by Benjamin Law
‘I was always 100 per cent confident,’ he told me. ‘There is a mountain to be climbed. You can see it; you have to climb it. It may take time. You may fall. But then you will go ahead, because it will be climbed. There’s no doubt about it, because it’s patent injustice.’
Anand had worked extensively in cases relating to homosexuality and HIV since the late 1980s, when he represented Dominic D’Souza, a gay man who was fired after being diagnosed as HIV-positive. Doctors refused to treat D’Souza and he was detained in a sanitarium for two months by state officials who insisted they were serving the public interest. D’Souza’s mother approached Anand and his team to initiate a lawsuit to have Section 53 – the law that allowed D’Souza to be fired and detained – declared unconstitutional and a denial of due process. They lost the case and everyone was shattered. In 1992, as D’Souza was dying, Anand promised him that he’d keep on with the work they had started together.
After D’Souza died, Anand became obsessed. Gay men approached him for representation if they were being blackmailed. Anand would take on four new pro bono HIV-related cases per month. His wife – herself a lawyer and co-founder of Lawyers Collective – said he’d gone mad, and Anand knew she was only half-joking. After years of working on these cases, he felt the root cause of each one was the same: Section 377. If India got rid of that law, most of these cases would disappear. And, technically, it wasn’t just gay men who infringed Section 377.
‘The act was only against gay men on the face of it,’ he said. ‘But if I’m heterosexual and have anal sex or oral sex with my female partner, I’d go to jail too. You have to understand this section.’ Anand looked at the ceiling and recited directly from Section 377. ‘“Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse with a man, woman or animal – against the order of nature – shall be punished.” What is the meaning of “against the order of nature”? A practice which does not beget children! Penis is the culprit –’
‘As it always is,’ I said.
Anand laughed, agreeing.
‘As it always is. And the explanation says, “penetration that is sufficient to constitute this offence”. So penile penetration is a must.’
This provided an interesting loophole if you were a woman. Lesbians were completely ignored by Section 377. If you were a queer woman in India, this was one of those rare cases in which discrimination actually swung in your favour. When Anjali, Anand and Lawyers Collective started mobilising for the fight against Section 377, some lesbians in India became nervous. They remembered a 1995 case in Sri Lanka, in which petitioners lobbied against a similar colonial law called Article 365. Not only did the repeal fail, the campaign made things worse. The previous law, the government decided, wasn’t discriminatory enough, so they created an amendment called Article 365A, which criminalised same-sex relationships between anyone – men and women – as an act of ‘gross indecency’. Female-on-female sex was now punishable by up to twelve years’ imprisonment in Sri Lanka, solely because activists had spoken up. It was the court’s perverse way of redefining equality.
Anand and Lawyers Collective, aware of these concerns, arranged open meetings and forums for anyone who felt they had a stake in the repeal. Queer people from gay to hijra, transgender to bisexual, poor to middle class, arrived to debate the campaign. In the meantime, the case tediously bounced from the Delhi High Court to the Indian Supreme Court and back to the Delhi High Court. For most people, the wait would have been frustrating. But in the years it took for the case to pass between the courts, Anand noticed something else developing.
‘By 2006 and 2007, there were talk shows and chat shows. Everybody was saying, “My daughter is gay,” “My son is this,” “My brother is that, and I support them.”’
Journalists and commentators started talking about the petition too. The issue occupied increasing inches of column space in newspapers and divided the Indian parliament. The Health Ministry declared its support for repealing Section 377 for public health reasons, while the Home Ministry denounced the petition. Having two government ministries publicly contradict each other gave the repeal an advantage, forcing the court to push its final arguments through. Suddenly, it was announced that the two-judge bench overseeing the case would deliver a swift verdict.
Indians and expatriates sent emails and text messages to each other with the news: They’re deciding tomorrow. Anand got the word in Geneva where he was working for the UN. In India, and around the world, people stayed up in anticipation.
The next morning, the Delhi High Court was packed with activists, lawyers, reporters and spectators. Judgements in other cases had to be read out first, but the crowd was there for Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi. As the two-man bench entered the room, everyone stood up, bowed to both Chief Justice A.P. Shah and Justice S. Muralidhar, and then sat down. A silence descended.
‘I will read out the conclusion,’ Shah said. ‘We declare that Section 377 IPC, insofar it criminalises consensual sexual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles –’
A gasp went around the room. Some people squealed. Anjali couldn’t tell whether they were expressing horror or joy. She wished her legal vocabulary was stronger. Had they won or not?
‘What’s he saying, what’s he saying?’ she asked the man next to her, a lawyer she didn’t know. ‘What does it mean?’ Smiling, he leaned over and explained.
In homes across India, the rolling ticker-tape display on the bottom of television sets explained the verdict in capital letters: ‘BREAKING NEWS: HOMOSEXUALITY IS LEGAL. HC: CONSENSUAL SEX BETWEEN SAME SEX ADULTS IS LEGAL.’
Later, Anjali would recall the moment over and over.
‘My god,’ she said. ‘It was such fun.’
In Delhi, hijras led dances among repeal supporters who held up banners for photojournalists. In Mumbai, 1500 kilometres away, it was monsoon season and the city was being pissed on by rain. It didn’t matter: people ran or caught rickshaws or taxis to each other’s homes to see the news, remaining glued to the TV sets for hours. People skipped work. Many wept. Religious groups fumed. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s conservative opposition, had always been against the repeal. And while few things were capable of uniting India’s diverse Muslim, Christian and Hindu groups, they were all united in denouncing this. Furious, Baba Ramdev declared he would immediately file a petition with the Supreme Court against the decision.
On that day, though, it was clear which side the news producers were on. As they reported the news of Ramdev’s petition, every TV station managed to find the most bizarre footage of Ramdev possible, including shots of him doing Russian Cossack leg thrusts and that weird thing he did with his gut. It made it hard to take him seriously.
Several days after the court verdict in Delhi, a still-buzzing but exhausted Anjali Gopalan was in bed when her phone rang. On the other line was a man’s voice she didn’t recognise, telling her that he represented Baba Ramdev and that his people were going to have her kidnapped and killed. Normally, this would have been chilling, but after the previous few days, Anjali was exhausted.
‘Look,’ she said down the phone line. ‘I don’t think you’ve seen me. It’s not so easy to kidnap me.’
‘Women like you,’ continued the caller, ‘have singlehandly ruined the moral fibre of this country.’
‘Well, thank you very much,’ she said, sighing. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
Then she hung up.
The next day, she told her colleagues at the Naz Foundation what had happened. They were appalled.
‘You must file a police report and ask for protection,’ they said.
‘Are you mad?’ Anjali said. ‘Ridiculous! This is what you’re going to get killed for? Fuck this shit.’
So far, nothing had happened. After a decade’s worth of drama in campaigning for queer rights, Anjali had recently started as a volunteer at a Delhi shelter dedicated to caring for abandoned, neglected and abused animals. Considering the number of stray do
gs, cats and cattle I’d seen on Delhi’s streets, it sounded like a job without any end in sight. It was as though she was always looking out for the next disenfranchised group to take care of.
‘You can’t help yourself, can you?’ I said.
Anjali shrugged mock-innocently.
Maybe Baba Ramdev was right. It always started with homosexuals before progressing on to animals.
My hotel in Delhi – if you could call it a hotel – was a hole in the wall with the vaguely brothel-ish name of Hotel Express 66. It was bang in the heart of the city’s busiest road, an artery for trade that connected Delhi to its main railway and metro station. Outside the hotel, stray dogs with long snouts and droopy nipples wove through human legs, as those human legs wove through a bitumen chaos of cattle-drawn carts, motor cycles and three-wheeled auto rickshaws. Teenage boys sat on the ledges of the main bridge of Desh Bandhu Gupta Road eating snacks, feet dangling over the edge, seemingly oblivious to the fatal drop. Men pissed into open-air urinals on the kerbside only to have their piss run back onto the footpath and road. Everything stank. It was an ever-evolving smell, usually consisting of petrol fumes, faeces, human urine and an exciting hint of fire. At night, even with the windows closed, the smell seeped inside. As I slept, I collected it in my lungs.
In the morning, barely conscious and heavy-lidded, I caught the metro into the suburbs to meet the man known as the godfather of India’s modern gay movement, who’d supported the Section 377 repeal movement from the start. Ashok Row Kavi had even discussed with Lawyers Collective the possibility of filing the petition himself, but the problem was that he lived in Mumbai at the time.
When I got off the train and walked the back streets towards Ashok’s apartment, I sighed with relief: this was as close to quiet as you could get in Delhi. Instead of the screaming of car horns and the smell of burning, there was birdsong and the sound of lone hammers doing construction work. It wouldn’t be this quiet for long. This area was in demand. Older houses were being dismantled all over the neighbourhood in favour of new, full-floor apartments. When I mentioned the development in his street, Ashok nodded happily.
‘Oh, India’s just exploding,’ he said. ‘It’s like gay culture here too.’
Although he was indoors, Ashok wore a full winter jacket and beanie. He lived in a fifty-year-old building with bad wiring, which meant that an electric heater could blow the fuse. But there was a serene quality to his apartment too. He kept two aquariums full of bright fish, bookshelves packed with literature and warm fairy lights strung throughout the place.
Ashok was in his mid sixties, but had a constant expression of wry amusement that made him look far younger. He had an infectious, puckish personality, called everyone ‘darling’ and always referred to his male friends by female pronouns. When someone phoned in the middle of our chat, Ashok greeted him by airily asking, ‘And who are you fucking at the moment, you filthy pig?’
Ashok was the first gay man to talk about his sexuality in the Indian press. After he came out as gay in the 1980s, he became notorious and the press endlessly interviewed him about homosexuality. For years, Ashok remained the sole openly gay public figure in India. He founded two major institutions: India’s first gay magazine, Bombay Dost, and the Humsafar Trust, which remained one of India’s peak organisations for sexual health in gay men, MSMs and transgender people. People called him the godfather of India’s gay rights movement.
‘Oh, I’m not the godfather,’ Ashok said now. He put his hand to his chest, feigning humility. ‘I’m called amma, which means mum. And as a mother, I earned that title.’
Like Dr Anjali Gopalan, Ashok had also had his fair share of encounters with Baba Ramdev. Ashok asked to see my photos with him. He adjusted his glasses to examine them, made a face, then handed back my camera.
‘I’m glad you spoke to him,’ he said. ‘I think he’s weird. In fact, I’m very sure that he’s in the closet.’
‘People do keep saying that,’ I said.
‘He only has men around him,’ Ashok said. ‘He only nurtures guys. Closet queens. What did he have to say to you about homosexuality?’
I told Ashok that Ramdev has described homosexuality as a ‘bad habit’.
‘Eeee!’ Ashok squealed. ‘I could slap him! He’s a yoga teacher. What he speaks on is yoga, and yoga is a physical science supposed to harness spiritual energies. It’s got nothing to do with pure spiritualism. I once said to him on television, “You’re not even properly Hindu. Most of the stuff you teach is rubbish.” But it is frightening. He’s got 80 million followers, most of them total weirdos.’
Queer sexualities were not new to India, Ashok explained. Everyone knew about the hijras, similar to transgender men – who dressed and lived as women – also known as the so-called third gender of India. But there were other precedents, like the ancient practice of holy prostitution in some Hindu temples. Jogappas, male devotees of the Hindu goddess Yellamma, had dressed in the saris and jewellery of married women and sexually serviced men as a display of their religious devotion. There was also the obscure Hindu concept of Vanaprastha, a stage in the Vedic ashram system where men, in old age, would renounce everything, including their property, wife and family. They’d go to a forest or ashram, get fully nude and stay nude until they died. Ashok quipped that this had been a handy option if you were old, married and closeted. It was British colonialism that introduced new rules and moral structures into Indian society, and laws such as Section 377 made sex largely taboo, even though this was the birthplace of the Kama Sutra.
Now the gay scene was expanding quickly, with social groups, fundraisers and parties sprouting up, especially in the wake of the Section 377 repeal. Still, Ashok had reservations about how the scene had evolved. Recently, someone had held a gay party at a Hindu religious hostel about 250 kilometres from Delhi, which had been raided by the police. Partygoers were outraged at the authorities, but Ashok was more appalled at the party’s organisers.
‘Gay men take such horrendous risks!’ he said. ‘That’s my gripe. “Stay out of trouble, guys. There’s enough shit on our plate already!” A hundred of them were there! Can you believe it?’
‘Still, it’s quite bold of them,’ I said.
‘It is bold,’ Ashok conceded. Then he shook his head as if to add: but also stupid.
A lot of the Delhi parties were for the young urban elites, gays with a tertiary education, a full-time job and money to burn, who were looking for a quick fuck. Meanwhile, Ashok pointed out, lesbians were still getting bashed and gay men were still contracting HIV through bareback sex and lack of education. It felt vulgar to him that these parties didn’t give anything back to their community.
‘To the guys holding these expensive parties, I ask: “Why don’t you collect fifty rupees extra? When each ticket is 400 or 500, surely you can pay fifty rupees extra for one of your own who’s been bashed up somewhere? Where is your sense of charity?”’
Tuesdays and Saturdays were gay nights in New Delhi. Since the repeal, the nights had become far more open and, ironically, less gay. Gay parties now attracted a more mixed crowd, with many straight women – mainly models and wannabe actresses – rubbing shoulders with fashion designers and magazine editors. To get into one particular club, you needed a special SMS forwarded by a friend. Ashok didn’t want to go, but knew the organisers and sent me the exclusive SMS to show at the door. It seemed a little incestuous – a club night where everyone would know someone else – but maybe that was the appeal.
Later that night, I showed my phone to security guards and paid a 500-rupee (eleven US dollars) entry fee, which was steep for this country. The place was packed with young men and as dark as blindness. As my eyes adjusted, I saw these men were uniformly young, twinkish, educated professionals, including IT specialists and film-makers, engineers and media types. Beers started at 250 rupees and went right up to 500, a colossal price in India, where you could pay a rickshaw driver a mere twenty rupees for a fifteen-minute drive h
ome.
It wasn’t long before I was monumentally drunk. Older men shouted me drinks and demanded in unsubtle terms that we go back to a hotel and fuck immediately. Strangers kept plying me with liquor, lighting my cigarettes and dragging me to the carpark because they had something very important they wanted to tell me in private, which was always a fervid plan of fucking in a hotel room. One guy – an aeroplane engineer in his thirties, who wore a black jacket and blue paisley satin shirt – became smitten with me and asked, over and over, to see my bare feet. The attention was flattering, but soon the place was nightmarishly packed, and I felt I was either going to pass out or vomit. After pushing my way out into the night, I hailed an auto rickshaw and headed back to Hotel Express 66 alone, my face going numb with the cold. After I paid the driver, I looked in my wallet and realised I’d spent hundreds – possibly thousands – of rupees on alcohol. Ashok was right: Delhi’s gay parties had become freer since Section 377, but the gay nightlife existed only for the people who could afford it. And in a country like India, that wasn’t many people at all.
From Delhi, I took a south-bound train to Bangalore to move closer to the equator. I needed to defrost my bones. The train route cut India down the middle like a scalpel, and the entire ride would take over thirty hours.
I had already experienced some of what India’s vast rail network had to offer. When travelling from Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali headquarters to New Delhi, I had mixed up my tickets and ended up booking a last-minute journey in standard passenger class. The experience was so searingly uncomfortable that it became comical. Children hid and slept in the overhead luggage compartments while women spat peanut shells directly onto the floor. In the toilets – which were somehow worse than I could ever have imagined – there was a brown smear of something on the mirror. At each stop, men threw themselves violently into the carriage and smashed their bodies into impossibly small spaces, as if playing a human game of Tetris. Strangers asked to sit on my lap, got angry when I said no, then sat on my lap anyway.
