by Ira Trivedi
‘Women decide to run when their families begin to put unprecedented pressure on them to get married,’ Maya says. This is when they contact Sangini. The first thing that Sangini does when someone wants to run away is try to resolve differences with their families. If discussions break down, then they plan the escape. The fugitive-to-be begins to send her belongings in small instalments to the Sangini headquarters (this apartment), so that she can travel light on the big day. Calls are avoided because they can be traced, and only email is used. Bank accounts are slowly emptied out so that the fugitive’s location cannot be traced through bank transactions. Sangini also helps the runaway with her job search because financial independence from parents is critical to the success of the escape. The lesbian network in India, though nascent, is getting more organized and better able to help those who seek it out. The number of lesbian organizations is growing as the number of women joining these organizations is increasing. There are LGBT groups present in Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Baroda (amongst many others) and these groups often coordinate with each other to form a cohesive network of assistance. Most importantly, more Indian women are working and financially independent, and this makes it possible for them to think of a life outside a traditional heterosexual marriage.
As I leave, I see the fugitive sitting at the dining table, her arms folded tightly, and her head down. She is crying softly. Even though I don’t know who she is, where she is from, or what her problems are, I feel for her. It takes a lot of courage for an Indian woman to run away from home. I remember my only attempt of running away when I was visiting my parents after my first year of college. After the short stint of independence at Wellesley, I had felt oppressed in my parents’ home in small-town India, and after a particularly trying fight, I had decided to leave. Though I had planned my midnight escape meticulously, I only got 100 kilometres away in a shared taxi before two carloads of family members found me and brought me back home. I still remember how scared, terrified and alone I had felt during those six hours of flight. When they found me crouching in a car, a part of me had never been more relieved. When I got home to the screaming and scolding, there had been hugs, kisses and waterworks of joy.
I wished there was something I could do to help this runaway, but I knew that Maya wanted to conceal her identity until her situation was resolved. I want to tell her that after the long, difficult battle is fought, there will be beautiful moments of freedom, happiness and love, and that she too will be found.
THE QUEER REVOLUTION
In his hometown of Phaltan (100 kilometres from Pune; population of about 53,000), Kapil Ranaware is a local celebrity. He is the first boy in the history of the town to clear the IIT-JEE, perhaps the most difficult college entrance exam in the world, which 500,000 students take every year. Every mother in Phaltan wants her son to be like Kapil. They all send their sons to the same schools, the same tutors, and even the same temples where Kapil is rumoured to have prayed. But Kapil has a dirty little secret that he is desperate to tell, but may never be able to share with his family. He is gay.
Kapil did not know that he was gay, or even what homosexuality was till he was fifteen years old. It was only after the tenth standard, when he moved to Pune to begin the strict two-year training for the IIT-JEE exam, and stumbled upon gay porn on the internet, that Kapil realized that he liked men. He always knew that he was different from the other boys. He was teased for being effeminate, for laughing differently, for walking differently, and he had never understood what the big deal about girls was. Now he was beginning to realize why.
Ultimately, Bollywood showed Kapil the way. Dostana, a 2008 blockbuster film featuring actors Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham, brought the topic of homosexuality into the mainstream. Millions of families across the country watched this film together, many understanding for the first time what being gay was. In the film, the two actors pretend to be gay so they can share a flat with a girl. While watching the film, Kapil noticed that he was wildly attracted to the hunky John Abraham. He also found nothing amusing about two men loving each other. His friends, on the other hand, made fun of the gay men and ogled the actress Priyanka Chopra. Kapil seriously began questioning his sexuality, and scoured the internet for any information that he could find.
Kapil studied hard, landing a 2,000 rank amongst the 500,000 students who took the IIT-JEE exam, securing a seat in the biotechnology department at IIT Delhi. Kapil loved IIT Delhi: it was like an all-boys’ school (the sex ratio at a typical IIT is ten boys to a girl) and he saw many cute boys that he immediately liked and wondered why his fellow students complained about the lack of women. Here at college, Kapil had the freedom to explore his sexuality. He had free internet, his own mobile phone, and he was far away from the clutches of his parents’ morality.
Social media presented a turning point for Kapil. The internet gave him access, and Facebook gave him a new identity: he could be anyone, anywhere, at any time. He cruised freely online—miles, even countries away, for information and for men—which gave him access to unlimited sexual partners, from Delhi to Pune and much to his surprise, Phaltan.
The first time was painful for Kapil. It was during his second month at IIT, he was seventeen, and his lover, twenty-three. He found him on Facebook, and the only criteria for Kapil was that his lover have a place to have sex, and that he wasn’t far away. Though Kapil didn’t enjoy the sex, he was interminably relieved that there were others out there like him, that he was not ‘defective’ or have a ‘disease’ as some blogs had indicated.
Kapil kept the gay part of his life secret, operating through fake Facebook accounts. He discovered that there were all sorts of gay people—old, young, and many who were married to women. A fellow cruiser introduced him to PlanetRomeo; this website transformed the way he cruised online, opening up a new host of opportunities. On PlanetRomeo he could search for men by location, he could see their pictures, their likes, dislikes, and even their preferred sexual positions.
Over the two years that Kapil has been at IIT, he has begun to enjoy his furtive, often vigorous sexual encounters. He seeks out men in his own age group, preferably students who live close to the IIT campus. Not much conversation is had during the encounters, and often condoms are not used. Kapil has never had a desire to meet any of the men again, or to pursue a romantic relationship, except once, when Cupid struck.
Kapil met the man whom he called Robby on PlanetRomeo. Instead of having sex, Robby and Kapil spoke all night, falling asleep naked, holding each other. They kept in touch online until Kapil declared to Robby that he loved him, and wanted to be in a relationship. But Robby didn’t want a boyfriend. He was going to get married soon to a woman that his parents had arranged his marriage to, though he would continue to have sexual encounters with other men.
Kapil’s first love hit him hard, like first love often does, and he started thinking carefully about his future. He knew that he wasn’t a liar like Robby; he would never get married to a woman when he loved a man. He had to be true to himself, and to do this he would have to tell the world that he was gay.
Kapil’s most striking features are his eyes—round as saucers, with a permanent, almost ghoulish, blank look. He has craggy yellow teeth, with two canines that jut out like fangs from the sides of his mouth. His hair is cut short, and he has grown the fingernails of his pinkie fingers an inch-and-a-half long. Most of the time that we talk he looks blank, but occasionally he breaks into a squeaky sigh, or a laugh, transforming his face from a ghoul’s into a happy elf’s.
I met Kapil through a focus group that I conducted on the IIT campus to discuss love, sex and relationships with students. My first question to the group had been, ‘Who here wants to be in a relationship?’ Every hand had shot up. I asked why and the answers were varied—someone to talk to, emotional support, someone to have fun with. A boy sitting in the front row who had been listening intently raised his arm, and told me in broken, heavily accented English, ‘I want to be in a relatio
nship, but not with a girl, but with a boy, because I’m a gay.’ I was taken aback, this wasn’t something that I had expected. At the end of my session, I asked the students, casually and cautiously, expecting at least a few positive answers—how many of them had had sex? Out of all the students in the room, only one had raised his hand confidently. It was Kapil, the boy in the front row.
I began visiting Kapil frequently at the IIT campus at night, when he had finished with his classes. We would sit at a small tea-stall that stayed open all night, eating Maggi noodles and drinking sweet tea from the machine. Of the 5,000 students at IIT Delhi, Kapil was the only openly gay person, though he told me that he know of more than 200 gay men on campus, courtesy social media, and he suspected that there were several hundred more. He had a few friends in the gay community at IIT, but most of the time they ignored him because they didn’t want anyone to suspect their ‘wayward’ sexual orientation.
Kapil came out five months before I met him by posting a message on Facebook, which read:
‘Thought a lot about it, nearly 20 days and nights full of introspection and it was hard to accept myself the way I was especially because of the homophobia around. But finally I accept and tell the world that I am a GAY! People like Ashok Row Kavi are inspiration for me and why should I feel ashamed of myself when homosexuality has been there since ages plz note this is NOT hacked status.’
Despite his cautionary footnote, Kapil’s friends flooded his hostel room, telling him that his Facebook account had been hacked, and that the hacker had proclaimed him ‘a gay’.
‘I told them that I was the one who posted it, and that I was really a gay,’ Kapil said one evening as we sat chatting at the tea-stall.
‘And how did they react?’ I asked.
‘Initially they were shocked, but when they realized that I was serious, they became curious. The first question that people asked me was “Do you find me attractive?” They asked me how sex was, how we had sex, how I felt after sex, and what positions I liked.’ Sex was clearly on their mind—with man or woman.
Much to Kapil’s pleasant surprise, his coming out process had been smooth. His friends at IIT, in Pune, and even in Phaltan have accepted him, telling him that his being gay was no big deal. ‘I realized that everyone was cool about it. No one mocked me, no one laughed at me. I was totally shocked, I thought it would be much worse,’ Kapil said with an elfin smile.
Kapil’s acceptance amongst his peers is no exception to the norm. Of the 5,369 men and women surveyed by a magazine in 2010, 17 per cent approved of homosexuality62—a figure that increased from the magazine’s previous survey in 2000. This may seem low, but in a country that has previously been fiercely homophobic, it is a positive step. Perhaps what is more telling, however, are my conversations with young people across India. There has been a distinct generational shift—partly due to more gay people coming out as a result of decriminalization of homosexuality in 2009—and as straight people see gays leading positive lives, people appear to have become more tolerant. Fifteen years ago, anything even alluding to homosexuality was highly taboo, and was kept hushed. It is only recently, with the growth of a robust, liberal media and the advent of technology that the gay movement has found a voice and an entire generation is growing up with more liberal views than before.
Understandably, the biggest opponents to Kapil’s homosexuality are his parents. He wants to tell them, but he is not sure if they will understand, and if so, how they will react. His mother doesn’t even know what the word gay means. The only person that he has told in his family is his sister. Kapil doubts that she takes him seriously. He tells me that his sister understands because she has had an inter-caste love marriage, but she also does not know much about homosexuality, and she hopes that Kapil’s sexual orientation will change. I notice that this is a common reaction of the older generation that Sree and Kapil’s parents belong to.
‘I thought that I would come out to my parents. I wrote a letter, I rehearsed everything. I decided that I would call them so many times, but then at the last minute I chicken out. I just don’t have the guts,’ says Kapil.
‘Maybe they’ll understand, like your friends did,’ I tell him optimistically. ‘At best, they may just feign ignorance.’
‘No, Ira ma’am, I don’t think so. There is so much societal pressure, especially from relatives. We live in Phaltan, and I am a Maratha. We are proud people. Maybe I’ll tell them when they put pressure on me to get married or when I find someone that I love.’
As Kapil speaks, a perspicacious passage from my friend Anita Jain’s memoir, Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India, comes to mind: ‘In the West, people are obsessed with sex, so they focus on what sexual acts are committed in homosexual relationships. In India, the focus is marriage, and society is more concerned with maintaining the family structure and less with what is being done in the bedroom. I’ve heard some gay men tell me that their parents don’t care what they do or with whom as long as they end up getting married.’
Homosexuality in India is accepted as long as it does not interfere with reproduction and the family process. Sex and marriage seem to be disconnected—so as long as the son marries and has children, he can do whatever he wants in the bedroom. As long as homosexuality is ‘masti’ or fun, it is okay, but the minute it becomes an identity—like it is slowly becoming for Kapil—then it becomes a problem.
It was late now, almost 2 a.m., and Kapil and I were the only ones left at the tea-shop. There were still some students hanging around outside their hostels, mostly groups of boys. We walked past a male trio who snickered when they saw us. Kapil increased his pace and I almost had to run to keep up with him. He was staring down at the road and was suddenly quiet. I asked him if something was the matter.
‘One of those guys is a gay. I think he is cute, and he likes me too, but he doesn’t want to hang around with me because I am open. He makes fun of me so that people don’t think that he is a gay,’ he said to me in a whisper, peering over his shoulder to make sure the boys were distance away.
He added wistfully, ‘Ira ma’am, sometimes, I feel really alone. I am bored of all this sex stuff, and I wish that I could have a boyfriend like you.’
PEGS AND PINTS
On a Tuesday night in Delhi, the party is at Pegs and Pints. On the dance floor the men dance fervently, violently, khuley aam, to the music. Outside, it is a Delhi winter night, cold and foggy, but inside the temperature is soaring. There are a lot of bodies and a lot of heat. Men grind pelvis-to-pelvis, dry hump, and make out on the dance floor, fumbling with each other’s privates.
The bar is small and packed with men—most are dancing, while others stand on the margins of the dance floor carefully scoping out the crowd for men they can take home. There are a few flamboyantly dressed transvestites and only a handful of women. Any place in New Delhi that is packed with men at midnight, especially where alcohol is flowing, a woman has numerous reasons to flee immediately, but here I feel strangely safe. I gleefully notice that not a single man is staring, looking, or even paying attention to me.
Kapil and I have come to gay night at Pegs and Pints with a mission to land a boyfriend for Kapil. At least that was the plan. On the dance floor, Kapil is a beast. He is a fluid and nimble dancer, and he hops, skips and gyrates confidently to the music, though in curious juxtaposition, his face and saucer eyes remain as expressionless as always. I am amazed at what a good dancer he is and how confidently and unselfconsciously he is dancing—all by himself. He doesn’t seem interested in meeting anyone. The music here is great, a mix of English pop and Bollywood tunes, though the latter are clearly the rage. When the DJ plays Bollywood music, the dance floor goes crazy, and it is almost a little dangerous to be on it with all the flailing arms and legs. Kapil knows all the words to the songs, both English and Hindi, and he mouths them as he dances. I join Kapil on the dance floor. At first I dance cautiously, I am the only woman on a floor full of men, but then I too let my hair
down and dance exuberantly to the music. I can’t remember the last time I danced like this.
‘I would be careful if I were you,’ says a slinky man with a lizard-like face pointing his cigarette towards me. ‘Many of these men are bisexual, and someone may jump on you. They can get violent here, that time of night is approaching.’
The man who is being so solicitous is Manish, the queen of the club. He organizes weekly gay nights at clubs around Delhi. Though Delhi’s gay scene is getting hot now, Manish tells me that the real party had been in Bombay, the nucleus of India’s gay scene. Manish remembers that time fondly. The first gay nightclub to hit the scene in the mid-1990s was Voodoo, a discotheque in South Bombay where Manish lost his virginity behind the bar when he was seventeen years old. Manish tells me with stars in his eyes about the legendary ‘White Party’ that he attended. According to Manish, the White Party, thrown by a Bombay industrialist, was even larger than a big Indian wedding, and featured a troupe of handsome foreign male strippers and barmen flown down from various parts of the world. Unfortunately the police raided the party and arrested most people there; Manish spent a night in jail, though he adds wistfully that jail time was worth that party. It is Manish’s dream to organize an event as large as the White Party, and when homosexuality was decriminalized that might have been a distinct possibility but now things have started looking uncertain again.
I think back to Suri’s article on being gay in India:
The Bombay I grew up in during the 60s and 70s was quite incontestably unenlightened. Homosexuality was not mentioned, it didn’t exist. I never once met anyone I knew to be gay. The only media input I remember was a single article in a women’s magazine during my college years talking vaguely about far-away beaches where men supposedly found each other.63
