Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (3 page)

All that you fashion

All that you make

All that you build

All that you break

All that you measure

All that you feel

All this you can leave behind.

(U2 ‘Walk On’)1

This book was written during the course of my Master’s programme in Comparative Media Studies at the Masschusetts Institute of

Technology—where I spent three years between 2003–06. It began its life as my graduate thesis, which I completed in May 2005. I then left it alone for a year and returned to it for a few months towards the end of 2006, after I relocated back to Bombay from Boston. In some sense, its publication marks the end of my coming out journey as an Indian Introduction
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gay man, comfortable at last in his own skin. This comfort took several years to arrive at and the quest for this comfort was perhaps one of the reasons that I took this project upon myself.

I lived a pretty closeted gay life in Bombay for several years prior to my departure to the US. I was neither aware of nor did I seek to be a part of a greater gay community. Sure, I had some gay friends and socialized with them occasionally—but for the most part, my sexuality was something that I had compartmentalized as something that was surreptitious and all about the sexual act, not about an identity. In 2002, I visited the US to check out potential graduate schools and on my cross country trip, stayed with several gay individuals and couples, courtesy my friend and mentor in Bombay, the late Riyad Wadia. One of these included Riyad’s brother Roy, who was living in Atlanta at that time, with his long-term partner, Alan. After experiencing the love and warmth that their household exuded, I became aware of the possibility of how wonderful gay coupledom might be.

Serendipitously, when I got back to India after my sojourn, I experienced my first gay relationship. It was crazy, because I had never imagined myself in such a context before, but now suddenly, I turned into a walkie-talkie Hallmark card, living out all the clichés of mushy-gushy love with another man. We texted each other a hundred times a day, went out on dates, long romantic walks, planned our dream house and argued over its décor, made love like in Hollywood movies, complete with slow-motion action and top 40 hits playing in the background…it was exhilarating. What was even more mind-blowing was that my

boyfriend Z’s family was completely accepting of our relationship. Our romance became everything that I had read about in comics and books and seen in movies—I mean, I would go to his house to pick him up for a date—and his parents would wave us goodbye—it was that awesome!

How many straight couples in Bombay enjoyed that kind of equation with their partner’s families?

One week, we got to know about a party being organized in the city by a group called Gay Bombay and I can still remember how we excitedly went shopping for new clothes for the big night and speculated wild-ly about what the experience would be like. It was magic. As we entered the portals of the nightclub, it seemed that we’d stumbled in on an
24
Gay

Bombay

episode of
Queer as Folk
or something, except that everyone here was brown. The dance floor was packed with male bodies swaying in tandem to Enrique, Cher and Madonna, the bar had more male flesh packed per square inch than we’d ever seen before in Bombay and it seemed that there were men everywhere…draped on the staircase, squeezed in dark corners, emerging out of the woodwork….

LEAVING ON A JET PLANE

Z takes my hand and leads me to the dance floor. I am surprised, he has
never been the forward type before this…but the atmosphere is electrifying.

We dance together—shyly at first and then as the music seeps into us, more
confidently. After some time, we embrace and he kisses me. Tentatively, my
instinctive reaction is to look around mortified. (‘What if anyone sees us?!!!’)
Then I realize that we don’t have to worry. Not here. Not for the present.

As we dance, body to body, soul to soul, we feel the crowds spread apart…

spreading open to celebrate our love. It is magic. I never want the night
to end.

August 2003. I weep freely as my plane circles the Sahar Airport runway
for its take-off. It has been three days since I visited the temple and prayed
hesitantly for clarity, three months since I ended the relationship with Z that
was supposed to go on forever. I look out of the rain-spattered window…

I see the pain and rejection that comes daily when classmates whisper

‘pansy’ as I pass them in the school hallway. I remember the thrill that comes
with the first flush of longing, the transparency of desire, the innocence of
newly discovered sex. I laugh at the preposterousness of trying to think
for two people when thinking for one is hard enough and the stupidity of
thinking that going away will give you all the answers.

I see myself in Nalanda—the bookshop at the posh Taj Mahal hotel,
browsing through foreign magazines… looking at the beautiful men in
GQ

and their taut, sexy bodies, almost always white. The magazines are expensive.

I hold them up to my nose and sniff with pleasure—it is the sweet smell
of freedom—this is what Indian magazines will never have, I think… the
reason why I need to go to America. For so many years and perhaps even
now, America, to me, is the sweet smell in the folded perfume advertisements
Introduction
25

in
GQ
,
Vogue
and
Bazaar
that I read inside air-conditioned Nalanda,
forgetting that I eventually have to walk out to the beggar-infested, fly-buzzing, cockroach-crawling, shithole of a city that I call home. Inside,
I belonged to the beautiful bodied, white, chiseled gods and within a few
hours I will be among them.

When I reach MIT, I am astounded that through the grapevine, some students in the university already know of my sexual orientation. I am asked by the campus LBGT group to join them for a leadership retreat in the fabulous queer holiday destination of Provincetown. The event is an eye-opener and a perfect start to what turns out to be a very interesting year. Personally I decide to be completely
out
with regard to my sexual orientation as opposed to the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy I followed in India. This year is especially significant for the gay movement in the US, with the recognition of gay marriage in Massachusetts and the debates about it all over the rest of the country.

I enjoy myself thoroughly—the initial rush of freedom as an out gay man, living life in an environment that is supportive. At last, at last!

I go to San Francisco and explore the Castro, wide-eyed, feeling proud of the rainbow flags fluttering high above. I go to Los Angeles and see beautiful boys at the Abbey bar, carefully poised with martini glass in hand, hair always perfect. I go on dates with semi-hot Harvard and Boston University guys that I have met online, through the social networking site Friendster. It is brilliant, but I realize soon, that it is not enough.

I had hoped that by coming to America I could finally become
properly
gay, but strangely enough and irritatingly enough, I am missing and often craving for a notion of India that I had thought I had happily left behind. I realize that I need to understand my Indianness along with my gayness—they can’t be two separate journeys. So I begin to study the different books and films touching upon Indian queer themes. This research as well as Riyad’s untimely death provide the impetus for me to plan a film festival at MIT dealing with the negotiation of a South Asian LBGT identity across different contexts—amidst the diaspora in the West, as well as among the home countries.2

As a part of my learning process, I add myself to the Gay Bombay mailing list that I have come to know about and discover a whole new
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Gay

Bombay

world in India—in my very own backyard—in Bombay. There is so much going on! Now, I am sheepish for having lived under a rock for all these years in Bombay and find it ironic that I have been so obsessed with nur-turing and living in one kind of online-offline realm (my youth website
Freshlimesoda
3) that I have allowed this parallel gay universe to completely pass me by.

Begun in 1998, the Gay Bombay group is an example of what Camp-

bell (2004) has termed as a ‘queer haven’—a safe space for gay individuals to come together, ‘affirm their identities and explore their sexuality’.4

I find it very interesting that the space exists in different dimensions and these offer participants a multiple-choice introduction to a certain kind of gay life in and around Bombay city. These dimensions include—

(
a
) The Gay Bombay website—the web home of the Gay Bombay collective, with information, news and internal and external links to resources for the gay community. (http://www.gaybombay.org)

(
b
) The Gay Bombay mailing list—a Yahoo! Newsgroup. (http://groups.

Yahoo.com/group/gaybombay/)

(
c
) Gay Bombay events held at different locations around Bombay, like dance parties, parents’ meets, events to mark different Indian festivals, picnics and museum visits, New Year’s Eve parties and film screenings.

(
d
) Fortnightly Sunday meetings, mostly with a pre-determined discussion topic.

I am intrigued by the possibility of the ‘virtualization of real space and a realization of virtual space’5 (Silver, 2003) that the group presents.

I feel that in order to understand contemporary India, which I want to make the locus of my academic career, a group like GB even though it is ostensibly situated on the margins, reflects and in fact, symbolizes all the hopes and anxieties of the mainstream, and basing my research project around this world would serve as a perfect entry point into my quest for understanding myself, my sexuality and my Indianness. Sexuality would certainly make an interesting lens to examine the tremendous changes happening in India—the economic surge, the higher political profile, the cultural explosion on the world stage and a new and assert-ive confidence in its own capability as a major world power. Perhaps, Introduction
27

the combination of my outing in the West, the distance and perspective I gain during my time abroad and my lived experiences also gay man in the rapidly changing urban India that I am seeking to catalogue, make me a good candidate to undertake such an effort. This acquired distance is valuable—it stimulates in me a desire to engage and understand and from this ‘neither here, nor there’ position, yields particular insights, which I have fashioned into this book.

Basing my study within this group would be important for the following reasons. First, the context of the study would be urban upper-middle class India, something that has not too often been explored in academia, which particularly in anthropological studies regarding India and South Asia, has a ‘distinctly rural bias’6 (Hansen, 2001).

Second, the Gay Bombay group is a symbol of the radical change

that has swept across gay and lesbian Asia (especially India) due to the emergence of the Internet.7 Third, while there have been some attempts in the past few years to catalogue a diversity of non-Western queer experiences,8 most academic work on gay and lesbian or queer studies still tends to be American or Eurocentric. Jackson (2000) points out that there is especially, a sore lack of ‘detailed historical studies of the transformations in Asian discourses which have incited the proliferation of new modes of eroticized subjectivity’.

We…lack studies of the changes in economies, social organization and political systems which have created the spaces for the emergences of Asian gay and lesbian scenes. Current histories, ethnographies and sociologies of gay and lesbian identities are overwhelmingly from the West, and we need studies of gay Bangkok, gay Seoul, gay Mumbai, gay Taipei and other major Asian cities that are as detailed and as comprehensive as those we have of gay Sydney, gay New York, gay London and gay Amsterdam.9

It is a pleasure to acknowledge recent work, which has tried to re-dress the balance with regard to both of the above issues. This includes the writings of individuals like Jyoti Puri10 and Brinda Bose11 and the collaborative readers
Because I Have a Voice
and
Sexuality Gender and
Rights
.12 Zia Jaffrey’s
The Invisibles: A Tale of the Eunuchs of India
is quite well known and Serena Nanda is someone else who has written about
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Gay

Bombay

the
hijras
.13 Gayatri Reddy’s
With Respect to Sex
covers
hijras, kothis
and other different sexualities and genders in India.14 Academics like Jigna Desai, Gayatri Gopinath, Rajinder Dudrah, and Jasbir Puar cover sexuality, history, films and other media, identities and community in their work.15

Finally, there has been very little work done on online LBGT identity in any context;16 the work that exists tend to focus exclusively on the
online
, leaving out the
offline
component of people’s lives that I am deeply interested in; here I am in conjunction with Miller and Slater (2002) when they write that the Internet and its related technologies are ‘continuous with and embedded in other social spaces’ that ‘happen within mundane social structures and relations that they may transform but cannot escape’.17

Altman (1996) has observed that ‘sexuality, like other areas of life, is constantly being remade by the collision of existing practices and mythologies with new technologies and ideologies’.18 I realize that a study of Gay Bombay, due to its timing, content and nature, would be the first academic account that would deal with the collision of gay male sexual identity and community, cyberculture, media and globalization in contemporary India. Studying this collision would (in a Bhaba-esque fashion) present me with an exciting opportunity to ‘focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences’.