An Indefinite Sentence

by Siddharth Dube

  From what I had read about the AIDS epidemic among gay American men, Eric fitted the profile: he was already in his mid-thirties and had previous sexual experience. My fears were so intense that I held myself back even from oral sex, let alone sexual intercourse. Everything about AIDS caused a blind fog of confusion and terror. I was left too nervous to have sex that could have satisfied Eric.

  My apprehensions could easily have been solved had there been accessible resources—such as counseling services to provide advice on safe sex—at hand. I don’t recall any such service on the campus at that point; the university health services certainly did not make a noticeable effort to provide the gay students (or straight students, for that matter) with such information. Nor was there any guidance provided by the gay students’ group. I had never even come across a guide to safe gay sex.

  With no source of expert advice, I gleaned whatever I could from articles in the Village Voice, gay magazines, and—to a lesser extent—the New York Times. Despite reading all that with great attention, I never felt confident that my understanding was correct and foolproof, in large part because even that information was not explicit enough to be practicable and was also hedged with ifs and buts. The most exasperating of the qualifications was, one, that there was a risk that condoms could break or fail, and two, that the advice amounted not to “safe sex” but only to “safer sex,” a critical qualification that implied that there was still an untold risk of contracting HIV.

  Thus, correctly or incorrectly, my conclusions at that time were the following: Always assume that your partner is infected. Hence, always and unfailingly have safe sex. Fucking even with a condom might be unsafe, because of a risk of the condom tearing. So might giving a blow job without using a condom. The only safe sex acts were nonpenetrative, notably kissing (but even deep kissing possibly carried a slight risk), mutual masturbation, getting a blow job (possibly a slight risk there, too), and giving a blow job only along the penis shaft.

  Was it any wonder, then, that all that I ever allowed myself to do with Eric was an unsatisfying sort of canoodling that allowed me to scrupulously avoid putting his penis head into my mouth?

  The high point of our sex together, spread over those months, amounted to oh-so-pleasurable blow jobs by Eric. Mine were obviously nowhere on a par with his, not just because I lacked expertise but also owing to my fears. They just could not satisfy Eric. Consequently, I would simply masturbate him to ejaculation.

  Never having discussed those issues before and also feeling awkward because only Eric was the object of worry about AIDS (given that I had been a virgin till now), I lacked the skills to open up to him about these fears. I castigated myself for that inability at that time. It was only much later in life that I realized that our problem of being ill equipped to handle sensitive discussions was a common one among gay men almost everywhere, reflecting our late start and crippling inexperience with romantic relationships as well as the many psychological burdens we had invariably developed due to the hostility we faced.

  Our awkwardness was so severe that Eric and I never talked about his putting my fears to rest by getting tested. A commercial test for the antibodies to the AIDS virus—the term “HIV” was yet to be adopted—had became available some months earlier in 1985. People were encouraged to be tested. But there were enormous fears about testing, given the life-destroying hopelessness that would follow a positive result. By now the coverage of Rock Hudson’s desperate struggle against AIDS had made the disease known everywhere and American gay men lived in terror of contracting it. The desperation was such that many gay men sought out the Hemlock Society, which provided advice about home euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, or convinced friends or sympathetic doctors to agree to help them commit suicide if they fell direly ill as the only sure way of cutting short the endless horrors caused by AIDS.

  I knew instinctively that my relationship with Eric would have worked and lasted happily under better circumstances, free of the dread of AIDS. Eric and I were strongly attracted to each other, and we were both serious-minded people looking for a lasting relationship. But despite Eric’s patience, my worries were so crippling that our relationship ground to a halt in a matter of months. I felt paralyzed, unable to make sense of what had happened to so quickly destroy something that had seemed an answer to my fervent prayers for love.

  A few months after my relationship with Eric ended, I began to rapidly lose weight—from my already skinny 140 pounds—and was constantly tired. The fear and shame that I might somehow have contracted AIDS from Eric kept me from seeking medical advice or even mentioning my anxiety to Bharat. But eventually, finding it difficult to attend classes or cope with everyday chores, I had no choice but to go to the university medical services.

  After describing my symptoms to the attending doctor, I said I was from a high-risk group for AIDS. It was the first time I had ever made the admission, and I burned with embarrassment at saying it.

  I was very fortunate, because the doctor was thoroughly professional. He simply asked me which high-risk group I came under. I said I was gay. I hastily added, almost involuntarily, that I had barely ever had sex, as if that qualification would reduce the opprobrium attached to being homosexual.

  My blood was drawn for testing for the AIDS virus and several other possible causes. The results would take three days to come in, the doctor told me. However, given that my lymph glands were not swollen and I didn’t have night sweats, it seemed unlikely that I had AIDS, he added. I was weak with relief.

  Three days later, I was back in his office. It took a superhuman effort on my part to control my shivering: What if his confidence had been misplaced? The doctor walked in, instantly picked up the report—no doubt aware how nervous I was—and told me that the AIDS test had come back negative. He kept up his clinical demeanor, but even so, I could sense that he was pleased to be able to give good news. All I had was a severe case of hypothyroidism, which could easily be solved. That was my first encounter with the terror of testing for AIDS.

  I spent another year in the United States, but there were no more romantic developments in my life in spite of desperately wanting a steady and loving relationship, I felt incapable of negotiating one, given the mess I had made with Eric.

  I slipped back into a dead-end pattern of burying myself in my work and my ascetic lifestyle. I also pined for several unquestionably heterosexual men, a subconscious ploy to avoid sex or romance. I was attracted not to some especial masculinity but to their comfort with themselves, their ease in the world, the fact that they didn’t carry the scars of exclusion that we gays always did. Though I wrote lovelorn poems for those men, I had the good sense to never give them to them.

  I was such a mess that I once again bolted from men who showed any signs of being attracted to me. In New York City, where I spent the latter half of 1986 as an intern with a leftist magazine, I met a glorious Brazilian man at a literary party—velvety skin set off by a shirt of cream-colored linen, with curly locks and an immense mouth—who, ignoring my protests, dragged me onto the makeshift dance floor, gyrating with his crotch flush against mine. He bit me on the neck and kissed me on the mouth. His exuberance was infectious. I forgot my shyness and self-consciousness for some hours—as I didn’t drink alcohol or take drugs, those means of unwinding were not open to me—dancing wildly and kissing him with passion. But I refused his invitation to spend the night at his nearby apartment. And when he called the next morning and for several days after that, leaving messages on my answering machine in a plaintive voice, I didn’t return his calls.

  Beyond that one evening, the sum total of my gay adventures in New York consisted of walking furtively a few times down Christopher Street, lacking the courage to enter the smoke-filled bars or the porn stores. I quickly glanced away if anyone looked at me with interest. In that violent, drug-ridden city, an epicenter of AIDS, I was not going to have sex.

  In the winter of 1986, a few months after my twenty-fifth birthday
, I left New York City and moved back to India. In one of those odd twists of life, I felt that to fulfill myself at that juncture I needed to return to India, the place I had been so desperate to escape from just a few years earlier. I was aching to work on the issues of poverty and social justice back in my own country. I thought that I could be of real use in impoverished India, whereas wealthy America had no real need for me.

  But, in considerable part, my decision was also an effort to stave off my fears about the bleak likely course of my love life, which stretched out ahead terrifyingly bare and alone. My relationship with Eric had been a short-lived disaster, but none of my handful of gay Indian friends there was in a relationship or even dating seriously. Of all the gay or lesbian Americans I knew, only one was in a live-in, long-term relationship. The few men I had met through personal ads, some a generation or more older than I, seemed to have searched fruitlessly for love year after year. Gay men and women everywhere seemed doomed to lives without lasting romantic love.

  The one compelling reason to stay on in the United States was the knowledge that living in India as an openly gay man was sure to be even more difficult and possibly dangerous. I knew by now that homosexuality was a serious criminal offense in India, proscribed under Section 377 of the Penal Code, which had come into force 101 years before my birth, when India was a British colony. I had not yet read the text of the Indian law but knew that it was similar to the US sodomy laws—with a common origin in medieval England’s “buggery” law—and entailed equally harsh jail terms that could extend to imprisonment for life.

  My awareness of the possible dangers ahead was magnified by my father’s vehement opposition to my returning. He told me he feared I would be ostracized and persecuted for being gay. He urged me to settle in the United States and to forget about India.

  Yet I eventually set aside my own anxieties as well as my father’s warnings. As it turned out, I had utterly underestimated India’s potential for both happiness and trauma.

  SIX

  INDIA

  Within months of moving to Delhi, where I began to cover economic development and social justice issues for Business India, an influential weekly magazine, I realized that there had been no discernible progress in how Indian society treated gay issues since my days at St. Stephen’s. Neither the homophobia nor the nullifying public silence on gay matters had eased; indeed, in some ways, they were even more entrenched than I had imagined as a college student. Five years was an epoch in my short life then, and although I had changed profoundly in how I dealt with my orientation in these matters of the heart and body, India seemed frozen in time.

  At Business India, several of the senior staff openly used homophobic slurs. Their target, because of some festering office intrigue, was a senior editor, a mild-mannered man from Calcutta who spoke with a British accent and habitually chugged on an unlit pipe. When he was out of earshot, they called him “pansy” and, bizarrely, an “effete Bengali homosexual.”

  The comments cut especially deep because they were so similar to the ones I had heard from my father and his friends in years past. And just as before, no one challenged them, either. Consequently, from my very first months of employment in India, I retreated from the candor about my orientation that I had so come to relish in my last few years in the United States. I rebuffed efforts by my colleagues at Business India—and then at the Washington Post’s South Asia bureau, which I joined in 1988—to discover anything about my personal life.

  But I was no longer used to evasion. All the hiding also contradicted my openness around friends and family. I soon realized that I was once again living a double life, constantly wary, just as in the years before I had come out of the closet. My frustration at being forced back into that unpleasant state would have been sharper still if I had not realized that it was not the solitary imprisonment of the past, where I had hid my secret fearfully from everyone, but a halfway house that I could tolerate.

  There still proved to be no way to escape the pervasive prejudices against gays in Delhi, everywhere, at every level of class. I witnessed that hostility in the company of my beloved friend Siddhartha Gautam—one of the two friends who had confessed that he, too, was gay when I had come out to him several years back—who had also moved to Delhi in 1986 to do a law degree at Delhi University after a BA at Yale and an MPhil in development studies at Cambridge.

  There was a palpable intensity to our friendship, evident in the amount of time we spent alone with each other, how we constantly touched and embraced, and how protective I was of him in my unaccustomed role of responsible elder brother protecting a madcap, vulnerable younger sibling. We proudly called ourselves “Tiddarth and Tiddartha,” à la the indistinguishable detectives Thomson and Thompson in the Tintin comic books. It didn’t matter to either of us that we didn’t look alike. We had everything else in common: our first names, our Calcutta childhoods on neighboring streets, and our shared calling for social justice.

  My protectiveness had to do with the fact that Siddhartha had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age fifteen. Though extended treatment had brought the cancer into remission, the threat remained, never spoken about but ever present and ever dangerous.

  Perhaps because he sensed that he had only a short lease on life, Siddhartha lived it at breakneck speed and with the most exceptional intensity. Being in his vicinity was a sure recipe for getting entangled in adventures and scrapes.

  Siddhartha Gautam

  As both he and I loved to dance, we overcame our shared dislike for swanky hotels and decided to go to the discotheque at the Taj Mansingh, given pride of place just below the hotel’s ornate marble staircase. The manager greeted us effusively, no doubt because we looked affluent. Though the disco music was largely unmemorable, Siddhartha and I had a wonderful time dancing together for hours. We always felt invincible when we were together, and so we laughed off the alarmed stares from several couples and the way they edged away from us. At some point, I noticed the manager staring at us from behind the bar, a hostile look on his face, but I ignored that, too.

  By our third visit, some weeks later, the manager’s warmth was nowhere in sight. He was polite but didn’t seem happy to see us back. Siddhartha and I had just started dancing when one of the staff interrupted us and said that men weren’t allowed to dance together. Siddhartha and I retorted that we had danced there together before and that we weren’t touching each other or doing anything inappropriate. I looked around to speak to the manager, but he had mysteriously disappeared. Eventually, because so many people were staring at us, we decided to dance separately. We left after a while, offended and fuming.

  Siddhartha and I decided to go back the following weekend, having resolved that we wouldn’t stop dancing with each other. So when a similar request was made of us again, we said no. This time the manager appeared and told us grimly that we would have to leave the dance floor. Over the din of the music, Siddhartha and I took pains to politely explain that it was only fair to let us dance together, given that we were not hurting anyone. When it was clear that he was not going to agree, we went back to dancing—leaving the manager standing stone-faced in the crowd.

  A few minutes later, the music went dead, the lights came on, and the loudspeaker announced that “stag dancing” was forbidden. Near the entrance, I saw that the manager had been joined by another officious-looking man, probably a more senior colleague, who was also staring at us. Quite a few of the couples, giving us baleful looks, went and sat down by the bar. Siddhartha and I stood our ground. Many minutes later, finding that we were the only people left on the dance floor—everyone else was sitting down in a semicircle, staring at us with hostility—we left the discotheque, ignoring the managers as we passed them.

  Siddhartha and I should have been distraught at this public humiliation. But we were indomitable when together, even possessing the alchemy to turn our humiliation into victory. On the drive to my brother’s home in Panchsheel Park, our bleak mood vanished,
replaced with fits of laughter as we regaled each other with our best moments of the evening—how we had bravely stood up to the manager’s silly homophobia and the idiocy of people who were offended by seeing men dancing together. We yelled out to the empty streets, “Beware! We’re the leaders of a tribe of homos! We’ll soon conquer all of Delhi! No one is safe!”

  When we were together, Siddhartha and I could cope with whatever homophobia we encountered in the well-off neighborhoods to which we were accustomed. But we soon came to realize that outside those settings any disclosure of our being gay could have far more harmful consequences.

  After moving to Delhi, Siddhartha had lived in a series of rented apartments in the cheaper sections of Defence Colony, Lajpat Nagar, and Jangpura. Siddhartha’s flawless Hindi and his angelic looks always enchanted his landlords initially. But in just a few weeks they would inevitably turn hostile.

  They disapproved of the unending stream of bohemians visiting Siddhartha—men of feminine appearance (some with tweezed eyebrows and a hint of kohl), rough and macho men, obviously single women (based on their arriving and leaving without male companions), and even one flagrant cross-dresser who sometimes arrived decked out in the shiny slips he favored. Singly or in a group, they all disappeared into Siddhartha’s apartment.

  The curtains were then pulled tight. Whatever the hour, there was music and loud laughter, sometimes broken by suspiciously long silences. Impromptu parties took place at odd times, occasionally even in the afternoon. The sound of ghungroos and male voices seductively singing “In ankhon ki masti ke, mastaane hazaron hain”—“Countless men are intoxicated by my bewitching eyes,” a courtesan’s siren song from a classic movie—would drift down. Siddhartha’s voice, excited and giggling at a peculiarly high, feminine pitch, would float above the din.