Mahavir joined the group as a peer educator and field coordinator. There was no looking back. Within a decade, Muskaan had seven hundred registered members, seventeen staffers, and a drop-in counseling center and covered not just Sangli but the neighboring districts as well. The group’s presence had led to major changes in the lives of local gay men as well as trans women, Mahavir said. The foundational changes began with confronting the prejudice and violence they had faced so far. “Earlier, if we went to the Civil Hospital for any problem, it was a real problem. The doctor would call four or five other staff and announce, ‘Look at these homosexuals. They have anal sex, and then look what has happened to them!’ We used to weep in anger and shame, but there was nothing we could do then. There were many of us who even died, usually of AIDS but sometimes of suicide, rather than go to the hospital and be humiliated. But now we have changed so much that we now go boldly to the Civil Hospital! If any of our members are ever rudely treated there, we go to help them out.”
The most important change, he said, was in tackling abuse by police and thugs. “Us kothis and others are scared because we don’t live together in a group. Not like the women sex workers, who live together and now that VAMP has given them courage, if there is a problem, they feel they are in it all together. But among kothis, at least earlier, if the policeman or a goonda was thrashing me, the others wouldn’t intervene, they would watch from afar. But now that we have come together because of Muskaan, we fight back against anyone, whether it is the police or thugs!”
He told me, with obvious relish, of incident after incident that showed how far-reaching their revolt has been.
“Recently, one of my colleagues and I were waiting at the bus stop, on our way to outreach work, when two thugs began to fight with us. They were drunk and insisted that we have sex with them. We refused to go. They were rickshaw drivers, and they drove their rickshaw into us! When we fell down, they began to thrash us. We fought back. When the police came, I told them what had happened, that these men are harassing and beating us, that I want to file a written complaint so that they will be arrested. The policeman said, ‘No, whatever it is, just settle it here peacefully.’ I said, ‘No, I insist on a written, official complaint.’ So, for the first time, the police were forced to write a complaint, and the rickshaw drivers were arrested and kept in the jail for three days. It gave courage to others not to be silent, either! I’ve been working with Muskaan for years, so I must take the first step, no?
“Another time, when some of us kothis were beaten by the police, all the VAMP women came to support us at the police station. That really worried the police.” From Mahavir’s frequent, admiring references to VAMP, it is clear that the sister collective of women sex workers is a model of solidarity and collective action that the area’s gay men and trans women aspired to.
Mahavir added, “Now we visit the police, show our Muskaan identity card, educate them about HIV prevention methods, and then have a dialogue with them about why they should not trouble us. We tell them we are saving lives by preventing HIV, not promoting sex. But it will take a long while to build relations. They still think of us as criminals. It will really help if Section 377 is removed.”
I was struck to see Mahavir single out the egregious effect of Section 377 on the police’s view of gay men and trans women, that it cast us as criminals. Despite Mahavir’s and my coming from the antipodes of Indian society, Section 377 was the common root cause of the homophobia we faced. That is why the movement for gay and trans rights in India had organically developed into a nationwide one that bridged the vast class and urban-rural divides. (I noticed that in settings such as Sangli there were few divisions between gay men and trans women, especially in activist groups. That was strikingly different from activism among better-off urban gays, where gay men and lesbians came together but trans women were excluded. It was rare to find out or self-identified lesbians anywhere outside the larger cities and middle- and upper-income groups, reflecting the even greater constraints and risks that face women.)
Mahavir said, “So I feel very satisfied and happy with this job. I don’t get much of a salary, but I scrimp and save. Altogether, I feel as if I get paid to have job happiness—and I get sex as well!” He grinned.
He was even, he told me, in a long-term relationship. Aditya was shy, tall, lanky, and with a thick head of wavy hair—in every visible way the diametric opposite of Mahavir. Like Mahavir, he was a sex worker and had also recently joined Muskaan as a peer educator.
Mahavir spent most nights at Aditya’s home: one in a row of boxlike brick huts in an area that seemed newly settled and poor, yet was clean and pleasant by India’s degraded urban standards. Inside, there was a single small room with pink walls.
They had been together for three years, and the love between them was obvious and moving. They eagerly told me about the history of each one of their few possessions. Pointing to two bright green nylon parrots intertwined on a wall, Mahavir said, “One tota is Aditya, and the other is me. We are a pair, a couple!”
Aditya then produced the gifts that Mahavir had bought him for his recent birthday—a sari as well as trousers. “Only for a kothi can you buy both a sari and a pant,” Mahavir quipped.
They showed me the jewelry that they had bought for each other over the course of their relationship. To solemnize their vows, Mahavir had given Aditya a mangalsutra—a pendant worn by married Hindu women—and Aditya had given him a gold-tinted ring. Aditya placed them in my hands, telling me that if I closed my eyes I could feel the love they had for each other.
On escorting me from their home later that night, Mahavir and Aditya greeted with puppylike enthusiasm the middle-aged woman who was filling a metal ghara at the hand pump outside, calling her Mausi, aunt. They told me that she looked after both of them. Mausi smiled shyly. It was clear that the affection was mutual. I was filled with joy to see such real acceptance rather than the homophobia I always expected. Against all the odds, those two feminine gay men in a small town had managed to carve out a full, happy life.
As Mahavir told me his story during my days in Sangli, there was one special point of emphasis: this was the pride Mahavir took in how he had fended for his family. I had seen the mutual affection between him and his parents, and how clearly they relied on him. He had put his sister through school and a nursing course. She now worked as a nurse in the affluent city of Pune, where her husband lived. For her marriage, Mahavir had bought her jewelry, furniture, and everything else that the couple needed to start off.
“Later, when my sister needed fifteen thousand rupees for the down payment on the house they were buying, I had to ask my regular customers for a loan,” he said, fixing an intent gaze upon me. “Actually, I had just had a piles operation and the doctor had told me not to take customers for a year. But I could not say no to my sister when she asked for money, and I suffered many health problems, as I had to take many customers. I can barely sit properly now.”
Mahavir had his eyes fixed on mine, clearly waiting to see how I would react to that last comment of his. I knew he had pointedly put everything in such graphic terms—the hemorrhoid operation, the risks to his health from being fucked, the fact that even so he’d sold so much anal sex. He wanted me to understand how deeply he had sacrificed himself to fend for his family, and he wanted me to understand that he had secured his sense of self-worth and dignity from providing the very sexual act that men inevitably consider most debasing: being fucked.
My grief at losing Arndt and my life in Geneva didn’t ease for many months, despite my being in an utterly different world and the incessant pace of my new life.
But then, on my research trip to Cambodia in early 2008, I had a romance with a gay activist. It had that headlong connection, emotional and sexual, that occurs between people who are both hungering in the same way. It was what I needed to begin curing me completely of my grief, by making me realize that I could fall in love again.
A few months later, at a meeting in Delhi of g
ay and transgender activists from around India, I found myself drawn to one of the men. We hadn’t spoken directly to each other, but watching him speak from the podium and in discussions, I was struck by his gravitas, a quality that was all the more surprising as he was clearly young, probably in his early thirties. I was also deeply impressed to see that he took pains to translate for participants who didn’t speak English, treating them with a respect that was rare at the meeting, where the well-off Westernized individuals grouped together clubbishly and dominated the proceedings.
Unexpectedly, a friend of mine came up to me later that day and said, “Hey, I really want to introduce you to Anand. I keep thinking you’d be perfect for each other!”
Anand and I did meet and began a relationship. It developed slowly. We met for dinner each time I visited Delhi, but that was rarely more than once every month or second month. We talked endlessly when we met. I was wonder-struck to see how deeply he felt and had thought about every kind of social injustice, whether poverty, caste-based discrimination, or persecution of sexual minorities. He had given up a career in corporate law on realizing that he found satisfaction only in work on human rights and social justice. He was a practicing Buddhist. He was fiercely independent and principled. And he was funny, kind, and loving.
The more than ten-year difference in our ages—a gap that I had often felt with Arndt—seemed irrelevant. I felt secure with Anand in an absolute way that I had never felt in any of my previous relationships, even with Tandavan. I had finally found a soul mate. Long before we even kissed—sex was still months away—I felt real love for him.
Anand came to visit me that winter in Goa. My father was staying with me. To my surprise, I found them forever engrossed in conversations. I had never seen my father warm so readily to anyone I had dated. On January 1, 2009, on a perfect Goa winter morning, when the three of us were having breakfast together on the sunlit veranda, Lorca stretched out on the cool floor next to us, my father looked intently at both of us and, addressing us jointly, said, “Sons, you can make this a special year for this old man by getting married. How about it?”
Some months after my moving encounter with Mahavir in Sangli and my momentous meeting with Anand, the Delhi High Court began a dozen daylong hearings on the legal challenge to the sodomy law, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, in Naz Foundation v. Govt. of NCT of Delhi and Others. The hearings began in September 2008 and were expected to take several months to complete.
Seven interminable years had passed since the case had been filed by Anjali Gopalan of Naz Foundation (India) Trust and Anand Grover of the Lawyers Collective—and a decade and a half had passed since ABVA, the grassroots group that my friend Siddhartha had been with, filed the first challenge at this very court. Indeed, it had been two years since the open-letter campaign had shown unambiguously that thoughtful Indians from all walks of life felt that the courts should urgently address this wrong. I wished there had been some way of showing to these judges what I knew from my recent research—that millions of gay men, women, and trans women were looking to them for justice, irrespective of whether their homes were in rural shanties, urban chawls, or mansions.
But, however long the delay, at least in the judges hearing the case we were guaranteed an intelligent and unbiased review. The two-person bench comprised the Delhi court’s chief justice, Ajit Prakash Shah, who had authored numerous progressive verdicts, and S. Muralidhar, a former human rights lawyer. Ever since Independence, every oppressed community in India had despairingly turned to the higher courts in its search for justice. Perhaps inevitably, as with courts even in other liberal democracies, the Indian courts’ record of advancing justice for the oppressed was mixed.
On innumerable thrilling occasions, the courts had corrected old wrongs on constitutional grounds, empowered by a strongly emancipatory Constitution, improving the course of India’s history and sometimes even raising the global bar for human rights jurisprudence. But sometimes, even in the most unconscionable cases of injustice, the courts had sided with the oppressors or with bad laws, motivated by conservatism, prejudice, and literalist readings of the law or simply because they acceded to the demands of the state. Fortunately, those two judges were widely considered to represent the most stellar qualities of India’s judiciary.
On November 7, 2008, I went with Anand for the final day of the hearings, held in Courtroom Number 1 of the Delhi court, an impressive colonnaded building at the eastern end of Rajpath, the magnificent ceremonial boulevard along which are set the presidential palace, Parliament, and other landmarks of state. On that day, and in earlier reports from the hearings that I had followed attentively, the justness of our position shone through—the evidence of the terrible damage done by the unjust law; the force of universal human rights principles; the past half century’s global trajectory of decriminalization and of moving toward equal rights (countries as diverse as the United States, South Africa, Russia, almost all of Latin America, and neighboring Nepal had decriminalized same-sex relations by now); and, not least, the proof from the open letters that the most respected Indians urged an end to the archaic, alien law.
That morning, Anand Grover argued that the criminalization of adult, consensual same-sex relations violated constitutionally guaranteed rights on numerous overlapping counts. By imperiling HIV prevention efforts, criminalization left gay and bisexual men and trans women far more vulnerable to contracting this fatal disease, hence violating their rights to health and to life. (It was testimony to the unexpected positive changes catalyzed by the AIDS pandemic that both this legal challenge and the earlier one moved by the ABVA group had taken the depredations of AIDS on gay men as their starting point.) Criminalization also deprived those Indian citizens of the right to liberty, privacy, and dignity. The government had failed to prove any compelling grounds for selectively denying those rights only to those who had same-sex desires, Grover argued. And the disproportionately harsh punishments prescribed under Section 377 for “private sexual activity between consenting adults” merely because they were of the same sex also flagrantly violated the right to equality before the law, he stressed.
Supporting the Naz challenge was a friend-of-the-court intervention by Voices Against Section 377, a coalition of civil society groups ranging from those working on women’s and children’s rights to those focused on HIV prevention and yet others directly on gay and transgender rights, showing that the demand for decriminalization now had wide backing across Indian society. The lawyer representing the coalition, Shyam Divan, drew the court’s attention to the harrowing personal affidavits filed by gay men and women, which showed that Section 377 “subjects male and female homosexuals as well as transgenders to repressive, cruel and disparaging treatment . . . [and] degrades such individuals into sub-human, second-class citizens.” The harm done to them by Section 377 was all the more unconscionable for being provoked “simply because they seek to engage in sexual conduct, which is part of their experience of being human,” Divan pointed out. In a moving closing speech, Divan, who has an openly gay brother, said, “Public morality is not a valid or sufficient justification to deny a person his dignity . . . Indeed, in this context, it is the fundamental rights enshrined to protect minorities, including sexual minorities, that ought to prevail. Morality, by itself, in the absence of any other harm, cannot be a ground to restrict the right to live with dignity.”
I had closely followed the arguments of the three opposing parties—comprising the Indian government’s Ministry of Home Affairs, a Hindu-supremacist politician, and a fringe AIDS denial group—in reports of the hearings. If there was any merit or even basic logic to their views, I could not grasp it, reinforcing my growing conviction over the years that the “moral majority” everywhere consists of aggressively opinionated cranks.
The senior lawyer representing the Home Affairs Ministry, P. P. Malhotra, argued that homosexuality must remain criminalized because it was “neither known to nature, nor known to law.” He claimed th
at decriminalizing “unnatural sex” would “open floodgates of delinquent behaviour and be misconstrued as providing unbridled licence for the same.” Those, as well as other outlandish statements by Malhotra—in an earlier hearing, he had insisted that consensual adult homosexuality was indistinguishable from pedophilia—earned him sharp rebukes from the judges, who scolded him to “take this issue seriously.” While I was relieved that Malhotra’s arguments were so weak that even the judges could not hide their irritation, I was also aghast that such a visibly incompetent person could become additional solicitor-general, the third-highest-ranking lawyer for the Indian government.
The Home Affairs Ministry’s stand had also been dealt a body blow by a counterintervention filed by the NACO, the Health and Family Welfare Ministry’s AIDS control agency. In direct opposition to the Home Affairs Ministry, the Health and Family Welfare Ministry pressed for the decriminalization of homosexuality as an imperative step to checking the spread of AIDS, emphasizing that IPC Section 377 was crippling HIV prevention efforts among India’s large populations of gay and bisexual men and trans women, and consequently among their wives and other women partners. The judges noted in surprise, “A rather peculiar feature of this case is that completely contradictory affidavits have been filed by two wings of Union of India.” The upshot was that when the Home Affairs Ministry’s lawyer argued that homosexuality should remain criminalized on public health imperatives, too—saying that gays have “sex with hundreds of persons, two hundred, five hundred, even more, [so that] it’s more likely to transmit disease”—the judges noted that the NACO’s affidavit “points to the contrary.”
Then there was B. P. Singhal, a prominent Bharatiya Janata Party politician and former member of Parliament, a heavyset, forceful man in his seventies who seemed to be brimming with a generalized rage. In an angry intervention, Singhal vented, “The mother of all harms to the human body comes from homosexuality.” He insisted that a majority of Indians found gay sex “inherently immoral, grossly unnatural . . . the very antithesis of the lofty ideals, lofty values and lofty objectives” of Indian civilization. It was astonishing to see how utterly ahistorical Hindu supremacists were in defense of their bigotry: they were arguing that a colonial, British-imposed law dating back a hundred and fifty years was an integral part of Indian civilization!
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