Once I graduated from school, sensing that I was deeply troubled, my father urged me to move to the United States for college, ideally close to Bharat, who was an undergraduate at Harvard. He said the new setting would do me good. He looked intently at me while saying that, obviously hoping that the overture would give me the confidence to open up to him. I looked away evasively; uppermost in my mind was the terror that he would despise and disown me if he came to know the truth.
THREE
IN AMERICA
Heeding my father’s suggestion, after three semesters at St. Stephen’s College I headed to Tufts University in suburban Boston, joining there as a second-semester sophomore. It was January 1982, two years into Ronald Reagan’s first term as US president. I was twenty years old and, for the first time in my life, anonymous. No one on the campus knew a thing about the secrets I carried from my past. Even Bharat, at Harvard, was a twenty-minute bus ride away. It was a completely new start.
At St. Stephen’s, which was coed and hence a less warped place than the boys-only worlds of Doon and La Martinière, my spirits had been rejuvenated by the deep, caring friendships I had made with several women and by rediscovering a prankish side to my personality that had irritated my teachers but won me popularity with other students. But now I embraced the atomistic Tufts environment: the single-minded focus on studies, solitary hours alone in the library, and the acute competition at swimming team practice. Despite intense pangs of loneliness, I found peace in the silent library stacks and the ethereal snow-blanketed campus. In every way, it was the opposite of India—and that difference was exactly what I needed at that point.
In those first months, I had little time to think about my homosexuality, which had become a tortured preoccupation for me in Delhi. It was a blessed relief not to be endlessly burdened with those dark thoughts, to instead be engrossed in constructive things. I began to hope that my anxieties had been magically solved or had faded into irrelevance now that I had reached the liberal West. I also harbored a Mills & Boon–style fantasy that an American hunk—a Warren Beatty look-alike or one of my sexy swim-team mates—would be enthralled by my exotic beauty and that we would live happily ever after.
But those proved to be fantastical hopes. The worries and self-loathing about my sexuality reemerged once I settled down—and they were magnified by soon discovering that in the United States the hatred for homosexuality was many magnitudes greater than in India.
At the sprawling university library, praying with a pounding heart that no student I knew should chance upon me, I began to read the occasional articles in the New York Times and Boston Globe about homosexual issues. I would hold the newspaper so that people sitting nearby could not see what I was reading, or I would pretend to be engrossed in an unrelated article on a facing page. It was in this illicit, conflicted way that I first came to read and learn about homosexuality and thus my homosexual self, the self of my intense yearnings, as well as of self-loathing and despair.
So absolute was my lack of theoretical knowledge of the subject that everything I read came as a revelation. Despite having studied at India’s leading school and college, I had never come across any scientific information on homosexuality, not even in biology textbooks. The sum total of my reading had been the mild allusions in Jacqueline Susann’s books, a handful of sexual passages in Harold Robbins’s potboilers, and Gore Vidal’s oddball Myra Breckinridge.
The articles that I read most attentively, almost greedily, were those reporting on the roots of individual sexual orientation, a matter of obvious personal relevance. I knew nothing at all about it. Indeed, until I read those articles, I had had no way of knowing that the study of sexuality, including same-sex attraction, was an established field of research. As it happened, the early 1980s saw major advances in research on sexual orientation, led not just by mental health specialists but also by a diverse range of sex therapists and researchers, and I was faced with a bewildering onslaught of information to digest. Old, crude notions were giving way to a more sensible understanding among scholars and specialists. The research had begun to show that sexual orientation, including homosexuality, had complex origins that included genetics and hormones as well as psychological dynamics within the family and society.
I felt enormous relief at seeing that homosexual attraction was discussed in reasoned, matter-of-fact terms, as part of a scientific effort to understand a complex human issue. I also remember my relief at realizing from these articles that the consensus among American psychotherapists and sexuality researchers was that same-sex attraction was not an abnormality or a mental illness. That had been one of my strongest dreads—that my homosexual desires meant I was crazy or deviant. I read that nearly a decade earlier, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association had removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. I was equally relieved to find that most American mental health experts now felt that the goal of therapy should not be to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality but to help them become happier with their orientation.
But my main recollection of these readings is that, with a few exceptions, they were grim, both in subject matter and tenor. I read with disbelief numerous articles about the hate and persecution faced by gay Americans. Everything I had absorbed in my teens from books, from James Bond movies and The Graduate, and not just the purring of Donna Summer and Barry White but even Joan Baez’s “Love Song to a Stranger” and Bob Dylan’s “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word,” had made me imagine that Westerners had wonderfully free sex lives, unburdened by shame or censure, let alone persecution by their police and governments.
Prominent in the news at that time were legal battles over US “sodomy” laws, and that was where I learned that homosexuality remained a serious criminal offense in over half of the fifty American states, including Massachusetts. Astonishingly, men were being arrested even in the privacy of their homes for having sex with their boyfriends or other men. (It was to be several years more before I knew for a fact that a similar law criminalized homosexuality in India, with equally harsh punishments, and that, like the US laws, it was a legacy of British colonial rule.)
Other articles reported that homosexual men and women lived in terror of being thrown out of their jobs and homes and being socially destroyed if their sexual orientation was discovered. They were also disproportionately the targets of violence—often what the young, bored, and drunk male perpetrators thought of as “recreational” violence—ranging from being beaten, assaulted with a weapon, spat on, and chased to having objects thrown at them. Even in cases involving extreme violence and murder, US courts were unconscionably biased against gays, with judges often accepting killers’ pleas that their violence had been spontaneously triggered by their revulsion against homosexuality.
I read that US immigration law explicitly barred “suspected or self-declared” foreign homosexuals from entering the country because they were “afflicted with sexual deviation.” That meant that I would be unable to immigrate if my sexual orientation were discovered, and I would have to return to India. In the naiveté of a young man from a distant developing country, I had assumed that the United States—as a rich Western democracy and beacon of freedom—would surely have long since guaranteed equality for every citizen, even those who were homosexual.
Another set of disturbing articles described a mysterious killing disease among homosexual men that had been discovered in the summer of 1981, just six months before I had arrived in the United States.
The facts were still trickling in. Doctors in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City—and subsequently elsewhere—were finding that young and middle-aged homosexual men, ranging from twenty-five to forty-five years of age, were developing harrowingly aggressive forms of diseases that affected only people whose immune systems had been devastated, including extremely rare cancers, pneumonias, and parasitic conditions. Many of them died rapidly, failing to respond to even the most powerful drugs.
As early as mid-1982, expe
rts feared that this deadly disease had reached epidemic proportions among America’s homosexual men, with tens of thousands thought to be infected and certain to develop life-threatening ailments in a few years. Fear turned into panic among homosexual men because, at that early point, scientists still didn’t know the cause or means of transmission of this never-before-seen disease. Theories abounded—some thought that the disease was caused by “poppers” and other inhaled party drugs, while others opined that it could be transmitted by casual contact or by mosquito bites, or could spread through the air like the flu or tuberculosis. It was as late as September 1983 before the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that the cause of the disorder was an infectious agent that was spread not through air, water, food, or casual contact but through sexual intercourse (whether homosexual or heterosexual), as well as by exposure to contaminated needles and blood.
No one even knew what to call the terrifying new disease. Some derisively called it “the gay plague.” Others called it “gay cancer.” Health experts first called it GRID, for “gay-related immune deficiency.” In late 1982, over a year after the first scientific reports describing the condition, the disorder was given the name by which it is now known: acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS. Whatever its name, the stigma against homosexual men in the West worsened because of their association with this frightening, runaway epidemic.
Those bleak articles made me realize how unwelcoming the Tufts campus was to gay students. Rather like St. Stephen’s back in Delhi, the college felt entirely heterosexual, a universe of men and women attracted only to the opposite sex. That reality was more evident here because amorous desire was so visible everywhere in public, as men and women flirted, touched, and kissed unabashedly. In contrast, gay men and women were invisible. Out of the eight thousand students at Tufts, even by the time I graduated in 1984, I knew definitely of just two other gay men and not even one avowedly lesbian woman.
The overwhelming majority of gay students at Tufts in my time, whether American or foreign, did not join the Tufts Lesbian and Gay Community (TLGC), the student-run lesbian and gay group. Though the group had been established several years before I joined Tufts, it was not a visible presence on campus, and in my years there, I did not even know of its existence. Even in the mid-1980s, in their annual group photos, most TLGC members wore bags over their heads to hide their identity.
There were compelling reasons for not revealing one’s sexual orientation at Tufts. A year before I joined, homophobic graffiti—“Fags Must Die”—had been spray painted across the Memorial Steps. In the dorms, men and women discovered to be gay were often ostracized. Sensing that, I soon moved to an off-campus apartment, despite the twenty-minute commute by bicycle through a grim neighborhood.
Matters were not helped by the university administration’s policies. The TLGC’s application for official recognition as a student group—so it could receive funding from the university like other student groups—was rejected year after year. Despite many reported incidents of homophobia on campus, the university neglected to add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy. By not handing out AIDS prevention information, the university failed to help its students protect themselves against AIDS, even though the disease was by then known to be cutting a swath through young gay men, many of whom were infected in their college-going years.
At that time, especially on days when I was feeling low for one reason or another, I would often feel dirty for poring surreptitiously through those news articles, as well as the gay sex ads and personals in the Village Voice or the steamy gay romances that I later chanced upon in Harvard Square bookstores. However, I realized later that even that furtive exposure to gay issues aided in my emancipation in a haphazard, piecemeal manner.
The regular mention of homosexuality was profoundly affirmative in itself. The realization that there were countless other men and women facing the same challenges and fears gradually helped break my apprehension that there was no one else in the world with my shameful affliction. That psychological isolation, the invisibility even to each other, was among the most crippling aspects of being gay. A gay psychiatrist had commented, in one of the earliest articles I read, that it was “a miracle” if any homosexual could become a stable and happy individual, since “unlike women and blacks who can at least identify with one another, gays have no one to counteract the negative societal assault on their egos.” I was so struck by the insight that I purchased that issue of the New York Times from the newsstand, storing it in a suitcase out of risk of discovery.
And at least in the liberal papers that I read, despite the primarily grim context of the articles, I found that the reportage was largely respectful of homosexual men and women. They were portrayed as normal people engaged in the universal search for fulfillment in life, seeking romantic love, family and community, acceptance and self-respect.
The usage of the word “gay” instead of “homosexual” in the Village Voice and by gay people themselves reinforced this sense of respect. Both the New York Times and the Boston Globe used “homosexual,” though the individuals they quoted often used “gay.” Even in those early days, when my politics were yet to take root, I was intrigued by the word. I didn’t know why it had become a synonym for “homosexual men” (it being many years before the internet made information readily available), but I loved the joyous association and also the fact that it left us beguilingly undefined and, consequently, wholly human—rather than defining us reductively in sexual terms, as in “homosexual” or in “sexual orientation.”
And some of what I read proved inspiring. In the spring of 1982, I read that Wisconsin had outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation, becoming the first state to do so. I was moved by the courage of Congressman Gerry Studds, a Massachusetts Democrat, who fought back after his homosexuality was revealed in 1983; his constituents reelected him the following year, affirming that his political ability mattered in public office, not his orientation. I read about a handful of other openly gay men and women being elected to public office. There were frequent reports on campaigns by gay and lesbian rights organizations to pressure politicians to get rid of sodomy laws and prevent discrimination in employment, housing, and other aspects of life. Several men arrested under sodomy laws had taken the police to court. Many individuals and groups came to their help—not just gay activists but also elected officials and civic, labor, and religious groups and leaders—because they believed that everyone should be treated justly as a core principle of human rights. I read about the annual “pride” marches in Boston and other major cities. It was a huge affirmation compared to what I had known in India.
While I was dealing excruciatingly slowly with my sexuality, I found I was being rapidly transformed in other ways by being at Tufts and in the United States.
I relished the demanding academics. It would have been difficult for all but truly indifferent students not to be infected by the industrious mood and the celebration of learning, so in contrast to the lassitude of undergraduate studies in India (where barely anyone studied during term, instead cramming madly right before the annual exams). I had done decently in India, apart from my year at St. Stephen’s, where, relishing my newfound popularity, I had played the class joker, but here I excelled as a result of my genuine interest in the subjects I was studying as well as the resulting diligence.
I realized that without conscious design on my part I was drawn to learning about injustice and marginalization. I spent my time studying everything from India’s political economy and Latin American history to communism and radical politics in developing countries, to the global political economy of hunger. (I soon chose a double major in international relations and literature.)
Those courses helped me make sense of my own situation of exclusion. My reading about homosexuality had already made me realize that I was not entirely alone, that there were scores of men and women who were dealing with the very same anguish as I of their vi
lified same-sex desires. But the books about poverty, racism, and other kinds of subjugation made me understand that the predicament of gay men and women was no different from that of countless other outcasts.
One of the most moving works I read at the time was Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. This novel, written in the 1930s, portrayed a day in the life of Bakha, a young Indian man from an “untouchable” caste. Like generations of his ancestors, he had no choice but to follow the caste occupation of cleaning latrines in the village of his birth—these being pit latrines from which feces—lumps of which inevitably spilled onto him—had to be scraped off with a broom and then hauled away in a basket.
The injustice was made even worse by Anand’s account of how the better-off reviled Bakha for his work, paid him a pittance, and recoiled from his touch even though all of them depended on him for maintaining hygiene. Untouchable depicted realities that persisted even fifty years from the time Anand had written it. I recalled how the men and women employed as “sweepers”—whether in homes, including my own family’s, or in public places—were always visibly shrunken from generations of deprivation. Everybody shrank from them as if they carried a fearsome contagious disease—and they themselves avoided touching or even looking at anyone.
I was never to forget the chilling opening lines of Richard Wright’s Native Son, set in a tiny, dark ghetto room: “A huge black rat squealed and leaped at Bigger’s trouser-leg and snagged in his teeth, hanging on.” Those first pages of violence set the tone for the rest of the book. The naked anger of Wright’s writing was such that it made everything I had ever read so far seem censored. His rage at the dehumanizing racism black Americans faced through their lives also shook me into realizing just how unjust a country even the United States was.
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