiv Sena attacks on cinema halls screening Deepa Mehta’s Fire, in 1996.

The first sense of gay politics being somewhere closer home than the magazines I read at the British Council Library came in 1997, when the National Seminar on Gay Rights was organised by students of the National Law School, Bangalore. It received much media coverage. More importantly, I knew one of the participants was Ashok Row Kavi, an openly gay man giving a face to abstractions.

I was actually 20 when I met my first gay man. Until then I, the son of two government- employed accountants, had assumed I was the only self-confessed gay in the village. My relationships continued to resemble the hide-and-seek routines with boys in the Public Library that I had had in Class X — sometimes romantic, sometimes erotic and sometimes plain silly. Abhishek was around my age. Outside of work, Abhishek’s entire social circle was gay. He already had the lifestyle that is much easier for young gay men in Indian metros to have now. V, for instance, a 19-year-old I know, probably has conversations with straight people only when he steps out to buy groceries. Perhaps. At work, as a stylist, he can assume that everyone he meets is queer.

But the evening that Abhishek took me to Good As You, a tea party that masquerades as a support group, I felt another ripple of identification. There were around 20 men in that neat, small room. Artists, activists, IT sector men — many, like me, slightly effeminate. One boy, a medical student, dressed punk. The meeting went on, minutes were taken. What was more important for me came afterwards, when we all trotted to a couple’s home. To me, and to others in the group, their existence, as a couple who kept house together and went on to do so for eight years, was important. Their house was a place to go to and a place where many parties took place.

Obviously, parties were more important spaces for homosexual and bisexual men (and women to a lesser extent) than the well-intentioned support group meetings that mushroomed across India in the 1990s.

These communities grew to tackle, in myriad ways, hitherto condoned persecution of same-sex love and sexual acts. Having regular support group meetings and counseling help-lines, building libraries, bringing out newsletters were some of the primary activities of such groups. If they were lucky, these were also places to hook-up and have sex. One of the earliest politically identified groups was the Delhi Group, a group of lesbian feminists. (Lesbian groups in India have always been more radical and political, coming as they did from the women’s movement. Today, lesbian groups continue to actively organise interventions to deal with shame, immediate family crises, and create shelters for lesbians. Instead of pride marches once a year, Kolkata’s Sappho continuously engages with the public year-round. It was through the lesbian and women’s groups that the gay movement joined the larger network of social movements.)

But parties organised, both at homes and at select discos, built for us a sense of being a significant population. This was where you went to meet new gay men and women; where I went to dance; where you watched fascinated as someone dancing lifted that eyebrow to practiced perfection at that precise point in Kajra Re; where I learnt to deal with bad body image; where sometimes body image didn’t matter when you were held like you would never be left alone. Parties are where I always have a niggling suspicion that gay identities are built on sexual gossip and not sexual orientation.

WITH A deep sense of being born at the wrong place at the wrong time, I love to listen to stories from older homosexuals who, with a nostalgic glaze and a playful lilt, speak of parties in the 1980s and early 1990s as allowing for a lot more sexual expression than the more regulated parties held in metros today. The strict ‘No Drag, No Sex’ policies of some of these parties, which also include self-policing of all toilets, seems like a clean-up act in preparation for the imminent entry into legal acceptance with the reading down of 377. It is where I am also increasingly convinced that the reading down will only provide an increased sense of security to the urban gay man, certainly not to the hijra who has always been, in that sense, ‘out’.

The post-internet generation of urban men and women who quote from Will&Grace, download and share episodes of Queer as Folk, Six Feet Under or The L Word, and read any number of news articles speculating on the sexual positions of Shah Rukh Khan, Karan Johar or, more recently, Arjun Rampal, are surer than before of how to negotiate, or even ignore, the straight world out there. The tragic gay who identified with the exiled-from-love figures of Meena Kumari and Rekha is well on his way out and occupies a retro-voguish status at best. (It is mildly entertaining to be the only person who remembers Anil Kapoor, at the height of his fame, having to fight off accusations in Stardust about his sexual orientation).

SIMULTANEOUSLY, straight people find it easier to deal with us. Not that Will&Grace was the primer that gave them the clues to spot us. They always had the clues, but now they can assume that talking about them to us is not going to shame or anger us. Just a decade ago, it was great fun to watch students trying to deal with Hoshang Merchant. I was at Hyderabad Central University, where Hoshang teaches English. He was 50-odd years old, had edited Yaarana, an anthology of gay writing, and was highly camp. To many straight students, it was like being flung into a dark swimming pool and told to swim. Later, I would associate him with Quentin Crisp’s line about being not just a self-confessed homosexual but also a self-evident homosexual. I identified with his tragic queen figure, his love for Anaïs Nin and HD. It made it easier for me to be a queer man on campus.

After University, I joined Sangama, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) support group that had become an NGO. I travelled to other cities and went to conferences. I met Famila, a striking young hijra sex-worker, at a conference in Ooty organised in 2001 by the Churches of South India. I believe it was one of the first such efforts to integrate LGBT issues into liberation theology. Famila died in 2004 and everyone would remember their first meeting with her; everyone would recall that she transformed their ideas of sexual politics. That first time, I remember her as sexy and quiet. Over the years, in conversation with her, I realised the gay / straight framework was just one way of organising our sexcapades, romantic or otherwise.

The various ways in which we fashioned ourselves constantly as gay or straight, but spoke about it as if it was innate became suddenly more visible from this perspective. Generous and articulate, she was the first person to raise hijra ideas of sex, desire and community to the level of knowledge, not dismiss it as experience. Through this perspective, the annual Koovagam festival in Tamil Nadu took on a different meaning.

These conversations make it difficult for me to be reconciled to the gay identities being forged in India today, patterned after a Western trajectory. Among the dozens of LGBT groups and NGOs in the country in the late 1990s, there was once conflict about identity. Some wanted traditional identities such as khoti and panthi to be subsumed under the ‘gay’ umbrella and others argued exclusively for traditional identities. Traditional identities have won out because that is where the funding is. Almost nobody will consider the idea that, even a decade ago, a non-English speaking khoti would think of what he did as only the way in which he loved. Not something innate. But now, with the all-organising HIV-AIDS discourse and the reformist agenda of the urban English-speaking queer person, it is almost impossible to find a khoti who does not know that it is unsophisticated to not identify yourself. To not sit in support group meetings, pass the Marie biscuits and name yourself, “Gay, khoti, panthi.”

IT IS easy to slip into the familiar narratives of gay people as invisible, those with a voice, those without. You find yourself organising experiences into these narratives. I could tell you that I once found it easy to go to Cubbon Park and meet crowds of gay people just behind High Court. You chose to join groups, to pick up or be picked up. Over the last decade, arrests have happened in Cubbon Park with greater and lesser frequency. And now the entire stretch is marked by floodlights so you must run where it’s dark, hoping not to bump into cops. But I could also choose to remember that my friends, who say they miss cruising and rue online cruising, will not go out with people who have not uploaded photos.

I could choose to remember a young Catholic lesbian couple in Bangalore who thought it important to talk to their youth group and their priests in the same week they told their parents that they were in love and, over a year, found at least partial acceptance. Another lesbian couple in Kerala moved court and got legal sanction to live as a couple. People like them force us to notice what is culturally sanctioned.

I agree with the people who argue that our movement should perhaps not have focussed on 377 (given Indians’ complicated relationship with the law). We should have focussed on marriage instead. Rather than assume that acceptance of gay marriage will come later, faithfully following the Western trajectory, we could see what is around us. In the 1970s, Shankuntala Devi (yes, the mathematical genius) wrote a treatise on homosexuality in which she interviewed a priest who spoke of Hindu marriage being between two souls, not two bodies. In 1987, when Leela and Urmila were married, their priest used the same words as justification.

THOUGH MOST of us were happy to read about Wendell Rodericks’ wedding, one wished people knew that gay and lesbian marriages, with some ritual, happen around us all the time. Nandu’s and Sheela’s, in Kerala, for instance, was one of the more public ones, in 2004. Why aren’t we organising mass marriages as the Self-Respect movement once organised inter-caste marriages in Tamil Nadu’s cinema halls? The social hostility attendant would be only the same hostility that any inter-caste, inter-race or intergenerational marriage faces in India or the West. As would any union that privileges erotic love over social suitability.

My friend remarked that a young gay couple whom we think of as the most devoted in existence, are living a double life, as neither are out to their parents. I would argue that the phrase double life is not particularly useful because the hostility the young gay couple face is hardly different from that faced by heterosexual couples arrested in parks in Bihar.

If I were much ruder, I would quote Akshay Khanna. Not the actor, Akshay is an important and serious activist, someone just as capable of kissing a woman while wearing a skirt, as kissing a man in a public meeting. To annoying people who ask him whether he is out to his parents, he would respond, “I wish heterosexuals in India would come out to their parents.”