Being gay is not just who you love and sleep with
Today, December 11, is the second anniversary of the Supreme Court judgment that recriminalised homosexuality by upholding Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. The Section had been struck down by the Delhi High Court in 2009 but a group consisting largely of sundry religious organisations appealed the order in the SC, and got its wish.
Last week I was in Pune for a cousin's wedding. Before that, I had travelled to Mumbai to spend time with a gay friend. We know one another for a few years now and, truth be told, my trip was meant as a testing ground for a relationship. I reached Mumbai on a Friday evening, looking forward to spending the next two days with my friend over his weekend off, before I headed to Pune.
We were - are - great with one another. He works for an LGBT rights NGO and we spent the first night chatting about his work. He earns little at his job, but he is so committed to it that it does not matter. He is one of those comfortable-in-their-skin gay men who are friends with a broad swath of LGBT persons. Not for him the discriminatory contours of class or gender expression. He is as at home working with a transgender sex worker, as he is hosting a delegation of foreign aid workers.
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On my second day there, as talk got more serious and we began discussing who would move where should we get together, he told me he is HIV-positive. He said it while nestling his face against my neck, as if he wanted to hide the fact, make it disappear. I kissed him and brushed his hair. We shared a moment of silence in which our skins seemed to melt into one another. We discussed if this changes anything. It does not for me, but to him it is everything. He said he was now a "branded" man. He said this laughingly but, of course, he was hurting deeply. I told him HIV is a completely conquerable condition in this day and age, and he agreed, in that half-hearted way of his that I find cute, but at this moment found chilling. I told him we are all "branded" in our own way, that being gay is also a form of "branding", and that I both understand and feel his sense of loss.
Over the next two days, our conversation bore the weight of his status, even when it ached to be set free. He said he does not see himself leaving Mumbai any time soon. I said I too am happy in Bangalore. It was as if we were tip-toeing around the central issue of how we will be a mixed-status couple by raising more banal concerns. By the end of my trip, I decided that maybe I should listen to him and give this some thought. We parted amicably and promised to be in touch.
I reached Pune and suddenly, I was in a completely different set-up. Here was my cousin and my uncle and aunt dressing up for his wedding. Here was his bride and her cousins preparing a dance for the mehendi ceremony. Here I was absorbing it all and trying to be a part of it, taking out the detailed attires I had carried from home, stuffing my face with mithai, and soaking in the wedding spirit. It was so different from the gravity of what my friend and I had discussed in Mumbai that it seemed as if I had travelled from one world to another in the course of a few hours.
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As the wedding progressed, my restlessness grew. It was too loud, too ritual-ridden, too constricting. I grew tired and hankered to be back in Mumbai, lying next to my friend and discussing rights and duties and discovery and pain and acceptance. From the time I first knew him, our time together had always had romantic undertones but this trip had been especially charged. I missed him and felt more attracted to him. It was as if this new inversion he had told me about had mixed comfortably with the inversion within me. We were bent people hungering for one another, while all around me was a different happiness, a happiness for and of the unbent. Amidst the drunken revelry, I felt lonely, cast away from the cheery surroundings.
When I attend gay events and meet other gay men and women, talk quickly veers towards Section 377. That discriminatory law has become a mother lode of our collective anxieties, a ready reference point to beat our drums with. But gay identity is so much deeper and varied. It is a different state of mind, one that cannot be granted or won by changing a law. Being gay is not just who you love and sleep with; it is a world marked by secret longings and hidden pleasures, pleasures of the mind and spirit that are rich veins of their own accord, pleasures that are worth protecting against a straight world.
The day we are granted decriminalisation will be the day we come one step closer towards equality. The next battle would be marriage, and so on we shall walk down the path to complete heteronormativity. There will come a time when two men will marry the way my cousin got married, with band-baaja-baraat. Perhaps I will shed tears then, for the fulfilment of a long-cherished dream. Or perhaps the tears will be for the loss of a world so recognisably my own, a world built and nourished away from the prying eyes, a world of richness accessible only to those who are branded.