In July 1990, the court ordered that the women be freed, and all of them, including the hundreds deported from Bombay on the Mukthi Express and held elsewhere in the state, were released. It marked a welcome, if long overdue, improvement in the judiciary’s attitude toward civil liberties and AIDS.
In spite of that, the government made no move to compensate the women for their unlawful incarceration—as if it bore no responsibility for their suffering. Nataraj despaired at thinking of the terrible odds facing those impoverished HIV-positive women and tried to track what had happened to them after their release. She found that some had been taken in by a Madras home funded by the American feminist charity Zonta International. Many had gone back to Bombay. Some might have tried going back to their families, but it was unlikely that they would have been accepted, given the implacable stigma against sex workers.
I felt a strong commonality with sex workers. Sex workers and gays shared the fate of being demonized and persecuted because of prejudices about sex, the aspect of human life on which most societies displayed the worst irrationality and cruelty. People thought of us as vilely immoral, driven by greed or lust, with sex workers selling the use of their private parts for money and gays defiling theirs out of unnatural desire. They were literally being wiped out by AIDS yet were being blamed for the pandemic—and so it had been with gay men. I saw myself as a kindred soul, having known since childhood what it felt like to be reviled and cast out.
I sought out sex workers on that first research trip in the summer of 1991. I didn’t go to Madras; the epidemic had spread so far that it didn’t make sense to focus on the first women in whose blood the virus had been detected. As Mumbai’s sex workers were known to be the hardest hit by the epidemic, I concentrated on them.
A day after my visit to the AIDS ward at J.J. Hospital, I visited a health clinic for sex workers in the city’s major red-light district, Kamathipura. It was my first visit to a red-light area anywhere in the world. At least on that monsoon morning, there were no signs that the neighborhood housed countless brothels and sex workers, reputedly more than anywhere else in Asia. It was indistinguishable from other low-income parts of Mumbai, damp and nondescript. It had nothing of the heated sexuality I’d seen in Times Square in New York City, with its lurid sex stores and peep shows, and the in-your-face hookers and hustlers.
The clinic was a shallow, barely furnished room, reached directly from the street by a few shallow steps. It was dark because of the monsoon gloom. It seemed airless, too, though the main door had been left wide open. On rough wooden benches running along the wall, there were about a dozen young women sitting quietly, their heads bowed, dressed neatly in saris. Not one looked up as I entered and then walked past them.
The doctor at the clinic was no older than me. She ushered me into a small chamber—separated from the main room by floor-length curtains—where she did physical examinations, saying that she had time to answer only a few questions. She spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper, presumably concerned that the women sitting outside would realize that we were discussing them. Her consideration was touching, though I doubted if any of the women could understand English. “Almost all the women waiting in the outside room are HIV-positive,” she said.
I asked her how old they were. “None of them is older than twenty,” she said. “And the youngest is just fourteen.” Some were already sick with HIV-related tuberculosis and other diseases. The doctor explained that they would not stop working until they were visibly ill; they had no savings and often had to pay off debts to their pimps and madams. There was nowhere else for them to go. Almost none of them had tried to return to their families in neighboring states or Nepal, because of the stigma of their work and now of being tainted with a disease associated with prostitution. And there were no charitable organizations in the city that would offer them succor.
The doctor asked if I wanted to speak to the women, but I said “No!” with such intensity that it must have struck her as odd. I didn’t have the presence of mind to explain my reaction.
I had intended to interview sex workers as part of my research. I knew next to nothing about sex work by women beyond what I had read for class, all focused on the toll the disease was taking on them. I wanted to gain an understanding of their circumstances. But after coming here, all the sensible questions I had planned on asking seemed utterly pointless.
Those young women all knew they would die in a few years. They would suffer the tortures I had seen among the patients in the AIDS ward, but probably without any medical care. How could I possibly ask for their names, their ages, where they were from, their family backgrounds, or how they had ended up in Kamathipura? All those things had shrunk into irrelevance.
And I couldn’t bear to ask any of the larger questions I had thought of because, while listening to the doctor recount how no one would help the women, it occurred to me that no matter what I wrote it would not dent the unyielding bigotry that kept officials and civic leaders from helping them—the same bigotry that kept many people in the West from aiding or even sympathizing with the countless gay men dying of AIDS. It was the first time I had ever felt such hopelessness in my years of working as a journalist.
Elsewhere on that research trip, the abuse and oppression were more obvious still. At a prison in Imphal, the capital of Manipur in India’s northeast, several dozens of HIV-positive drug users had been segregated in one corner of the open central compound. Those young men and women sat with heads bowed, barely moving. I had never seen such palpable hopelessness. The jail warden seemed unconcerned by the fact that they were being kept imprisoned indefinitely without trial.
Yet the brief, distant interaction with the handful of HIV-positive sex workers at the Kamathipura clinic remained uppermost in my mind. Over the years, I often remembered the gloomy clinic and the strangely silent women. The disparity between how scornfully the outside world saw them and how absolutely vulnerable they appeared seemed cruelly unjust and was a deeply familiar feeling to me.
I was not the first gay man to feel such empathetic connections between all of us who were despised and outlawed for our desires. In a poem that I had loved ever since my undergraduate years, “Ode to Walt Whitman,” Federico García Lorca—who, like me, had struggled with corrosive shame both about his homosexuality and femininity—expressed my feelings when he wrote, “That’s why I don’t raise my voice, old Walt Whitman, . . . against the boy . . . who dresses as a bride / in the darkness of the wardrobe, nor against the solitary men . . . who drink prostitution’s water with revulsion, / nor against the men . . . who love other men and burn their lips in silence.”
ELEVEN
THE INVISIBLE
On that research trip, I didn’t seek out gay men for my analysis of India’s unfolding epidemic in the same way as I did sex workers. In the half decade since HIV had emerged in India, the unrelenting focus on women sex workers had spared us blame and persecution for carrying the “gay plague.” And so, to avoid drawing hostile attention, in the policy paper and articles I wrote I deliberately chose to keep silent about what I knew for a fact: that a significant proportion of Indian men had unprotected sex with other men, and that meant they stood an increasingly high risk of contracting HIV.
Virtually none of the men I knew or had witnessed having sex in public knew to use condoms and water-based lubricants. Though I did my part to educate my sexual partners—or others that I talked to—most of the men appeared bewildered. As they had heard that AIDS was a disease spread by women sex workers, they ended up concluding that it was spread only through vaginal sex. (Dismayingly, many of the men I spoke to would confidently assert that anal sex was, in fact, known to be safe; some even added that that conclusion had led them to pay hijras for anal sex and stop going to female sex workers.) That was indeed what the government’s amateurish AIDS education campaigns seemed to imply. Rather than providing useful, explicit education about condom use and other safer-sex practices, the official campaigns e
ssentially went no further than billboards and ads that, in frightening imagery, depicted anguished men cursing their fate after contracting AIDS from “fallen” women—the latter portrayed as nubile, malevolent figures who were lurking on the sidelines to waylay men.
I also knew that a significant (though unknown) percentage of the several thousand men tabulated in official records as having contracted HIV heterosexually had instead been infected through unprotected sexual intercourse with other men or with trans women. But when doctors or health officials asked how they had been infected, they simply said that they were heterosexual and had been with women sex workers. By the end of 1990, just six cases of HIV in national health data were listed as homosexually acquired.
The only Indian gay men with any knowledge about the risks of HIV infection through gay sex were the tiny English-speaking minority concentrated in the main cities. Of even that minority, only a few of us had real knowledge about safer sex, either from traveling abroad or from having had the confidence to subscribe to Trikone, a newsletter for South Asian gay men and women published in California, or Bombay Dost, India’s pioneering gay magazine, published in small numbers since 1990.
An even smaller number of us knew, through our personal networks, of gay Indian men who were HIV-positive. Every year saw one or two more added to the roll call of the sick and dying. We began to be careful, by and large, when having sex. But we were an infinitesimally tiny minority within the vast number of gay and bisexual men in India.
It was distressing to be faced with all the evidence that AIDS was spreading rapidly among us and in hijra communities. I feared that the devastation among us could eventually be as terrible as that being suffered by Western gay men. And it would spread even more widely, since almost all the men were married or were going to get married, as was the unbending social norm, with wives and babies who were likely to get infected, too. It was only if the government launched a frank nationwide effort to educate men about using condoms during anal sex that this mammoth tragedy could be prevented.
Yet, in the articles I published in 1991, I wrote strategically—saying not a word about the rising rates of HIV among India’s gay and bisexual men—that in Africa, in contrast to the West, the overwhelming bulk of HIV infections had taken place through heterosexual intercourse, and that would be the primary mode of transmission in India, too. I was certain that the wiser course in these dangerous times was to maintain our invisibility.
I also decided against meeting Dominic D’Souza, the HIV-positive gay man who had been imprisoned in Goa in 1989. He had emerged as India’s first HIV-positive activist, despite the dangers of an era when AIDS evoked hysterical fears of contagion even among well-educated people. Siddhartha urged me to go see him, but I didn’t, not knowing that I was throwing away my last chance to meet him.
Far from going into hiding after his release in April 1989, Dominic became a resolute activist. His changed spirit shone in a letter written a few months after his release. Writing to a sympathetic Bombay doctor about three impoverished HIV-positive people—a young woman and two men—who had since been imprisoned at the very sanatorium where he had been held, Dominic said in frustration, “Believe me, not one word of counseling has been imparted to the isolated HIV carriers. I am proof to this unbelievable but true attitude of our health services and Goa medical authorities . . . How could the health services be so irresponsible? We have told them so many times to start educating people on how the AIDS virus is transmitted, but nothing has been done at all.”
That newfound spirit of activism reflected the surprising alchemy about AIDS that turned many of its victims—as well as relatives and friends closest to them—into do-or-die activists. That was vividly evident in the United States, in the shape of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), ACT UP, and numerous other groups formed mainly by gay men, themselves HIV-positive or mourning lost lovers and friends. They had refused to accept defeat, instead pioneering HIV prevention programs, caring for the dying, challenging civil rights abuses, fighting to bring HIV into the scope of US disability laws, and forcing the Reagan administration as well as the drug industry to accelerate the search for effective treatments. Activism was a logical, almost inevitable reaction to the situation that HIV-infected individuals found themselves in everywhere in the world. They knew they would face harsh discrimination from almost every quarter until the disease killed them. And with death a looming certainty in the not-so-distant future, there was—ultimately—little at risk. All this transformed their personal calculus.
Shortly after Dominic’s release, the Goa Legislative Assembly agreed—because of the advocacy of his mother and Professor Isabel Vaz—to substantially dilute the act that had instituted draconian anti-AIDS measures. Under the new amendments, the government still had the power to isolate HIV-positive persons, but it was an option to be used at the government’s discretion, rather than being a mandated course of action. It effectively ended the practice in the state.
But, oddly, Dominic, Lucy D’Souza, and Vaz found that the courts were less responsive to human rights principles than the legislature. The Goa bench of the Bombay High Court refused to release the HIV-positive woman and men who were imprisoned in the TB sanatorium. Social class was the operative factor here; all three were from impoverished backgrounds, and so the court opined that, unlike Dominic, there was no guarantee that they would behave responsibly if freed. Eventually, the woman escaped, never to be found again, while one of the men died in captivity, cared for only by a local Catholic nun, as government doctors refused to tend to him.
Dominic himself continued to face devastating human rights abuses. On being incarcerated, he had been granted a year’s leave without pay by the Goa office of the World Wildlife Fund (India). However, when Dominic reported back for work, the local head of the fund’s committee, Dr. Sharad Vaidya, barred him from the office, saying that other staff members were refusing to work with an HIV-infected person.
“Dr. Vaidya didn’t allow me to enter the office,” Dominic wrote later. “I said I had every right to enter as the court has said I could go back to work. But he just refused to let me enter. If doctors behave in such a fashion, the common man is going to be even more terrified about AIDS.” After months of fighting to regain his job, Dominic ultimately accepted voluntary retirement and a cash settlement, resigning himself to that outcome because he was “so fed up with all the discrimination.”
Yet, at the same time, there were decent-minded people rallying to challenge that discrimination. A young human rights lawyer from Bombay named Anand Grover came forward to represent Dominic pro bono. Grover’s involvement in fighting for Dominic became a lasting commitment to HIV-related cases, eventually advancing not just the cause of people with HIV but also of sex workers and gays in ways that were simply unimaginable at the time.
Dominic, whom a later employer of his described as “the best ambassador HIV-positive people could have,” did not flag even when he began suffering from recurrent bouts of tuberculosis and oral thrush, an agonizing infection of the mouth and throat. Since his release, he had found that people in Goa who knew or feared that they were infected were turning to him for advice, given the perils of approaching a doctor or health official. In September 1991, he started a self-help group akin to New York City’s GMHC. That group, known simply as Positive People, began operating out of Dominic’s home, with funding from the Dutch development organization Hivos. It was India’s first association of “positive people,” providing confidential counseling and a support system for people “to share their grief, experiences and anxieties,” as well as undertaking public awareness about AIDS.
But by then Dominic’s illnesses had become life-threatening, in large part because Goa’s hospitals refused to admit him for in-patient care. Finally, Isabel Vaz and his other friends admitted him to Bombay’s Breach Candy Hospital, at that point one of the few private institutions in India willing to care for people with AIDS.
On May 27, 1992, D
ominic died, two months short of his thirty-third birthday. He had lived for just three years from the horrifying morning of his imprisonment. With better medical care, he would certainly have lived much longer.
Remarkably, in that brief span of time, he had succeeded in improving public attitudes toward AIDS in Goa and beyond. In an obituary, the mainstream daily Gomantak Times wrote with evident pride in their native son, a sea change from the prejudice the press had displayed just a few years earlier. “This brave Goan did not quail under the burden of AIDS,” the obituary said. “For every person who shrank from his very touch, Dominic taught ten people that there is nothing to fear . . . in interacting with HIV-positive people. He showed this country that except for a little virus in the bloodstream, they are exactly like any other normal human being.”
While later piecing together Dominic’s life, from all the vivid proof of his courage, I found that I was most moved by the bravery he maintained even on the verge of death.
In his will, written in the hospital just a few days before his death, he asked that a newspaper announcement be published to “boldly say that I died of AIDS and that I am not ashamed to say it.” It took incredible personal courage and true dedication to combating the stigma against AIDS to insist on that, because, at that time, very few people anywhere in the world—even in the West—admitted to dying of AIDS. The New York Times obituaries, for instance, referred euphemistically to one young or middle-aged man or another as having died after a “long illness” or a “rare disorder”—or even that “the cause of his death was not immediately disclosed”—phrases widely known to be code for AIDS.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 16
