India in Love

by Ira Trivedi

  According to recently published government figures there are an estimated 2.5 million gay men in India, of whom 7 per cent are infected with HIV. Speaking about these numbers, Ashok is visibly angry; he insists these numbers were cherry-picked by the government. He spits out his words, ‘All we have done is reduce the number so that the government could work with the budgets. We first gave a number using the Asian figure of 5 per cent of the sexually active male population being homosexual but when I presented these numbers, the Director-General of NACO (National AIDS Control Organization), shouted at me: “Go back to the drawing board.” Apparently, it was felt that the number being mentioned was too low.’

  ‘Off I slunk back to my office room and looked at the number of gay men on public sex sites seeking sex. Even that figure was too high, so we came up with new numbers. That was the 2.5 million, which is now in every NACO record.’

  According to Ashok, the HIV/AIDS situation in India is pretty dire today, though the government projects things to be under control. ‘Most gay men refuse to use condoms. Over 50 per cent of the men on sex sites are married to women and more than 35 per cent don’t even have a sense of identity as gay men [they just fuck men because they love it]. They have sex with women because they want to ‘prove’ their masculinity. Just imagine the bridge population infecting women.’

  Ashok believes that the crux of the Indian sexual problem lies in the male psyche. And, if we were to study this all-powerful psyche, then a lot of our problems could be solved. He says, ‘There is a huge dysfunction in the male psyche in India—the sexual repression is shocking. I’ve seen men masturbating in cinema halls openly during the item numbers that come on screen. Like giant prisons, there is practically an “enforced homosexual behaviour” syndrome at work here, as there are not enough females to go around.

  ‘The problem is that nobody understands the male psyche, and no one has tried. The truth is that men will do anything for the pleasure principle. I remember one gorgeous guy who expected me to urinate on him while he masturbated, so I asked: “What’s in it for me?” And the bugger went blank. So I left him there in the bar like a dead dodo!’

  ♦

  On a perfect spring day in March of 1994, volunteers from the ABVA (AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan, or the AIDS anti-discrimination movement) showed up at the gates of Tihar Jail to distribute condoms to male prisoners. There had been an inordinate number of HIV-positive cases reported amongst the male inmates, and ABVA thought it necessary to take action. The Delhi police did not allow the ABVA activists entry into the prison, stating that the jails were gender segregated, and that by allowing condom distribution, they were abetting an act made criminal by Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. The enraged ABVA filed a petition in the High Court of New Delhi challenging the antiquated 377, pointing out that it blatantly violated constitutional rights of life, liberty and non-discrimination.

  As is usual with courts in the country, the case filed by the organization was delayed for many years. It finally came up for hearing seven years after it was filed in 2001, when it was dismissed because representatives of ABVA (a poorly financed organization run by volunteers) were unaware of the court date and did not show up for the hearing. At the same time, cases of police harassment against homosexual people had been increasing in cities across the country. Two incidents in July 2001, commonly known as the ‘Lucknow Incidents’—a set of raids on a public park frequented by gay men, and on the offices of two NGOs working on safe sex issues—made it necessary to take action. This was when the Naz Foundation (India) Trust led by Anjali Gopalan got involved and along with the Lawyers Collective filed a public litigation case in the Delhi High Court in late 2001.

  Several prominent personalities who supported homosexuality, like author Vikram Seth, academic Saleem Kidwai, actors Rahul Bose and Pooja Bhatt, and ex-Miss India Celina Jaitly, supported the petition by signing a document titled ‘Voices against 377’. The petition became a movement and for the first time in the history of modern India, the LGBT community and their supporters came together to fight for the revoking of Section 377. The public litigation argued that Section 377 had a deleterious effect on HIV/AIDS, a disease that was spiralling out of control across the country, with some Indian experts estimating that between twenty and fifty million Indians were infected with the disease.61

  After seven long years of trials and tribulation, and much deliberation, the case finally came up for hearing in 2009. In a historic judgment delivered on 2 July 2009, the Delhi High Court overturned the 150-year-old Section 377, and consensual homosexual activities amongst adults were declared legal. In a brave judgment, a bench of Chief Justice Ajit Prakash Shah and Justice S. Muralidhar declared that if not amended, Section 377 would violate Article 14 of the Constitution, which states that every citizen has equal opportunity of life and is equal before law.

  Although the prime minister extended his support to the judgment, an astounding nineteen petitions were filed by religious, political and conservative groups in the Supreme Court of India, stating that homosexuality was a Western import and sullied Indian culture. Unfortunately the Bombay High Court ruling was overturned by a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court towards the end of 2013. The Supreme Court judgement was greeted with outrage across the country, with the government filing a review petition against the Supreme Court’s decision. The fight carries on, and the encouraging thing about the whole sorry affair is the scale of support the gay community has received from many sections of Indian society.

  ‘WE ARE LIKE THAT ONLY’

  I am sitting in a terrace garden as lush and verdant as a rain forest, nestled between three multi-coloured stray dogs and a pint-sized tabby, all of whom live amicably in this small home along with their owner. As the director of the Naz Foundation, Anjali Gopalan has dedicated a decade of her life to fighting for homosexual rights, and is the country’s most prominent voice for gay rights and for the repeal of Section 377. Anjali is a stout, unassuming woman with a hard, angry face, and a brush of short, grey curly hair, who doesn’t like to talk about herself. I have had to chase her for months simply to have a conversation, but after her initial wariness, she has proved to be quite accommodating (she is especially happy to talk about her garden and her dogs).

  Anjali and I walk over to the Naz Foundation care home for HIV-positive children which she runs. The home is a small, tidy building with thirty beds. The kids love Anjali and crowd around her when she arrives, tugging at the bottom of her kurta, clinging to her legs, others raising their arms, asking to be held. Anjali is radiant, glowing with delight.

  ‘Children have a way of changing your life. People used to tell me, “You are single. What will happen when you are older?” I am one of those women who went from being a single woman to having an incredible extended family. How many can say that?’ she says with a smile.

  In 2000, when Naz was still operating out of Anjali’s home, a four-year-old male child was left at her doorstep. He was HIV-positive, both his parents had died of AIDS, and he had a brother who was HIV-negative who had been adopted by an uncle. No orphanage would have this child, so Anjali had no choice but to take him in. ‘I thought it was common sense to take care of someone. As time went on, we got more children. I was getting into trouble. People told me to stick to advocacy, not to run institutions. I would ask them, “Why not? We were changing the system, but what were we doing for those who needed the system the most?” People told me, “What’s the point? How long will they live?”’

  She introduces me to a well-dressed young man who seems to be in charge. He comes up to her, touches her feet, and then hugs her. ‘This is our oldest, the four-year-old who was left on our doorstep. I feel bad for those people who abandoned him. Those people who never called even once to see how he was doing. If only they saw him today, what regrets they would have,’ she says proudly.

  As we walk around the care home, from bed to bed, Anjali introduces me to each child, from toddlers all the way to teena
gers. She talks to me about the sexual health training that she does across the country, and the gamut of problems that she sees mostly because of lack of education and narrow-minded thinking that people disguise as ‘culture’.

  ‘People say that India has a culture, and that we must protect it. But having a rich culture comes with a shitload of problems. We are in transition, a state of flux, and a state of molten confusion. Despite all the years that I have been doing work in sexuality and HIV/AIDS, people still take my breath away with their crappy, narrow-minded thinking. “We are like that only,” they say to me, refusing to change and accept, and that explains everything, at least to me.’

  ‘I AM WHO I AM’

  Sree realized that she was lesbian the day she got married. Though she tried to consummate her marriage, lying naked next to her husband night after night, she could not have sex with him.

  Sree tried stripping down to the clean cotton underwear that her mother had bought for her to wear after her marriage. He stroked her breasts and fingered her, which she somewhat enjoyed, but the minute he brought his penis (an organ which she thought was the ugliest part of the human body) close to her, she felt disgusted and moved away. She had told Prakash that she enjoyed oral sex, that she wanted him to perform cunnilingus, but he had looked at her in disgust and told her that he would never do that to a woman. He had asked her politely at first, and aggressively later, as if it were his right, that she perform fellatio on him. But the thought of bringing that demonic organ anywhere close to her mouth made Sree want to throw up. The thought of having sex with a man was repulsive to her. On the other hand, her husband Prakash had only sex on his mind. At twenty-five, he had never had sex before and badly wanted to—this was one of the main reasons that he had agreed to a speedy marriage with Sree, though he didn’t find her particularly attractive.

  After a few months of trying, they both gave up. Prakash went back to masturbating daily and Sree resorted to conjuring memories of the best moments of her life—when she had shared her dormitory bed with her first love, and how they had together achieved the greatest pleasure that she had ever felt in her life. Attractive and energetic, Sree has short, cropped hair styled into spikes and a large OM tattoo on her athletic arms. Kalashree (Sree) Suwarnkar was born in 1984, the same year as me, in interior Maharashtra in Latur, and brought up as most girls in traditional, middle-class families in small-town India are—with idealistic notions that marriage and fidelity are the most important parts of a woman’s life.

  Growing up, Sree found herself attracted to women. Much to the wrath of her mother, she was a tomboy, refusing to grow her hair long, preferring to wear shorts, pants and jeans as opposed to long-skirts or salwaar-kameez. Even as a young girl Sree masturbated regularly to images of women—actresses, female cousins, girlfriends—visualizing them dancing to the Bollywood tunes that she loved.

  Sree was a happy-go-lucky girl who hated studying and remained a mediocre student throughout school and college. She much preferred the extracurricular and sports activities that were on offer, which she was better at than the boys. She began her first sexual relationship in college in Pune with her best friend. At that time, she didn’t know that she was lesbian, or even what being lesbian meant. All she understood at that age was that it was natural and enjoyable to pleasure her best friend.

  Her parents began looking for a suitable match for Sree the day she turned twenty-one. The thought of marriage to a man seemed unattractive and unnatural, yet it felt even more unnatural not to follow her parents’ instructions, so she agreed to marry Prakash, a twenty-five-year-old man from her Maratha community with an M Tech degree and a job at an engineering firm in Bangalore.

  It was only after a year of marriage, when Prakash and she had already separated, that she began to explore her sexuality again. Encouraged by the new sexual confidence that the internet lent her, Sree became increasingly bold. She was thrilled to find that there were other women like her, and she joined the online community to chat with single women looking for relationships. She watched lesbian porn, found a lesbian group in Bangalore she attended meetings with, and even had a few online sexual encounters with women.

  Two years after they got married, Prakash and Sree filed for divorce. Sree then moved to Nasik, where she lives a single, independent life working at a battery factory as a technical manager. Sree speaks to me candidly about her failed marriage.

  ‘I tried to convince my parents about my divorce, but they did not listen to me at all. They told me to fulfil my marital duties, to force myself to have sex with Prakash. My parents were worried, especially because both my brothers weren’t married, and they thought that if I got divorced it would ruin my brothers’ chances.’ Rather than being deterred by the negative reaction of her parents, Sree was convinced that she must remain loyal to herself and to her sexuality, so she applied for a divorce without the consent of her parents.

  ‘Those were the most difficult days of my life; my parents were just not willing to listen to me. A lot of situations arose in which suicidal thoughts were in my mind,’ says Sree grimly.

  ‘My parents want me to have long hair and to wear salwaar-kameez. I don’t like to do things like this. Main jo hoon, main hoon (I am who I am),’ says Sree with a look of conviction in her eyes.

  Sree talks to me about her current relationship with Sapna. Sree met Sapna online, they chatted online for a few weeks, and then started talking on the phone. After two months, Sree went to Pune to meet her.

  ‘We met at a McDonald’s in the mall and we got along so well that we went for dinner. The hotel where we went for dinner had a disco, and we danced all night. How we danced that night, it was amazing,’ she says remembering the night wistfully.

  She tells me shyly, twirling a golden band with a tiny diamond that she wears on her finger, that she has recently gotten engaged to Sapna. She hopes to move to Bombay to live with her as soon as she finds a new job.

  Sapna comes from a middle-class family and works in interior design. She is out to her parents and family. I ask Sree how Sapna’s experience of being open has been.

  She shrugs. ‘She is the oldest daughter, and supports her family. She even pays for her sister’s education. Also, they love me a lot, so maybe that is why the experience has been good,’ she adds with a laugh.

  She recalls the time when Sapna’s sister was in the hospital and Sree went and spent days by her side, like any good family member would do. At the end of it, Sapna’s parents told her ‘Sree is our jamai’ and that to Sree was the kindest thing she had ever heard.

  Sree shows me pictures of her engagement party in Pune where she exchanged rings with Sapna. Sree wears a tank top, and has large tattoos on both arms. She is sitting on a motorbike, and Sapna, a fair, dewy-faced girl with long dark hair, sits behind her wearing a pair of jeans and a petal-pink kurta. Friends crowd around them—cheerful, happy, accepting young men and women.

  ‘Main jo hoon, main hoon’ is Sree’s mantra. Perhaps the biggest blow to a patriarchal society is when a woman makes sexual choices for herself, not just choosing her own partner, but also the gender of that partner.

  Sree is a cultural rebel, an agent for sexual autonomy and social change, who, in the face of overwhelming opposition and intractable circumstances, has begun to fight to realize her dreams. It is heartening to see the change, and though the battle is a long way from being finished, at least it has finally begun.

  SANGINI, MY LIFE PARTNER

  The small apartment that Sangini is run out of is crowded with people and animals. The primary residents are two lesbian women, Maya and Bitoo, and their pets—two mongrel dogs and a small turtle that sits placidly in a corner taking stabs at a wrinkled piece of bhindi, occasionally nudged at by the dogs. There is also a small army of all-male support staff who look after the house and do admin work for Sangini. Lastly, there is the recent stowaway: a shy, pretty young girl, who looks not a day over twenty-one. This apartment is used for a variety of different
purposes: as a home for Maya and Bitoo, as a kitchen for the small catering business that Maya has started, and most importantly, as the headquarters for Sangini, India’s most prominent lesbian group, run as a part of Anjali Gopalan’s Naz Foundation. More inconspicuously, it is a shelter for lesbian women who have run away from repressive conditions at home.

  ‘The biggest change that I have seen over the past few years, especially since the [Delhi High Court] judgement on 377, is that women are coming out so much younger. A decade ago, if women came out at all, it would be in their forties, after marriage and kids. Not anymore. Now most women who come to us are in their twenties,’ says Maya, as we talk in her cheerful, crowded living room. She is a counsellor, listening to the hundreds of women who need someone to speak to and occasionally she helps women who have mustered up the courage to run away to find a new place in the world.

  I immediately think back to the other Maya I’d spoken to a little earlier. Maya Sharma is a prominent lesbian activist in India who runs Vikalp—an LGBT organization based out of Gujarat. Maya told me how she had married and borne a son because she thought it would give her maturity and respect. Maya came from an educated middle-class family and it was impossible for her to imagine breaking away from her family, for where else could she go? How could she survive? It was only later, at forty, when she starting working, first as a paid volunteer in a women’s organization, and later in labour unions that she found the courage to leave her husband, and come out about her homosexuality. ‘Why are Indian women coming out at a younger age today?’ I ask Maya.

  ‘Women are becoming financially independent and more confident about leading their lives on their own terms. The internet has given them access to information about groups like us who are out there to support them.’ She adds with a chuckle, ‘Also, finally, Indian women are just not ready to take shit anymore.’

  I spot Sangini’s latest stowaway in the hallway. She is fashionably dressed in a pair of tight jeans and a figure-hugging polo t-shirt with a pair of matching, long, dangly earrings. She is organizing all her things into a gigantic pink suitcase. Another equally large suitcase lies unopened next to it. From the number of things this young lady has with her, it looks she is planning to be away for a long time.