The two open letters were launched in Delhi on September 16, 2006, just a few weeks before the Delhi court was scheduled to begin hearing the Naz challenge. Across India, in every language, the campaign dominated headlines, columns, and TV shows for days. Media outlets the world over reported on the campaign. India’s judiciary and government could not ignore those letters.
For me as well as for many other gay Indians, those open letters marked a watershed in our conflicted, fearful feelings about life in our country. I realized that the India of 2006 was not the same country I had encountered as a twenty-five-year-old in 1986, exactly two decades before, when I had returned from college in the United States. It filled me with boundless hope to see the open letters overwhelmingly elicit supportive comments from the public and media; the homophobic hatred that had swelled under the BJP’s recent rule was not representative of Indians. For the first time ever, I felt I could return to live in India as an openly gay man without feeling constantly wary or threatened. I wished my beloved friend Siddhartha had been alive to see this thrilling turning point—many of the people who hadn’t even replied when he had asked them for statements of support for “Less than Gay” in 1991 were now backing this campaign.
Just two days after the launch of the open-letter campaign, I informed Piot and his deputy that I was resigning from the secretariat, though I would stay on for a few months so that the executive office’s work was not disrupted.
I had signed an agreement to stay on at the secretariat for two more years just that summer. But I had reached an irrevocable tipping point on realizing that Piot’s personal and professional lives were entangled in the workplace, having a romantic relationship with a highly paid consultant to UNAIDS. (At the World Bank, where ethics rules are clearer cut and better enforced than at the UN, Bush appointee Paul Wolfowitz was at that time being charged by the institution’s anticorruption branch of arranging a massive pay increase and promotion for his companion; Wolfowitz was eventually forced to resign, despite the White House’s efforts to defend him.)
I told Arndt I couldn’t bear to work for Piot anymore and that I would resign. Arndt supported my decision and lovingly pooh-poohed my worries about being possibly jobless in expensive Switzerland.
“There is no shame among the shameless,” I thought to myself, when, in April 2007—within a few months of my leaving UNAIDS—the American press reported that former US global AIDS coordinator Randall Tobias, the close Bush friend who had recently been promoted to deputy secretary of state in charge of all US foreign aid, was a regular user of high-end call girls. “Ex-AIDS Chief in Escort Flap Called Hypocritical: Backed US Policy That Forbids Aid to Help Prostitutes,” the Boston Globe headlined.
The hypocrisy beggered belief. Tobias’s attempts at defending himself included the tragicomic claim that he had not had sex with the women from the Pamela Martin & Associates escort service but had merely had the “gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” Why Tobias had not called the Beltway’s mainstream massage experts rather than an escort service famed for providing attractive young women was a question he evaded. A year later, undermining Tobias’s claims, a US district court in Washington, DC, ruled that the escort service was charging clients $250 to $300 an hour plus tips for full-fledged sexual encounters, not for massage or erotic role-playing.
Within months, Republican senator David Vitter, one of the proudest proponents of “family values” conservatism and opponents of abortion and gay rights, was implicated in the same scandal. And soon thereafter, New York governor Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, resigned after a federal investigation showed that he had spent as much as $80,000 in recent years on high-end sex workers. Not only had Spitzer vigorously prosecuted escort services—of precisely the kind he later secretly patronized—in his previous post as New York State’s attorney general, he had also inked one of the most extreme anti–sex work laws in the United States during his first days in the governor’s office, parroting Bush in calling prostitution “modern-day slavery.”
The scandals involving Tobias, Vitter, and Spitzer, following one another in quick succession, led to the worldwide ridiculing of the Bush administration’s antiprostitution crusade. They showed the moral bankruptcy of its advocates, doing more to discredit their views than all that had been achieved by our appeals to logic, evidence, and human rights principles.
There was more evidence still, in those years, to demonstrate that it was precisely those who most loudly condemned the supposed immorality of others who were themselves the most immoral abusers.The Catholic Church was battered by revelations that for decades it had enabled the rape and sexual assault of tens of thousands of children by pedophile priests worldwide, systematically shielding serial abusers and continuing to let them prey on youngsters. Republican congressman Mark Foley, the author of the sexual predator provisions of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, was forced to resign after ABC News uncovered his long history of sending congressional pages, some still minors, texts and emails with repeated references to sexual organs and acts.
But, as always in history, it was rare for the powerful men in even the most blatant scandals to be punished, escaping by virtue of their wealth and stature as well as the rigged standard of justice by which the laws that apply to ordinary folks are not enforced on the powerful. Thus, under US federal and state laws on prostitution and sex trafficking, Spitzer, Tobias, and Vitter should have faced criminal charges and the possibility of jail terms. But nothing of the sort happened. Though the scandal forced Tobias to resign from his top-level Bush administration post, he immediately became the head of the Indianapolis Airport Authority. Vitter continued as senator after apologizing for having committed a “very serious sin.” Spitzer became a political pundit, with a column in Slate and a nightly TV show.
In depressing contrast, as always, the women who catered to those powerful men were cruelly persecuted. On January 30, 2007, Brandy Britton, a forty-three-year-old single mother of two and former professor of sociology and women’s studies at the University of Maryland but recently facing bankruptcy, hanged herself rather than face trial for prostitution. (Britton had been an employee of Pamela Martin & Associates, the escort service used by Tobias and Vitter.) On May 1, 2008, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the fifty-two-year-old former escort and onetime paralegal who had run Pamela Martin & Associates, hung herself shortly before her sentencing, rather than suffer years in jail. In a handwritten note, she described her predicament as a “modern-day lynching.”
Within months of leaving UNAIDS, I realized that frustration with Piot’s abeyance of leadership had mounted to such an extent that—for the first time in its short decade of existence—UNAIDS was embattled rather than praised. It faced a barrage of criticism from policy makers, public health experts, activists, and nongovernmental organizations around the world, its reputation reaching such a nadir that there were calls for the program to be disbanded altogether.
One of the major charges against the secretariat was that for several years it had consciously exaggerated the global estimates of the number of people living with HIV, refusing to accept convincing evidence from outside experts that the epidemic had peaked even in sub-Saharan Africa and was not expanding relentlessly elsewhere, including in China and India. Eventually, in its 2007 epidemiological report, the secretariat cut its estimates of the worldwide number of people living with HIV from 40 million to 33 million and the number of new HIV infections from nearly 5 million a year in the previous year’s estimate to 2.5 million. For India alone, the estimates of people living with HIV were more than halved, falling from 5.7 million to 2.5 million. In one sweep, it transformed India from being a country with a runaway HIV epidemic to one that had seen it grow only sluggishly over the past twenty years.
The stunning scale of those revisions did enormous harm to the secretariat’s reputation for technical excellence. To many, it was evidence that the secretariat had been motivated by the desire to keep AIDS high on th
e global political agenda—or by the self-serving goal of ensuring that AIDS continued to command the lion’s share of global donor funds.
Another storm was triggered by a “UNAIDS Guidance Note on HIV and Sex Work” posted on the secretariat website for consideration at the summer 2007 meeting of the governing board, coincidentally right at the time of the sex scandal engulfing erstwhile US AIDS commissioner Tobias. It was the first major UNAIDS publication on sex workers in years, following the pall of self-censorship that had fallen over it thanks to the Bush administration’s policies. Astonishingly, the guidance note parroted that government’s prohibitionist views, sparking outraged criticism from sex workers’ rights networks and other human rights groups. The secretariat pulled the document from the website, and the governing board eventually instructed UNAIDS to revise the guidance note in consultation with sex workers’ rights groups.
I was not surprised by either the outraged reactions or the demand for revision. The document was shoddily argued and had an abysmally weak evidentiary base. Most odd, its argumentation and recommendations broke completely with UNAIDS’s past understanding of sex work, which had been detailed in numerous documents, such as the International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights that I so admired. There was no explanation given for why UNAIDS had turned its back on the closely considered guidance of the past. In a bizarre but revealing omission, the guidance note did not list any of those reports in its footnotes or bibliography.
The grubby fingerprints of the Bush administration were visible all over the guidance note. The kowtowing to the administration’s duplicitous equating of sex work with sex trafficking began in the opening section, which read, “The increasing feminization of migration and the involvement of families, kin networks and local communities in the movement of women and girls, blurs the difference between trafficking and sex work.” Yet not a single footnote or reference was provided to back this stunning claim.
In telling contrast, an evidence-based review of sex work by UNAIDS had concluded just five years earlier that the “forces that drive people into sex work . . . can vary—sometimes widely . . . Many people enter sex work for economic reasons; that is, it may be the only, or the best-paying, employment option. Others are coerced into sex work through violence, trafficking or debt bondage. Some, particularly adults, freely choose sex work as their occupation.”
And so it went—one unfounded claim after another, one inexplicable break with past UN guidance after another. Whereas UNAIDS, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union had previously clearly advised governments to review “with the aim of repeal” criminal legislation and other laws that criminalize “adult sex work that involves no victimization,” there was not a hint of that in the guidance note. Nor was there any echo of the recommendation that “where sex work has legal standing, laws against abuse and exploitation are more likely to be enforced, thus reducing the incidence of violence against sex workers, especially as perpetrated by corrupt enforcement authorities.” The acquiescence to the Bush administration was so extreme that no mention was made that the worldwide evidence reviewed by UNAIDS over the past decade had showed that collectives run by empowered sex workers, such as the Durbar and Sangram/VAMP in India, consistently had the greatest impact not just in stemming HIV rates and improving overall conditions for sex workers but also in tackling sex trafficking and child prostitution.
TWENTY-ONE
A HOME IN INDIA
At the end of August 2007, I moved back to India from Geneva. My relationship with Arndt had not survived the turmoil thrown up in our lives by my resignation from UNAIDS.
I had feared the relationship was too new to be tested so sorely—we had lived together for less than a year at the point that I had resigned—and sure enough that proved true, jolted by the premature questions it raised about the certainty of our commitment to each other. For me, the question was to know whether Arndt already cared for me so deeply that I should stay on in Geneva only to be with him. For Arndt, the question was whether he could tell me with confidence that what he felt for me was so strong that I had ample reason to stay.
The months that had followed had seesawed endlessly—from blessed highs because there was so much evidence that we loved each other and couldn’t bear to part to tortured lows brought on by Arndt’s doubts and then my anguished awareness of them. We were both soon worn out.
By the end of that wrecked summer, things were clear: Arndt couldn’t commit to me, and I wouldn’t stay on without having that certainty. It had taken us ten months to arrive at that decision—precisely as long as we had lived together before my decision to quit UNAIDS, a bittersweet testimony to the genuineness of our loss.
On August 30 that year, Lorca and I caught a flight to Bengalūru. Looking out from the window as we flew eastward and the sun began to set, I was filled with numbing sadness and regret. The end of my relationship with Tandavan had left me even more grief-stricken, but at least I had known that the relationship had run a full course. This one had come to an unnatural, premature end. I was filled with disquiet over whether, even in my mid-forties, I was making headstrong decisions that would do terrible harm to my prospects for happiness.
Yet my grief was lightened because there were things to look forward to in my life ahead in India.
Soon after my resignation from UNAIDS, I had been awarded a grant by the Ford Foundation to write about the AIDS pandemic’s impact on sexual outlaws and was elated at the prospect of the years of rewarding, independent work that lay ahead. Being a free agent again, I could speak up about the devastating harm being done by the Bush administration to global HIV prevention policies and to the well-being of sex workers and other excluded individuals. I began to dream, too, of writing a sequel to my book on rural poverty, already a decade old, and decided to apply for a research grant for that as well, as I could work on both books simultaneously.
Never during my several previous sojourns had I felt at ease about the prospect of living here—but seeing how warmly people had embraced the open-letter campaign to decriminalize same-sex relations a year before, those apprehensions had fallen away. I thought, to my own surprise, that I could enjoy India fully now, in a carefree way that I never had before.
Uppermost in my thoughts was that I was moving back at a point when my father really needed my support. (Through the tortured last months with Arndt, I had invariably turned to him for advice and support, even more than I had to my closest friends or my brothers, a telling testimony to the closeness of our bonds.) He had turned seventy-five at the beginning of the year, and though he was as uncomplaining as ever, I could see that he was tiring of coping alone. Two years earlier, he had finally given in to his sons’ urging that he should shut down his struggling tea garden, retire, and move out of Kolkata. He had hesitated out of concern for my mother—who continued to live in isolation at our family home in the city, disabled by her mental illness—but eventually my brothers and I had prevailed by insisting that it was our turn to take care of her. My father had set out on an adventurous road trip in his SUV to discover where he wanted to settle. I could tell that he longed for mountains and wilderness, and sure enough, he finally decided on the Nilgiri mountains of Tamil Nadu, a tea-growing area at India’s southern tip that he knew well and where he had many friends from his years in the industry.
The first goal I set for myself on arriving was to build him a home. Having settled him, I would move to Goa. That would be the perfect arrangement: my father could spend the winters with me when the mountains grew cold, and I could escape to his home during Goa’s hot summers.
There was so much to look forward to.
We soon decided on a site that touched my father in a way that no other place had. It had an equally singular effect on me, too.
It was a long, gentle plateau between two six-thousand-foot-high mountains. Both mountains were equally untamed, the tea bushes quickly fading out to be replaced by massiv
e rocks and dense clumps of forests. The only other place where I had felt this quality of infinitude, the sense that the world both began and ended here, was the Grand Canyon.
There were no neighbors at all—not one. Getting to the nearest of our friends would be a half-hour drive on a good day; on stormy days, it would be impossible, as the only access was a rutted track of earth and rock that quickly turned treacherous. The closest village was several valleys distant. Coonoor town was nearly an hour away. There were no electricity or water connections.
It was teeming with wild animals. On every visit we spotted herds of gaur, one magnificent, solitary old gaur bull in particular. There were barking deer, black eagles, and Malabar giant squirrels, which resemble fleet-footed red pandas. We spotted a pair of otters in the stream below. The friend who had taken us there told us that sloth bears and leopards were common—and that a tigress had sometimes been spotted on the facing hill.
The minute my father visited that untamed spot, he wanted to live there, drawn to it as if by an insuperable force. I was not surprised, as I felt exactly the same way. Somehow it felt like home even though there were just rocks, trees, and wild animals there—nothing that suggested human habitation was possible. My father had never felt like that about a place, he told me: as though he wanted to stay put, put down roots, and not leave, ever, for even a day. I knew without being told that he was longing to retreat to that isolated forest to find solitude and peace after the difficulties of his life; it was a time-honored step in the Hindu view of life, vanaprastha, retiring to the forest after a life well lived.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 29
