“I miss the gays,” sighs Elsa over this morning’s breakfast of Indian hybrid Pad Thai. Our cook has an originality in planning early-morning cuisine to make a gastronomically-liberal maharajah blush. Today is noodles, yesterday was spicy pasta (a favourite, especially served with green ‘chilly sauce’), and the day before it was sag aloo toasted sandwiches with french fry-shaped potatoes that were warmly soaked in vegetable oil rather than fried in them. He does, however, make an increadible daal and the best parathas I’ve ever tasted, so I’ve taken to becoming a two-meals-a-day girl.
Meanwhile, Elsa, who is from San Francisco and engaged to a man she has been seeing for six years, has been persuading us for the last five minutes that the homosexual community in San Francisco are the ‘best gays in the world’. She wants to find a gay bar in Delhi where she can soak up the atmosphere. Karsten tells her she can’t use gay men to supplement her lifestyle preferences.
In Delhi, it’s not uncommon to see men holding hands as they chew paan and walk down the street, or to catch a glimpse of a rickshaw passenger with his arm around a male friend in the back seat. It’s a public sign of friendship here (although not considered acceptable when displayed between women). Moreover, gaze around any trendy club or bar in the capital, and you’ll notice that the middle class boys are a little freer in their fashion. Elaborately coiffed hair and extra tight clothes are not considered the camp choice. In Bollywood, the macho protagonist hunks are shiny men with slick dance moves and open shirts that gyrate and swing. Men’s gestures and dress are completely sexually unambiguous – unsurprising, since concieving of anything else would be anathema.
A list of gay Indian celebrities wouldn't roll quickly off the tongue.
Homosexuality is illegal in India, and has been since the rule of the British. In the 1860s, Civil Servants considered it an abhorrence and it was criminalised. Queen Victoria infamously approved the legislation against sodomy (refusing to sign away the social freedom of lesbians because she didn’t believe they existed). An echo of this came recently when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was asked if he supported decriminalisation. His reply? "There would not be much appreciation for a law like that in India." And so the law remains in Delhi. Conviction can lead to up to 10 years in prison, plus a fine. According to the government, there have been no arrests in 20 years, though Human Rights Watch disagree. The law has been used to blackmail people, allow abuse by police, and, worst of all, leads to ostracism and a shameful excommuncation from the family.
And it is not because of a legal loophole or a lethargy over changing legislation that it remains so. In 2005 a suggestion by the Indian Law Commission to lift the ban on homosexuality was rejected by the New Delhi government. In 1996, Deepa Mehta’s film Fire was released. In it, two women are pushed together by the abuse and neglect of their husbands, by the end leaving their families for each other: poignantly, not before one of them is badly burned in a fire. It immediately banned by certain religious groups and on the first day of screening, cinemas were attacked by Muslim fundamentalists.
Ignoring the issue only causes India’s estimated 100 million gay, bisexual and transgendered people to move underground. Many liberal Indians blame the rapid spread of AIDs on the government’s decision to force the uninformed homosexual populace into the shadows.
Some, however, are beginning to emerge, blinking, into the light. Today’s Times of India carries a story that suggests hope, if only because it was printed at all. In Howrah, near Kolkata, two women in their early twenties (prime marriage-age) met at a wedding and fell in love. Now, they are accepted as a couple, and one girl’s parents are ready to adopt a child for them to make their unit complete. Not, it might be added, before they ran away together, leaving a note. “We know our relatives and society will not accept this alliance,” it read. “We have decided to leave our families and live elsewhere as a married couple.” When they returned to their village, they must have fallen backwards in shock when one of the girls’ parents killed the proverbial fattened calf.
Gay clubs exist semi-openly in the cities, and there are signs that in liberal circles they’re beginning to be tolerated. This year saw the first gay pride marches in Delhi, Mumbai and Pondicherry. But India is a dowry-based social economy that partially condones (killing daughters) in order to afford a part in it. Decriminalising homosexuality in India will not happen tomorrow. Tolerance is far off. Celebration is practically inconsiderable.
Elsa might find her gay bar, and the gays to supplement her lifestyle preferences. But if she’s camping it up to YMCA, chances are she’ll be doing it behind darkened windows.
...Bollywood hunks
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