I finally found myself outside the Saloon. It was a dangerous-looking windowless expanse, the walls pulsating with loud music. There was only a dark door leading in, with a small neon sign on top. I was riven with contradictory emotions—sexual excitement mixed with intense apprehension. I had a raging hard-on despite the fact that my entire body shook with nervousness.
When I walked in, I was sure I would find countless virile men locked in copulation and blow jobs, the handsomest of whom would immediately turn their amorous attentions to me. That was the pleasurable fate that had befallen all the virginal young men in the few gay porn movies I had seen. What would I do? How should I respond? What about AIDS?
I walked into a large, dimly lit room, rancid with trapped cigarette smoke, a long bar on one side and a wooden dance floor on the other. There were certainly men everywhere, but barring one or two who were kissing or hugging each other, the others were merely talking, dancing, or standing alone along the walls. This was no bacchanal.
My spirits plummeted upon realizing that no one had paid the slightest attention to my entrance. They sank further still when I noticed that the dress code was blue jeans, plaid shirts, and boots, a uniform worn by almost every man there, whatever his age, size, or looks. In my kurta-pajama and delicate Kolhapuri slippers, I looked like a Hare Krishna monk who had stumbled into a lumberjack camp.
I edged my way to the bar and asked the bartender for a beer. Even that was a first for me, my first alcoholic drink. But rather than feeling happy about my brave foray into gay life, I felt crestfallen, faced with the incontrovertible fact that my attire was odd beyond belief in this setting and not a single man had shown the slightest interest in me so far. I was too dispirited to even savor the novel experience of watching men dancing freely together and sometimes kissing and fondling, or the campy histrionics of others.
It must have been at least half an hour later that, summoning up all my courage, I pushed myself away from the bar toward a man leaning all by himself against a nearby wall. He was not attractive, so I reasoned that my overture was a safe bet. He glanced at me as I came up, but as I said “Hi” and proffered my hand, he turned away deliberately and walked off, not saying a word. Face aflame with embarrassment, I quickly took his place against the wall, praying that no one had witnessed my humiliating rejection.
An hour passed. It was either my courage returning or the unaccustomed effects of the beer, but I finally decided I would dance and try to enjoy myself, even if it meant dancing alone in my odd garb. So that’s what I did. As much as possible, I kept my eyes shut tight as a way to reduce the indignity of knowing that everyone else on the dance floor had a partner. After a while, I succeeded in relaxing somewhat, losing myself in the music. Madonna’s voice seeped into my mind, singing “You must be my lucky star” in her devil-may-care twang. Forever after, I thought of “Lucky Star” as a gay anthem.
I skulked out of the Saloon later, my mood very different from the one I had entered with. On the bus back to my apartment, it took every ounce of my strength to prevent myself from bursting into tears. What an awful evening it had been, and I had made such an ass of myself!
Though it was nearly midnight when I reached home, I was so upset that I couldn’t keep myself from phoning my friend Sankar in Boston. Sankar was leagues ahead of me as far as integrating into gay life was concerned, so I was sure he could help me make sense of what had gone wrong. Despite the late hour, he tut-tutted sympathetically as he heard me out, sounding appropriately outraged upon learning that the one man I had approached had turned away so rudely.
In Minneapolis, 1986: Sankar had gone American, I quasi-Gandhian
And then a note of suspicion evident in his voice, Sankar asked, “Siddharth, what were you wearing?” (By now I was infamous among my friends for the kurtas.) On hearing my shame-faced admission that I had worn my best kurta-pajama to the Saloon, his mirth drove all the sympathy out of his tone!
In Minneapolis, I took huge steps forward in actually leading the life of a gay man. Toward the end of 1984, some months after my disastrous first visit to the gay bar, I went to a meeting of a gay students’ group, the University Gay Community. The meeting was being held late in the week after the late-afternoon classes were over, at the Coffman Memorial Union, one of the main buildings near the river.
While searching for the room through its labyrinthine corridors, I realized, to my surprise, that I felt furtive and anxious. Becoming part of this group would be an irrevocable statement on coming out—from now on, it would be difficult for me to control and limit just who knew that I was gay. I hated the feeling that I still had those worries.
My doubts faded when, upon entering, I saw a group of twenty or so men, most, like me, graduate students. The meeting proved to be unexciting, with seemingly no agenda and purpose beyond that of getting together, but I relished it. Barring the visit to the gay bar, it was my first time in a group of other avowedly gay men.
I became a regular participant at the meetings as my feelings of furtiveness lifted. The meetings were never particularly interesting, always remaining somehow stiff and lifeless, but I still enjoyed the interaction.
I hoped, too, that being part of that group would lead to a relationship, which I ached for intensely. But though I was attracted to several among them, nothing concrete came of it. That was my introduction to the discordant laws of adult attraction: those to whom you are attracted are not attracted back; those you’re not attracted to inevitably desire you; and only rarely is attraction both mutual and simultaneous.
It was no surprise that I was not really sought after. I was awkward and shy in large groups and by now also relentlessly serious, while the rest of the men in the group were far more mainstream, interested in the standard, fun things about college life. My personality was writ large in my semi-Gandhian dressing style, which, even in the ferocious cold of the Minnesota winters, inevitably included a kurta and khadi jacket topped off by the bulky sweaters from South America that were all the rage with US activists back then. Only someone with a taste for peculiarly dressed foreigners would have fallen for me.
Despite the lack of romance, a great outcome of being a part of this group was that, through some of its more bookish members, I was introduced to the pioneering works of Western gay and lesbian writing, many of them published in the previous few years. I read them, one after another, in rapt succession: James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, John Boswell’s Christianity and Homosexuality, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, E. M. Forster’s Maurice, Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Jean Genet’s Querelle of Brest, Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw, Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy, and Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples.
What a welcome relief it was to discover that vast history of men and women who were like me. It was a relief to know that many others had felt and struggled with the same things I did: the unstoppable urge for love, intimacy, and sex; the terrible shame and self-loathing generated by the prejudice we saw all around us; and the courage it took to act on what we felt, even if we did so in secret. However tortured that history, however tragic the outcome for individual after individual because of the intolerance he or she faced, it was still validation that I belonged to a community that had heroically endured across eons despite terrible persecution.
More than anything else, I hungrily latched onto the evidence that many famous historical figures had been attracted to the same sex, whether exclusively or in part. Knowing that so many thinkers I admired—from Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and Leo Tolstoy to García Lorca, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, and Constantine Cavafy and then on to Baldwin, Foucault, and Marguerite Yourcenar—felt the same desires as I did was the most powerful affirmation possible. There was also a fantasy thrill to knowing that such iconic macho men as Alexander the Great, Emperor Hadrian, and the warriors in Thebes’ Sacred Band had all been smi
tten with other men.
My joy at discovering that history was dwarfed by outrage at learning just how cruelly men and women with same-sex desires had been persecuted over the centuries. Since my days at St. Stephen’s, when I had confronted my own orientation and become fully aware of pathological homophobia, I had assumed that men and women like me had faced persecution everywhere and always. But even so, what I read now, a chronology of brutality and injustice throughout almost the entire course of Western history, far outstripped my worst imaginings.
The most heinous of the outrages became indelibly etched into my memory like bloodstained milestones: the countless “effeminate” men and “sodomites” who were blinded, mutilated, castrated, hung, drowned, and burnt at the stake across most of Europe from the thirteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries; the homosexual men who were killed, and the lesbians who were raped, in Nazi Germany; the postwar persecution across the English-speaking world—stretching from the United States and Canada to Great Britain to Australia—of gay men and women who were imprisoned (often after mass raids in bars and parks), listed as dangerous sex offenders, incarcerated in mental hospitals, sterilized, and lobotomized; all the way to the present, when hysteria about AIDS was driving a resurgence of sodomy-law arrests and violence against gay men and the US Supreme Court would rule, in 1986, that state sodomy laws could remain in place on the basis of “millennia of moral teaching.”
Reading all that, I often felt that there was no safe place in the world for gay individuals. And though I searched hard to understand the root cause for gays’ being singled out across the centuries, there was of course no rational, legitimate answer. The truth was simply the depressing one that in society after society the powerful men—and often women, too—who dominated religion or politics maliciously targeted homosexuals as scapegoats, just as they targeted those they demonized as being whores, witches, heretics, congenital criminals, or subhuman because of their race or color. That hatred was then transmitted from generation to generation so that it became an unexamined truth, bred into the bone, making them the constant targets of disgust and violence.
Fortunately, as I was a graduate student on the University of Minnesota campus, such threats usually seemed worlds away. That was in great part because the University of Minnesota was a progressive place and the several gay students’ groups that had sprung up over the years had already secured remarkable gains, far in advance of Tufts and other elite East Coast colleges.
The Twin Cities campus was home to one of the country’s earliest gay student groups, founded in 1969, a few weeks before the Stonewall Revolution. It was known as FREE, for Fight Repression of Erotic Expression, a name redolent of the Flower Power era. Its evocative goal was to win for gay men and women the “freedom to walk hand in hand down the street, to embrace in public, to dance together, to live in peace with [their] lovers without feeling the guilt and shame that this straight, sick society [has] forced upon [them].” In 1972, two officers of the group had the distinction of becoming the first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license in the United States, a decision speedily overturned by a court.
The university administration had also been admirably supportive, recognizing FREE as an official campus organization within a year of its founding. In 1986, the year I graduated, the university amended its antidiscrimination statement to include sexual orientation. That was, in large part, because of the efforts of the gay students’ group and the University Lesbians. (By 1993, far ahead of its compeers, the university had established the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Programs Office to implement antidiscriminatory policies and integrate gay and queer studies into the curriculum.)
Most striking was how largely unafraid we were, those of us who had crossed the harrowing first hurdles of coming out. With Sankar, who had also moved to the university for graduate studies, as well as several men from the gay students’ group, I went out for dinner and to the two gay bars in town. At the bars the atmosphere was relaxed, men enjoying themselves with no apparent sense of threat. None of us, Americans or foreigners, seemed to care about the existence of Minnesota’s sodomy law, which might result in police raids or other forms of persecution I had read about in various US states. (Inexplicably, given the state’s long history of liberal politics, its sodomy law remained in force until 2001, eventually being struck down by the courts.) In my off-campus apartment building, I cared little about discrimination.
Of course, I realized that as a graduate student at a progressive university, I was enjoying a fleeting moment of peace; homophobic discrimination would surely reemerge when I entered the job market, even in media organizations or academia. (My craving to be open overcame my awareness that I was imperiling my chances of being allowed to settle in the US, given the immigration ban on gays.) The homophobia was evident the moment I strayed far from the university or the gay bars; at the blues bars that I loved for the live music, men would stare hostilely at Sankar and me whenever we danced together. Our gay American friends told us that we escaped being beaten probably because we were foreigners, our dancing together being excused as an alien peculiarity.
Encouraged by the blessed feeling of safety on campus, I became increasingly open about being gay. By the winter of 1985, I had revealed the truth about my orientation to dozens of people since my first terrified confession three years earlier.
Thus, within a month or so of striking up a new friendship, I would inevitably broach a discussion about my being gay. Though I was no longer worried that my confession would provoke an adverse reaction, it was still highly stressful for me to initiate the discussion. Consequently, each and every telling became a formal, portentous event in which I would tell the friend that I had something to discuss with him or her and we would then go for a walk or a coffee where I would state the matter seriously, saying “I wanted to tell you that I’m gay.”
Everyone reacted differently but fortunately always well. I was struck that almost all the male friends I confided in, whether Americans or foreigners, told me that I was the first openly gay person they knew. This was a telling commentary about how guarded gay men and women were even at that progressive university and how even those of us who had come out largely kept to the company of other gay people or to a select group of friends.
In contrast, many of my new women friends said they already knew lesbian women and gay men. Even more strikingly, several told me that they’d had romantic relationships with other women, beginning in their teens and continuing up till now, even though sexually they were more strongly attracted to men and hence did not categorize themselves as lesbian. That opened up a world of fluid possibilities in romance and sex, though it was a realm I was incapable of making much sense of at that time. I was intrigued by their honesty. Very few of the men I knew had ever admitted to being attracted to other men, even as teenagers or youthful experimenters.
My openness began to seep into the work environment. At some point, the two teaching assistants with whom I shared our large office room were talking about their girlfriends. One of them, a rather macho midwesterner, who looked like a sports reporter but in reality was specializing in mass communication theory, was getting married soon. When they turned their attention to me and there was a distinctly interrogative pause, I said, as naturally as I could manage, that I was gay and single.
There was a long silence. One of them then made a polite but meaningless comment that had nothing to do with my disclosure. We all turned to our work, an awkwardness settling over us. I had felt a pang of apprehension in being candid, especially as I hadn’t thought this through at all. I remained tense and nervous through the rest of the day. But later, on my bicycle ride home, the discomfort was replaced by a sense of enormous relief when I realized that I no longer had to ceaselessly evade or lie as before.
Unexpectedly, and with a romantic start worthy of the Mills & Boon novels I had devoured as a child, my first adult relationship began. It was the fall of 1985, shortly after my twenty-fo
urth birthday.
While waiting for a play to begin at the Walker Art Center in downtown Minneapolis, I noticed a man looking at me, half smiling. A black turtleneck accentuated big muscles, fine features, and blond hair. I smiled back. The man came over, said that he’d noticed me several times on the university campus, where he worked, and upon waking that morning had inexplicably felt that we would meet.
And so it began, love and romance—the things I had craved since I was a young child.
I saw Eric every day after he finished work. I longed for my first daily glimpse of him, the delight of once again feeling my affection for him as well as the thrill of erotic attraction.
We’d embrace on the street, even sneaking in a kiss on the cheek once in a while. I would draw in his faint body smell, so mild and scrubbed that it almost seemed disinfected.
We spent most of our evenings at my apartment, as it was nearby. Within seconds of closing the door behind us, we’d be kissing wildly. Dinner would be forgotten. Darkness would fall. Hours would be spent on the carpet of my living room or on my bed.
But despite being tremendously turned on by Eric, it took me a long time to start overcoming my hang-ups about sex, which had intensified over the many years from Doon to now. So I insisted, to Eric’s frustration, that we keep our jeans on even while kissing, to ensure that we didn’t end up having sex.
When we finally progressed beyond kissing and Eric stripped completely for the first time, I was awed by the beauty of his musculature, the heavy pectorals, the curving, thick thighs, and the full buttocks, all so different from the light-boned physique of the Indian men I knew. Out of his marble-white, hairless body jutted a hefty penis.
But almost immediately after we crossed that frontier, our relationship began to fall apart. Now my intense fears about contracting AIDS were to blame.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 8
