Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (9 page)

For example—

One of the things such as an account of the circulation of ‘Western gay or lesbian identities’ inside global space misses is the notion of hybridity—

not as something that happens when transparently ‘Western’ identities impact on transparently ‘other’ cultures, but rather as the basic condition of cultures on both sides of the ‘East or West’ divide (wherever that might fall…) at this moment in the concurrent processes of decolonization and the globalization of economies. Altman’s article assumes that the incur-sion of literature or imagery produced in the US, Australia and Europe
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into ‘other’ parts of the world means that ‘a very Western notion of how to be homosexual’ is swallowed whole and easily digested by women and men in those other cultures who then begin to exhibit the symptoms of the ‘global gay or lesbian’—you see an American-produced poster in a women’s bookshop in downtown Taipei, rush out and buy yourself a stick of Pillarbox Red at Watson’s and BAM, you’re a ‘global lipstick lesbian’.

This account assumes that it is always only the ‘American’ side of the exchange that holds the power; that the ‘other side’ will never return to seriously disrupt ‘our’ assumptions and forms (might this be one of the attractions of such an account…?) (Fran Martin, 1996)167

I am uncomfortable that Altman’s hypothesis only lightly brushes by the rich diversity of specifically local sexualities (such as
kothi
culture).

However, I am pleased to note that his ‘global queering’ does not only refer to fashion and entertainment but also to the positive effects of the global battle against the spread of HIV and AIDS—

The imperatives of AIDS education have pushed embryonic gay communities in a number of non-Western countries to create organizations, usually along Western lines, to help prevent HIV transmission among homosexual men. In many parts of the world, you can now find ‘gay’

organizations, which use Australian, American, German literature and posters as part of AIDS education campaigns, and in doing so spread a very Western notion of how to be homosexual. (Altman, 1996)168

On my visits to the Humsafar centre in Bombay,169 I have often observed some of these posters and it does feel a little strange seeing images of say, two white guys embracing each other advocating safe sex to Bombayites, so I turn back to Appadurai’s heterogenization model as a way to break through this restrictive ‘either global McGay or pristine local tradition’ (Berry and Martin, 2003)170 logjam, understanding that the poster means something else when viewed in Bombay. I also keep in mind that both the global queering and the local particularities line of reasoning have often been used by harsh governments to clamp down on their own citizens, even in India.171

Manfred Stegar notes that, ‘Globalization is not merely an objective process, but also a plethora of stories that define, describe and analyze that process’ (2003).172 I hope that the evocative stories contained within Introduction
59

this book will help create an understanding of some aspect of globalization as a lived experience
in
Gay Bombay (as well as the context
of
Gay Bombay), from a close to the ground perspective.

NET GAINS

For someone who has covered the commercial arrival of the Internet in India
extensively within the Indian press, organized one of the first mass surfing
spectacles in Bombay through my newspaper youth club and been a part of
every industry networking association in the city, gay chat is a pretty late
discovery. I buy my first personal computer in 1996 at the age of 20, but it
is not until 1998 that I get my first Internet connection—my primary use
of the Net in the interim consists of checking my Hotmail account weekly
at a friend’s place. Having my own Internet account opens up the portal
to the wonderful world of gay porn, informational websites and real-time
messaging, which is where I first learn about IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and
then the India-Countrywide room on Gay.com.

This is a place that is even harder to get into than the toniest South
Bombay nightclub on a Saturday night. With entry limited to 50, it takes
me 20 minutes of precious dial up time on my first attempt. The main room
is full of bitchy regulars, flamers scrolling ANYONE 4 SEX 2NITE, MSG ME

NOW and newbies like myself tentatively finding their way around. I learn
the chatiquette fast enough and discover my personal predilections. This
is the pre-photo profile era, so text is all one has. I look for chat bios with
style—something spunky and original, not the run-of-the-mill ‘Sexhunk
Bby…26…31w cs smth fair 7 uncut and hot lkng for some1 smlr’ (read as:
Nickname Sexhunk, located in Bombay, age 26, possessing a 31 inch waist,
clean shaven, smooth bodied, fair, possessing a 7-inch-long uncircumcised
penis and hot, looking for someone similar) types. So while A/S/L (age, sex
and location) at the beginning of a conversation is standard fare—if someone
asks me for my cock size within the first 5 minutes, I’m turned off. I want
wit, intellect and pizzazz.

I am a king in this room because I have something that every horny gay
man in India would give an arm and a leg for—a place. Thus, I can more or
less pick and choose. Despite this, it’s a fruitless endeavour on most nights.

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On the rare occasions that I find someone vaguely intelligent, the bloke gets
disqualified because he lives in the suburbs, doesn’t want to come to where
I am even if he is in town, or doesn’t break first in giving me his number.

There’s a well-defined ritual to follow if I manage to have a conversation
half decent enough to warranty my interest in wanting to meet. First, we
dither about who gives whom their number first. I’m firm on not giving mine
out—it just depends on how easily the other person breaks. Second, there’s
the ‘real name’ exchange. Everyone in this room calls himself either ‘Rahul’

or ‘Raj’ (Actor Shah Rukh Khan’s most common screen avatars). I fluctuate
between the two, depending on my mood. My preferred meeting place is
outside a coffee shop, down the street from where I live. It is public, crowded
and it would not seem uncommon for me to be waiting there at midnight,
for perhaps a friend, if my neighbours or local acquaintances see me.

If I’m especially horny or lonely, I lower my standards and settle for
what’s available on offer. Not all the encounters lead to sex. Sometimes,
it is just coffee and/or a drive. Often, if the person is not how I imagined
him to be physically, I lie that I have an emergency to attend and hence
will not be able to continue the rendezvous. I hate it when I’m rejected by
similar methods.

If sex eventually happens, I really don’t like it all that much. I find it
hard to get naked with someone who was a pixellated nickname a few
hours earlier. I find the whole ‘what do you like?’ and ‘what do you do?’ pre-foreplay question-and-answer session too businesslike. I find it hard to look
at people with their eyes closed when I am pleasuring them and wonder
who or what they are thinking of. I find it demeaning to demand reciprocity after I’ve finished—isn’t it simply the decent thing to do, to return the
favour?

The two decent ones I manage to meet become regulars—to be met with
one week’s notice or less, for sex and nothing more, absolutely no strings
attached. A is a psychology student studying for his Masters. Tall, dark, lean
and broodingly beautiful, he takes three months to tell me his real name and
that his entire life story that he had had me believe was a fabrication. He
is extremely confused about his sexuality and tries hard to convince himself
that sex with me is an experimental phase—what he really wants to do is
have a girlfriend and live a normal life. On the other hand, C, a curly haired,
boyish looking, mustached mid-level employee with a reputed public limited
Introduction
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company, is completely comfortable with his sexuality. He is married, with
two kids and fails to see why he should consider that to be an issue. I get
it one way at home, another way with you—what’s the big deal, he asks,
insisting that it is a win-win situation. He is shocked when I wonder if he
would be comfortable with his wife wanting the same deal and is certain
that such an idea would never even occur to her.

My closeted friend Unni begs me to let him watch one of my Internet
hook-ups and I am surprised at how easily I agree. (Am I an exhibitionist?)
The guy we pick up is open to the idea of a threesome but he can’t imagine
why someone would just sit on the side and watch instead of performing.

He’s not aware of the concept of voyeurism and I don’t feel like I want to
broaden the vocabulary of someone whose real name I will never know.

∗ ∗ ∗

There are two other terms that feature prominently in this book—identity and community—and I want to introduce these briefly at this point.

IDENTITY

(
a
)
The quality or condition of being the same as something else.

(
b
)
The distinct personality of an individual regarded as a persisting entity;
individuality.

Both these dictionary definitions of identity173 sit right next to each other, playfully demonstrating the challenge in pinpointing this concept down. In the West, the essentialist notion of identity (arising from the Cartesian concept of the subject being fixed and having an essential core that is stable) has been progressively eroded over the years, starting with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, when the human psyche began to be thought of as ‘divided and… not whole or “one”’ (Gripsrud, 2002)174—through Freud’s differentiation between conscious and un-conscious identities, until the present day’s social constructionist view, which ‘stresses the temporal and spatial locatedness of identity, as well as identity as a process’ (Bell, 2001). There have been many different terms used to describe this modern conception of identity, like ‘protean’

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(Lifton, 1999), ‘flirtatious’ (Philips, 1994) and ‘improvisational’ (Barrett, 1998; Eisenberg, 1990; Hatch, 1999).175

Identity can be seen as the interface between subjective positions and social and cultural situations. Identity gives us an idea of who we are and how we relate to others and the world in which we live. Identity marks the ways in which we are the same as others who share the position and the ways in which we are different from those who do not…. Identities in the contemporary world derive from a multiplicity of sources, from nationality, ethnicity, social class, community, gender, sexuality—sources which may conflict in the constructions of identity positions and lead to contradictory, fragmented identities…. However, identity gives us a location in the world and presents a link between us and the society in which we live; this has made the concept the subject of increased academic interest as a conceptual tool with which to understand and make sense of social, cultural, economic and political changes. (Woodward, 1997)176

Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past177 (Hall, 1990).

Jeffrey Weeks (1995) describes identities as necessary fictions people need to create, especially in the gay world,178 implying like Foucault, that identities are essentially constructs. Eisenberg contends that socially created identities are a celebration of the ‘multiplicity of selves’ that individual perform continuously (2001),179 echoing Butler’s ‘identity as a performance’ (1990) and Giddens’ ‘identity as a project’ (1991) para-digms. Weeks (1995) reminds us that if ‘identities are made in history and in relations of power, they can also be remade. Identities then can be seen as sites of contention’.180

Each of us lives with a variety of potentially contradictory identities….

Behind the quest for identity are different and often conflicting values. By saying who we are, we are also trying to express what we are, what we believe and what we desire. The problem is that these desires are often patently in conflict, not only between communities but within individuals themselves. (Weeks, 1990)181

In the gay and lesbian world especially, as we have discussed before, there has been a conflict between those advocating identity politics (using fixed notions of gay identity as a rallying point for seeking legal and political Introduction
63

inclusion into the mainstream) and those abhorring it as something that is restrictive and discriminatory.

We might distinguish between notions of identity constructed in Western (individualistic) and Eastern cultures (collective) (Eisenberg, 2001).182 We might also distinguish between social or collective identity (‘the identity we get from other people’s perceptions of us and the collective contexts we are a part of ’); Gripsud, 2002183 and personal identity (that answers the question ‘who am I?’; ibid.).184 Closely related to one’s social and personal identities is what Bourdieu denotes as
habitus
or the internalized social conditions that guide one’s thoughts, actions and choices.185 One’s habitus is influenced by one’s family background, upbringing and educational, workplace and other experiences—it is in a constant state of reshaping.

COMMUNITY

There is no consensually accepted definition of the meaning of community. In 1971, Bell and Newby analyzed 94 different definitions of the word, which had ‘little in common other than their reference to people’