I also ached with sympathy at uncovering Dominic’s struggles to come to terms with his orientation in matters of love and desire. Those struggles were made even more tortured by his feeling that it was his orientation that had led to his contracting the disease killing him. In a booklet published by Positive People shortly before his death, Dominic wrote, “I knew what AIDS was. But I never really educated myself. I knew how it was transmitted, but I never practiced safe sex. I had this feeling that it is not going to touch me.” He then wrote, “I am a Roman Catholic. I kept thinking—is this His way of asking me to pay for what I have done? I felt that it was promiscuity that led me to getting this virus. I felt this was God’s punishment.”
It was painful to read those last anguished sentences suggesting that Dominic had not yet come to terms with those matters. That statement was the closest Dominic came to publicly disclosing his orientation. It is possible that he would have become increasingly candid had he lived longer. Already, in just the space of those few years, he had gone from maintaining that he had contracted HIV while donating blood to candidly saying that he had been infected sexually. In a few more years, he might have cast off fears about having to bear a terrible double stigma—of being known to be HIV-positive as well as gay.
It was possible that Dominic would have eventually done what I shirked from doing at that point, what I thought wise not to do: to make us gay people visible in India by speaking honestly about the epidemic that was beginning to devastate us. But as it happened, at the very time that Dominic was dying, another young gay man facing death took it upon himself to break the silence and end our invisibility.
TWELVE
A FIRST GLIMPSE OF FREEDOM
I should have guessed that my maverick friend Siddhartha would not let things stay quiet.
Siddhartha had given me an inkling of his intentions the last time we had met—on the first leg of my research trip to India in the summer of 1991. On arriving in Delhi from being with Tandavan in Paris, I rushed straight from the airport to his Defence Colony barsati. My longing to see Siddhartha was not merely because it had been a year since we had last seen each other; it was because his cancer had reemerged after years of remission. He was leaving in a few days for New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he had been treated in the past.
Siddhartha was painfully thin, and his hair was only just growing back from his last stint of radiation at a Delhi hospital. Yet when I stood face-to-face with him, in the full wattage of his personality, I had no chance to voice the slightest of my worries. All I could pry out of Siddhartha was that he was delighted to have lost his hair because he now resembled the gorgeous Persis Khambatta in her recent appearance in a Star Trek movie. It had allowed him, he swore, to effortlessly seduce the male doctors at the hospital, and even the fitter of the patients! All discussions about his cancer were sidelined forever.
We talked through the day and into the evening, hugging each other tight as we lay in bed, full of love for each other. As always, our conversations careened from frivolity to seriousness.
He was full of questions about what I had learned from Jonathan Mann, whom he respected greatly, and about what I expected to cover in my AIDS research. I was even more impatient to know more about his own efforts on AIDS, which he had begun a few months before I had left for the United States, and his experiences working as a human rights lawyer at the Delhi High Court.
Siddhartha and several other activists had banded together to defend sex workers in Delhi’s red-light area who were being forcibly tested for HIV by researchers from the Indian Council of Medical Research and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). They had picketed those institutions day after day until they agreed to end forcible testing, at least in Delhi. (Those elite medical institutions had a disgraceful record through the epidemic’s first decade. The council’s top official, Avtar Singh Paintal, had pushed for prison terms for Indians who had sex with foreigners and then gone on to accuse Indian women of being “a lousy lot” for “cohabiting with foreigners.” As for AIIMS, I hadn’t forgotten its glossy AIDS ward standing empty even as legions of mortally sick people went untreated across the country, because of the hospital’s unspoken refusal to handle AIDS patients.)
From that effort was born the activist collective AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA)—the AIDS Anti-Discrimination Movement, which fought AIDS-related abuses. It was an unusual organization, in which I knew several of its members through Siddhartha. The force behind the group was a Sikh doctor, Dr. P. S. Sahni, who lived a life of frugality in common cause with the destitute. Other key figures included an activist Catholic nun, a grassroots feminist, a “professional blood donor” (who sold his blood to blood banks for a living), a prominent orthopedic doctor, several lawyers, and Siddhartha.
On a shoestring budget raised through community donations—it refused funding from institutions on principle—ABVA not only operated a free health clinic for sex workers but also tackled some of the worst human rights abuses raised by the AIDS epidemic. Improbably, it had even succeeded in keeping the draconian AIDS Prevention Bill from being passed into law. The public rallies its members had held outside Parliament had drawn an astonishing range of people, including women sex workers, hijras, gay men and lesbians, women from Delhi’s slums, and leprosy patients (who knew well what it was to be the victims of unjust, cruel policies mandated in the name of public health). The AIDS Prevention Bill was now mired in controversy, and it seemed possible that it could be kept from being passed into law. It was thrilling to see that even a characteristically unresponsive government could sometimes be forced to heed the views of the downtrodden—and that that had happened only because of a group of unpaid grassroots activists.
To influence public opinion, ABVA had also published two pathbreaking reports over the previous year, one focusing on how women—including sex workers—were being blamed for the spread of AIDS, the other on how to make the blood supply system safe without banning “professional blood donors” from selling blood. Siddhartha added excitedly that they were planning to write one on the situation of gay men and women. That report was still nothing more than a resolve, said Siddhartha, and work on it had been stalled by reappearance of his cancer, but it would lay bare all the injustices faced by us.
When leaving Siddhartha late that evening, I felt a rush of inexplicable dread that I was going to lose him. I brushed it aside, putting it down to the usual sadness of having to say good-bye to a loved one.
Some six months later, I received a copy of the report on gay issues that Siddhartha had talked about. But it arrived under devastating circumstances.
Late on the night of January 12, 1992, Tandavan and I had returned to our Manhattan apartment after celebrating Tandavan’s thirty-eighth birthday at a friend’s home nearby. The flashing red numeral on the answering machine showed that we had received a message. It was from my close friend Nilita in Delhi. Her message was broken by sobbing—but it said that Siddhartha had died a few hours earlier. My premonition of loss when I had last met Siddhartha had been horribly true.
He had died after battling a high fever for two days, Nilita said when I called her: he had been at his Defence Colony flat, with his sister Anuja and friends caring for him.
None of us had expected that. Siddhartha’s treatment at Sloan Kettering just a few months earlier had, by all indications, been successful. The doctors had expected him to do well for a long, if indeterminate, time. But it seemed that his immune system had been ruined by too much chemotherapy and radiation over the past decade. He was two weeks short of his twenty-eighth birthday.
It was several days before I could bear to leave our apartment and deal with the world. Tandavan stayed with me constantly, looking after me as though I were his fragile child. On the way out of our apartment building, I checked our mailbox. There was a letter from Siddhartha—the envelope bore his unmistakable looping handwriting, and there in the corner was his name and Delhi add
ress.
It was a second walloping blow. I wished that I had never found the letter, that it had been lost en route. I went back upstairs, forcing Tandavan to take a break from caring for me because I needed to be alone, even though I dreaded opening the envelope.
Siddhartha had written the letter three days before his death. On every inch of the plain paper, front and back of both sheets, crowding every margin and corner, was the handwriting I had come to love from letters that I had received in one place or another, each one filling me with joy from his irrepressible spirit.
“My dearest, lovely, silly boy,” Siddhartha wrote. “Your style of stringing adjectives is infectious. I note with envy your missives to Saleem and Nilita, but I’m sure you will write to me after this one.”
I wept with remorse at not having written to him and knowing that it was too late to remedy my error. I wept even more knowing that I would never get to see Siddhartha’s beloved face again, never hold him close as I used to, never be infected by his madcap giggling, never have him nearby to love and worry about and protect.
“I miss you immensely,” he wrote at the end of the letter, “especially on these beautiful, misty winter days when all the Lodhi Garden trees miss you from their barks as I do too.” It made me heartsick reading that, knowing that I would be the one missing him for the rest of my life.
But, characteristically of Siddhartha, the bulk of the letter was not about personal matters but about his causes. A full page focused on the efforts of the ABVA activist collective. Its energies were now focused on the World Bank, which was in discussions with the government over providing a $100 million soft loan to India for expanding its AIDS control efforts. Siddhartha and his colleagues had been pressing the Bank to approve the loan only if the government explicitly agreed to human rights safeguards that would put an end to its current punitive policies. If the Bank could be forced to insist on human rights protections, Siddhartha wrote, the government would, in turn, have to fall into line at this time, when India was in the throes of one of its worst foreign exchange crises and was beholden to the Bank for its support. For once, the Bank’s use of “conditionalities” as preconditions could be a positive thing.
“Please see if you can get some further information on the specifics of what the World Bank is planning,” Siddhartha wrote. “Also, see if you can write about it—possibly interview people in charge in Washington, DC. If you do, please try and include questions from the point of view expressed in our memo. The World Bank team will be visiting India again in February to wrap up the contract. If you speak to them, ask them what their response is to our memo, and what concretely they plan to do to ensure their money doesn’t finance AIDS-related human rights violations here.”
Despite my grief, I couldn’t help but chuckle at Siddhartha’s unrelenting determination. He was doing his utmost to leave the Bank no wiggle room.
Sure enough, just a few months later, the Bank approved India’s AIDS control loan after the government gave it private guarantees that it would end the harsh policies it had pursued ever since AIDS had first surfaced in the country. Prime Minister Narasimha Rao withdrew the draconian AIDS Prevention Bill from Parliament, and with that, the government—at least in principle—resolved to adhere to internationally agreed strategies on AIDS.
And then, with such evident passion, Siddhartha wrote, “I wanted you to have a copy of our latest report on homosexuality. It’s a real labor of love. I’ve never worked so hard in my life—while pulling it together, I worked eighteen hours a day on the computer continuously for two weeks. Nor have I felt such utter isolation, of the kind that engulfed me almost wave after wave while working on it.”
He continued, “It’s strange, I have for many years wanted to write something like this. Now when the chance came, my deepest impulse was to run away, postpone the whole thing. To actually sit and articulate what I wanted to say in the Indian context, to bring together years of insights, readings, mullings, wanderings, along with journalistic material, and to do it through a group of die-hard activists which includes Naxalites, Gandhians and a nun, seemed an impossible feat. But you have the product with you now, and I await your critical comments.”
The report was a pink-jacketed booklet titled—in the smudgy type print of that time—“Less than Gay: Citizens’ Report on the Status of Homosexuality in India.”
Those ninety-five pages were a revelation. It was in the pages of “Less than Gay” that I saw, for the first time in systematic fashion, the historical evidence showing that homophobia was a British colonial legacy—epitomized in the laws that mandated criminal prosecution for male same-sex acts as well as for gender-ambiguous males—and that Indian traditions had been immeasurably more accepting of same-sex desires, of diverse expressions of gender identity, and of sexuality in general. It was a relief to know that not all major cultures had treated those matters with the destructive loathing that Christianity and the West had displayed since the Dark Ages.
“Indigenous texts, concepts and traditions revered and even celebrated sexual ambiguity,” Siddhartha and his coauthors wrote. The Kamasutra, the famed ancient guide to erotic love and sexual pleasure, they noted, contained an entire chapter on the pleasures and techniques of oral sex between people of the same sex. (Fellatio was regarded as the defining male homosexual act in ancient India; sodomy was discussed only in the context of heterosexual sex.) Vatsyayana, the sage who compiled the Kamasutra, emphasized that these practices were allowed by the Dharma Shastras, the texts that detail dharmic or ethical behaviors.
Hinduism’s epics were rife with mutable, androgynous gods and heroes who displayed a stunning variety of sexual desires, Siddhartha and his colleagues wrote. The erotic sculptures that decorated numerous early-medieval temples—such as the renowned ones in Khajuraho and Konark—celebrated the Hindu metaphysical understanding that sex and desire are not impure impulses but lie at the root of all creation and routinely included same-sex acts among the other uninhibited, ecstatic forms of lovemaking. Hinduism even had a god embodying sensual love and desire: Kamadeva, a son of the creator god, Brahma.
And, strikingly, Hindu metaphysics did not make rigid male/female and masculine/feminine distinctions, in contrast to Christianity and other Abrahamic traditions. The worship of Shiva as Ardha-narishwara—half woman, half man, portrayed with the secondary sexual characteristics of both sexes—embodying the gender dualism present in each being, was an idea as old as India itself, they wrote. Indian mystics and spiritual seekers saw themselves in androgynous terms, as beings that combined male and female energies or in a state where the lines separating masculinity and femininity had collapsed.
In the past, generations of ordinary Hindus had accepted all those ideas without surprise or discomfort. That acceptance sprang from the ethical relativism that is fundamental to Hinduism, where nothing is unnatural, as the universal spirit pervades all things and humans can never know the absolute truth of things.
Siddhartha and his coauthors maintained that those tolerant attitudes to erotic desire and gender expression had not been destroyed by the Muslim dynasties that had come to power in the subcontinent from the tenth century onward, as many people assumed. In Sufism, the liberal, mystic tradition that has been more important on the subcontinent than orthodox Islam, “homosexual eroticism was a major metaphorical expression of the spiritual relationship between god and man” and Sufis saw themselves as genderless.
The rupture came only with British colonial rule, said Siddhartha and his coauthors, particularly from 1858, when India was brought under the direct heavy-handed rule of the British Crown. The chasm between British and contemporaneous Indian views on same-sex relations and gender expression, and more generally on both men’s and women’s sexuality, could not have been more enormous, setting in motion a true clash of civilizations, one with lasting retrograde impacts on Indian society.
Raised with harshly prudish notions, the colonial elite was appalled by Indian sights and customs�
��the bare-breasted women, loincloth-clad men, naked toddlers, and flagrantly cross-dressing “eunuchs”; regional traditions that encouraged maternal uncles to marry their young nieces, younger brothers to sire children with their older brothers’ wives, and women in matrilineal communities to freely take male lovers; and the tawaifs and devadasis who ascended to power and wealth. Even Hindu gods are “absolute monsters of lust,” William Wilberforce, the slavery abolitionist and Christian proselytizer, thundered in Parliament in 1813, no doubt thinking of the legions that worshipped glistening lingams and yonis. (Wilberforce was as unabashed in condemning Hinduism as he was in glorifying Christianity, maintaining, “Our religion is sublime, pure, beneficent . . . theirs is mean, licentious, and cruel.”) Lord Elgin, the viceroy of India, warned that British military camps could become “replicas of Sodom and Gomorrah” as soldiers acquired “special Oriental vices.” Ridding the world of sexual sin became a key aspect of Britain’s imperial civilizing mission, the “White Man’s Burden” of bringing Christian morality to their “new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child.”
Britain’s effort to prevent “sodomy” in its prized Indian colony, whether among its own people in this outpost or the degenerate “natives,” was eventually wrought through the Indian Penal Code of 1860, Section 377 of which criminalized “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” Out of Victorian prudishness, Section 377 did not explicitly mention buggery or sodomy, unlike earlier English and North American laws that had been written with raw bluntness. Lord Macaulay, the main drafter of the Penal Code as well as of that particular section, spoke elliptically of “an odious class of offences respecting which it is desirable that as little as possible should be said.” But the intent of Section 377 was clear to the colonial administration, courts, and police: to harshly punish any form of sex between males, even if it was between consenting adults. Arrests under Section 377 did not require a warrant and were also nonbailable. Convictions could lead to life imprisonment or ten years of rigorous imprisonment. Those punishments were so harsh, “Less than Gay” noted, that only murder, rape, and kidnapping were treated more severely.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 17
