“I moved back to Chennai once I fell very sick, as I longed to be with other Tamil people. And it’s cheaper here, so my savings will last longer. They also treat you better in Chennai hospitals. In Mumbai, hospitals won’t treat aravanis even if they don’t have AIDS. The prejudice in that city is so bad, the police won’t even allow aravanis to beg.
“Anyway, most of my aravani friends in Mumbai are dead or dying. But now so are many of the aravanis here and in other parts of Tamil Nadu.” Her voice grew taut with anger. “We finally got some money from the government to educate ourselves about AIDS. But it’s too late for most of us!”
At some point, in the course of the days I spent with her, I realized that Noori’s forcefulness went far beyond the obvious. She was the only person living with HIV who seemed dismissive about the disease and its death sentence. There was none of the desperation and anxiety that I witnessed with virtually every other HIV-positive person in India. Even in the preternaturally calm Sekar, those anxieties broke through occasionally. But Noori talked about AIDS as if it were just another one of the many unpleasant things life had dealt her.
I came to appreciate just how essential it was for aravanis to develop that toughness while interviewing several younger ones in the city. The dangers and hardships that beset them were of a horrific extreme. The minute they left the neighborhoods they lived in—where, by their accounts, they typically found tolerance and even support and affection, as people knew them personally—they faced hostility.
“There are always problems when an aravani ventures outside her area,” a young trans woman, who looked more adolescent than adult, told me. “I go twice a week to Mount Road to beg. But we can’t travel in the public bus in peace! Even educated men, especially the youngsters, behave indecently. They speak such filthy words! The young men will say a thousand insulting things, call us dirty names, and sing obscene songs. No one will help us. They will just watch. But if we say one thing in response, that will become a big fight.”
This harassment was a mere irritant compared to the terrible sexual violence they suffered. The most gentle of the aravanis I met, a slight, dark woman in her twenties, told me in a trembling voice that, just a few weeks before, she had been staying overnight at her mother’s hut when a gang of men had broken open the door, lifted her up, and tried to carry her away. She had been saved only by the intervention of her mother’s immediate neighbors.
Almost every one of those younger trans women had been raped, sometimes by gangs of thuggish men or policemen. The sexual violence against them was of the same unhinged intensity as that against women sex workers—as if the association with sex had debased them so much that their abusers felt they had forfeited their claim to be treated as humans. From their accounts, it seemed that many men thought of them only as sexual objects for having voluntarily chosen to become female, almost as if they imagined that they had changed their gender out of an unquenchable desire to be fucked.
From every one of the aravanis I spoke to, including Noori, it was apparent that once again the police, far from providing help, were their worst oppressors. Though the colonial-era Criminal Tribes Act that had criminalized “eunuchs” had been scrapped in 1949, almost everywhere in India the police retained the notion that hijras were inveterate criminals. They were accused of all manner of crime—of being prostitutes, of kidnapping young boys to castrate and force into prostitution, and of petty theft and extortion. The policemen well knew that the aravanis had no choice but to beg, dance in public, or sell sex to survive, as almost no one would hire them for conventional jobs because of the depth of popular intolerance, but that did not lead them to act with sympathy. (This being paradoxical India, there were simultaneously also isolated cases of hijras being treated with the acceptance and respect they had enjoyed in precolonial India. Bafflingly, that seemed to occur most in the conservative northern states, such as in the case of Shabnam Mausi—“Mausi” means “aunt”—a forty-five-year-old hijra elected to the state legislature of Madhya Pradesh in 1999, and others elected to the post of mayor in two northern towns.)
The upshot of those prejudices was that trans women were routinely persecuted by the police under Section 377 as well as India’s multitude of vagrancy, public nuisance, and antibegging laws, all dating back to the colonial era. (A 1989 amendment to the federal anti-prostitution law introduced gender-neutral language, in effect criminalizing soliciting and other aspects of sex work by men and trans women, but this law continued to be applied almost exclusively to women.) The police singled them out, emboldened to act against them en masse—for instance, fining or imprisoning dozens in antibegging drives or for unsolved thefts, irrespective of whether any of them was likely to have been involved or not—treating them as a homogeneous mass of criminality and perversion.
Those interviews left me shaken and enraged in no small part because I could see myself in the younger aravanis, with their stories of how they had felt feminine from childhood and had wished to dance and wear women’s finery. If I had been born to an impoverished or average Indian family rather than a wealthy, Anglicized one, I might have had no choice but to live like them, the only other alternative being to lead an isolated, fearful double life as a closeted married man. They had, at least, a ready-made community, which no doubt explained why I found such large numbers of aravanis in Tamil Nadu—in Theni district, where SIAAP worked, I heard from numerous sources that as many as one in a hundred men, or persons considered male at birth, were aravanis.
By the close of the 1990s, the open advocacy by Sekar and Noori in Chennai as well as a handful of pioneering activists in other major cities—not all of whom were HIV-positive and some of whom were just concerned, decent-minded heterosexual women and men—had begun to convince key government officials that a significant proportion of Indian men had sex with other men as well as trans women and that increasingly large numbers were contracting HIV. By now there were also data to back those claims. Studies in Chennai, Goa, and Mumbai—typically conducted by the fledgling groups that had recently launched HIV prevention efforts among gay and bisexual men and trans women—reported HIV prevalence rates ranging from 2 percent to over 50 percent. (The huge variations reflected not only genuine differences but also small sample sizes and the use of differing methodologies.) Broader research about Indian sexual behaviors, commissioned by the government’s National AIDS Control Organization, showed that a substantial share of men, whether in cities or smaller places, were bisexual or pansexual, variously having sex with women, other men, or trans women. A 2001 nationwide survey found that nearly one in three men who visited female sex workers had also had sex with one or more male or transgender partners in the past year alone.
An inflow of international funding now made it possible for grassroots activists and groups to begin expanding HIV prevention services for gay and bisexual men as well as trans women. Even till the late 1990s, there had probably been no more than half a dozen such grassroots groups, all concentrated in major cities. But by 2005, there were dozens, spread across even provincial capitals and small towns.
So gay and bisexual men as well as hijras in cities and towns nationwide now began to encounter outreach workers—typically, local gay men or trans women—in their cruising areas after nightfall. They advised them about safer sex, provided free condoms and illustrated booklets on safe sex, urged them to join their support groups or meet their counselors, and offered to help intervene in family conflicts or with police raids. Telephone help lines run by those groups gave advice and support to those unwilling to risk being seen at the offices of HIV-focused organizations.
It was very far from being enough to end the epidemic’s onslaught among them, but it was still a quantum leap from the utter neglect of the past. And given the relatively small numbers of men who could be open to any degree about their orientation, those groups couldn’t bring about the larger structural changes that had been generated by the sex work collectives. Even so, the spread of the groups
began to fuel activism for gay and transgender rights across India.
By the end of the 1990s, as the economy boomed, the India of Gandhian austerity and socialist rationing that I had always known was in retreat, to be replaced by a fractured, unequal nation where billionaires, yuppies, and the middle class jostled with a hinterland of mass poverty, squalor, and want.
That epochal shift in India’s fortunes held all kinds of opportunities for gay men and women among the multiplying numbers of the upwardly mobile. Successful gay people were suddenly visible at the forefront of the swelling ranks of fashion designers, interior decorators, beauticians, hoteliers, and artists. They had the financial freedom and self-confidence to be increasingly open about their orientation within well-off urban enclaves. Support groups for English-speaking gay men and women began to emerge in the major cities. Upmarket bars began to discreetly host weekly gay evenings. English-language TV channels aired Hollywood films as well as documentaries and newscasts about gay issues. Local programming began to cover metrosexuals, gay men, drag queens, and transgender people, often as fabulous, frivolous creatures but sometimes more empathetically. Indian publishers released a slew of gay- and lesbian-themed books, ranging from novels to scholarly works. At least in affluent urban circles, those changes began to breed a public familiarity with gay people that had never existed before.
The backlash came with breathtaking speed, the work of Hindu-supremacist political parties and their vigilantes, who had surged in assertiveness with the dawn of this gilded age, India’s first moment in the sun after centuries.
The initial flash point was a 1998 movie Fire depicting a lesbian relationship between two of its main characters, the first time an Indian film had explicitly shown homosexual relations. Directed by the Canadian Indian Deepa Mehta, the award-winning movie was running to full houses when Hindu supremacist mobs linked to the ruling Shiv Sena and BJP vandalized theaters in several cities in Maharashtra, as well as in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Maharashtra’s chief minister (a position similar to a state’s governor) supported the vandals, remarking “I congratulate them for what they have done. The film’s theme is alien to our culture.”
The thuggish Shiv Sena leader, Balasaheb Thackeray, a fervent admirer of Adolf Hitler who had just been named in a judicial inquiry as a provocateur of mobs that in 1992 had slaughtered 1,200 Muslims in Bombay, rhetorically asked in a magazine interview, “Is it fair to show such things which are not part of Indian culture?” And then, without waiting for a reply, he answered, “It can corrupt tender minds. It is a sort of a social AIDS.”
The BJP ideologue and right-wing columnist Swapan Dasgupta wrote, “So widespread is the new gay evangelism that . . . there were loud claims of homosexuality and lesbianism being part of the Indian ‘heritage,’ a claim that angered many Hindu activists.”
The victimization of gay people was part of a larger assault by the BJP and its Hindu-supremacist backers on what they alleged was a new wave of colonization by Western culture, especially in the realms of sexuality and morality. Anything even tangentially relating to romance or sexuality became an excuse for government censorship combined with mob violence. The minister of information and broadcasting banned educational programs on sexual health from the national TV broadcaster Doordarshan, despite the vital role they played in AIDS prevention efforts. Vigilantes were given a free hand to operate as moral police, assaulting women who wore jeans rather than saris or salwars, thrashing couples spotted holding hands, and torching bookshops that sold Valentine’s Day cards. India seemed to be at war with itself, some of its people ambitious to shape the twenty-first-century world, while others were bent on enforcing oppression in the name of contrived tradition.
Low-income gay men and hijras were hit worse than anyone else, as they could not sequester themselves away in enclaves of privilege. Persecution and sexual violence by policemen and thugs multiplied. The police used Section 377 with far greater frequency, in addition to the old abuses of extorting money and sex.
The gay men and trans women working on the front line to promote HIV prevention among their peers became a special target. Conservatives accused them of being conduits for Western powers to promote homosexuality and pedophilia. The brutal murder of two gay men in Delhi, one of whom worked for USAID, rather than eliciting any sympathy from the right-wing commentator Swapan Dasgupta, led him to allege “a nexus between employees of international aid agencies and the gay underworld,” with “the lavishly funded anti-AIDS campaign being misused . . . to buy cheap sex with poor slum kids.”
An investigation by Human Rights Watch documented serious police abuse of the staff of such organizations in half a dozen cities and towns. In the most concerted case of persecution, four staff members of Naz Foundation International and Bharosa Trust—two accredited nongovernmental groups working on HIV prevention in Uttar Pradesh’s capital, Lucknow—were jailed after the police raided their offices in July 2001, accusing them of “promoting homosexuality,” running a gay “sex racket,” and selling pornography. Even though there was no evidence of sexual acts, they were charged under Section 377, along with charges of criminal conspiracy, abetment, and obscenity. Although both these groups were recognized by the state government’s AIDS Control Society and were working within the guidelines laid down by the National AIDS Control Organization, the city’s chief judicial magistrate accused them of “polluting the entire society by encouraging the young persons and abating [sic] them to committing the offence of sodomy.”
One of the men arrested, Naz Foundation International’s Lucknow director, Arif Jafar, later told Human Rights Watch researchers, “For the first ten days, they provided nothing for us, not even clean water. We were not provided utensils for eating, and we couldn’t take baths. We were cleaning drains and toilets with the same utensils that were all we had for eating. . . . We were harassed. The first news reports that came out about our arrest said that we ran a ‘gay den’ and had made seventy lakh [roughly $150,000], so the police had the impression that we had money, and that, combined with their idea that we were doing ‘unnatural’ things, made them harass us. We were abused and beaten and threatened. . . . I have kidney stones, and in prison they would not allow me to have medication. I was in terrible pain. It was so painful—at that time, I wished to die.”
The four men were imprisoned for nearly two months before a higher court ruled against the police, reprimanding them for attempting to frame the men. Jafar, a Muslim, said that the police had told him that he was “trying to destroy our country by promoting homosexuality” and that “Hindus don’t have these practices—these are all perversions of the Muslims.”
I feared the worst in those dark years of BJP rule. The intense hope I had felt for India at the sex workers’ mela in Calcutta now seemed a chimera. The courage of Sekar and Noori appeared to be a flimsy defense against the bigotry and violence of Hindu supremacists. Perhaps the old India of fearful invisibility had been a safer, better place for most gay men, after all, than this new India, where homophobia had been politicized and turned into a rallying call for thugs.
SEVENTEEN
A NEW MILLENNIUM
In the spring of 2000, exhausted by the unsettled life of the past few years, I decided to settle in New York City. Since leaving the World Bank at the end of 1994, I had moved homes repeatedly and traveled constantly, often for months on end. They had been rewarding years for learning and for my work, but I ached to be in one place, to have the simple pleasures of a home and a settled life again.
I was also suddenly aware that my thirties had vanished. My fortieth birthday lay just ahead, in September 2001. And since breaking up with Tandavan in 1993 I had not had the time for relationships. In all those years, there had been just two brief relationships, more affairs than anything else. One had stretched through my second year at the World Bank, with a Spanish man, Jesús, whom I had met while visiting Madrid. Jesús, a gardener and landscape architect, was the one man I had dated who loved tree
s with even more passion than I did. But the stress of the long-distance relationship had become overwhelming when I had moved to India and could no longer afford to travel to Spain frequently. Without discussing it, both Jesús and I knew that our relationship was ultimately hopeless because none of the countries to which we belonged—whether Spain, the United States, or India—recognized same-sex relationships for immigration purposes, so we could never hope to live together. The other, short relationship had been in Delhi while I was writing the poverty book and had spluttered out of its own accord.
I resolved from now on to put my personal life ahead of my work passions. I stuck firmly to that decision, turning down a fascinating job at the World Health Organization in Geneva to lead its advocacy on the interrelationships between health and poverty, a tailor-made responsibility given my years of work on precisely those matters. Fortunately, I had no dearth of consulting assignments that I could undertake from New York City with the World Health Organization and UNAIDS, the Geneva-headquartered secretariat of the United Nations’ collective efforts on AIDS.
New York City had come to feel like home in the year and a half that I had lived there while working with UNICEF, beginning in the summer of 1997. A half dozen of my closest friends now lived there, including Nilita and Sankar. I had four godchildren in the city, all toddlers. I had a loving family in that group of dear friends to whom I could entrust my life without worry. I had been very lucky in my adult friendships: a psychoanalyst friend remarked that I gave more importance to my dearest friendships and to my relationship with my father than to my romantic relationships—a healthy thing but possibly also an explanation for why I hadn’t sustained a relationship since Tandavan.
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