Watching the collective damage being done by Kristof, Steinem, and other celebrity foes of sex workers’ rights intensified my revulsion. It was one thing for President Bush, Congressman Smith, Christian zealots, and neocons to insist that the United States play global moral policeman; it was quite another for individuals who imagined themselves to be feminists and humanists to help lead the shambolic, bullying crusade.
TWENTY-THREE
WORDS LIKE FREEDOM
Once the construction of my father’s home in the Nilgiris was in full swing, I moved to Goa. It was early in 2008. Just over half a year had passed since I had left Geneva.
One of my lifelong dreams had been to live right by the sea, and I rented a spacious sea-facing home in a quiet enclave on the outskirts of Panjim. From the veranda, it was just a hundred meters down to the Arabian Sea. At sunset, the calm waters turned roseate and the tugboats became inky spots against the orange sun. When the monsoon set in some months later, the pouring rain and pounding breakers seemed to merge, so that I felt, thrillingly, that I was living on some untamed tropical island alone with faithful Lorca.
I unpacked my paintings and books from Geneva. I had live-in help in Shanta Kumar, a Nepalese waiter at a Goa hotel whom I had become friends with many years back and who now joined me as a jack-of-all-trades, from cooking and handling practical matters to caring for Lorca when I was away on my long research trips. Shanta knew I was gay and paid it no heed; I didn’t inquire about his sexuality or off-hours life, knowing only that his wife and young children lived with his parents in Nepal.
That full life, full of novelty but comfortingly full of constants, too, was precisely what I needed to begin to heal from my grief about losing Arndt and my once joyous life in Geneva. Slowly, I began to look ahead rather than backward.
Once again, I was wonder-struck at seeing how life for well-off and upwardly mobile gay women and men, at least in the half-dozen major cities, had been transformed in the near decade I had been away. It was an entirely different world from 1986, when I had first returned to India. I sometimes had to shake myself to remember that this was indeed the same country that I had known all my life.
Nothing summed up those changes as vividly for me as the fact that in my first months back, my friends set me up with nearly a dozen men in the various cities I was traveling to. I had never known such a cornucopia of matchmaking, not even in New York City. It was so very different from 1986, when my Bombay friends had not known of one gay man that they could introduce me to.
And though nothing romantic came of those introductions—leading only to friendships, in good part because I was still too raw from the breakup with Arndt—they showed me how many out gay men and women there now were in the major cities. They led full lives. They had dealt with the inevitable difficulties of coming out to their families. They knew large numbers of other gay men and women of their own background. Some were in relationships. They didn’t commonly face homophobia in their social circles. If they worked in the creative arts, they were usually out to their colleagues; so were some of those in the media or who worked with multinationals. They were discreet around their homes and neighborhoods without quite hiding themselves.
Every day there seemed to be a landmark new advance in those globalized urban enclaves. Time Out Delhi ran listings of LGBT-themed events, while Mumbai’s edition went further still, with a regular column about LGBT life and issues. Gay support groups ran help lines and weekly support meetings—and hosted sold-out parties. A handful of bars had weekend gay nights, advertised as “private” parties to hide them from the police or censorious groups. Online dating and sex sites, from Planet Romeo to Grindr, were bursting with countless profiles of gay men, many of them showing full-face shots.
Annual gay pride marches began in city after city, the hundreds of marchers including gay men, women, trans women, and even one or two trans men; many wore carnival masks, but many others publicly announced their orientation. They were joined not only by their friends and families but also by women’s and human rights groups and even by trade unions.
A stream of English-language books with gay, lesbian, and queer themes appeared each year, published both by major mainstream imprints and by feminist and human rights presses, spanning the gamut from novels to scholarly works. A profusion of groups and think tanks worked on LGBT issues and rights; some of them were as heterodox as the most radical queer groups in New York City. Leading TV shows held debates on LGBT rights, with moderators and audiences invariably in favor not just of decriminalization but also of equal rights in marriage, inheritance, and other areas. To my astonishment, LGBTQ university campus groups had begun to spring up.
A Tamil-language TV channel, with a viewership of 64 million, began a talk show hosted by a trans woman, Rose, a poised twenty-eight-year-old former website designer who covered everything from sex to divorce and sexual harassment. At a Goa multiplex, friends and I watched the Bollywood rom-com Dostana—Bromance—in which two young men, played by A-list stars, pretend to be gay so that they can share an apartment with a pretty woman they are both attracted to. Every one of us was struck by how the audience (which included parents with children of all ages) was caught up in the story, laughing at the flirtation between the men and whistling loudly when they kissed on the lips; it spoke volumes that the movie was one of the year’s largest box-office earners.
Even outside the major cities and the relatively small numbers of Westernized, globe-trotting individuals, I saw astonishing evidence of how comfortable people I met socially or professionally now were with matters of same-sex orientation. This held true whatever their political leanings—thus, even among people who would not consider themselves either politically or socially liberal. Almost without exception, no one ever remarked on my orientation, even though it was well known. I noticed that they treated it, correctly, as a matter without bearing on our particular interactions. In the rare cases that anyone broached the topic, it was only in a sympathetic spirit, to learn more about the difficulties I or the others they knew had faced. Others spontaneously embraced the fact of my orientation. One of my most precious recollections is of my father’s immediate neighbors in the Nilgiris, a couple a few years younger than I, who told me that they were happy that I had moved there, as their teenage children would now have a real role model in case they were gay.
Even the few signs of bigotry I spotted outside the Westernized enclaves now seemed to rapidly resolve themselves, almost as though they were the last gasps of habit. Thus, in 2006, Manvendra Singh Gohil, the forty-year-old scion of the former maharaja of Rajpipla in conservative Gujarat, was disowned by his parents after he came out publicly. His mother threatened legal proceedings against anyone who referred to him as her son. Local protesters made a bonfire of Manvendra’s photographs and jeered him when he appeared in public. Even so, the times had changed so enormously that Manvendra’s father soon reconciled with him, and Manvendra became a LGBT activist, appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show and establishing a local AIDS prevention charity for gay men and trans women.
All that convinced me that what I had long thought but never been certain of was indeed true: that there was a strong element of easygoing tolerance and even nonjudgmental acceptance in Indian culture regarding many matters, which emerged readily when people had reason to think through any of the issues, a paradoxical counterpoint to the divisions of caste, class, gender, and religion. Correspondingly, I realized, outside particularly oppressive settings, bigotry did not spread readily unless it was consciously fueled by propaganda, as in the recent efforts of the violence-prone Hindu-supremacist groups to demonize gays or emancipated women or their long-standing victimization of India’s Christians and Muslims.
Even outside the relatively small numbers of the urban upper and middle classes, there were striking changes under way in the lives of gay men and trans women from lower-income and impoverished backgrounds, sometimes even in far-flung small towns. That had not been visible l
ess than a decade back when I was researching my book on AIDS. At that point, the prospects were promising for women sex workers but not for gay men and trans women. But now, I found, the opposite held true: the cause of sex workers was almost defeated, while the emancipation of gay men and transgender individuals was advancing.
That turnaround held an indelible lesson for me about the power of class. It was very clear that because rights relating to sexual orientation and gender identity mattered personally to well-off individuals in India and around the world, that cause had an inexorable staying power that tragically did not exist for sex workers, however just their cause and however clear the steps that would dramatically improve their situation. In contrast, people power, as in the powerful mobilization of sex workers that had happened in India, was not sufficient to guarantee changes in and of itself—especially because of the risk that groups of powerful people would oppose those changes for any number of motivations, as had so vividly happened in the case of sex workers with the Bush administration, Western prohibitionists, and conservative Indians themselves.
I came to understand the power of those changes through Mahavir, a gay sex worker in Sangli, a small agricultural town 250 miles southeast of Mumbai. By now, twenty-five years from the time I had first set out into villages and slums, I had seen how even the most brutally oppressed individuals—once given the slightest cause for hope—would begin to fight fiercely for their freedom, even though to any outsider it would seem that their chances remained hopeless and their efforts were foolhardy and even irrational. I had realized that they would fight and sacrifice even if it was patently impossible to improve their material circumstances: what they were fighting for, first and foremost, was to free themselves psychologically—to feel less shame and fear and more self-respect themselves and to force their oppressors to show them some grudging respect or even merely wariness. Mahavir showed me those truths in ways that I was never to forget.
There was so much about Mahavir’s life in Sangli that could have destroyed his capacity for hope.
The poverty he had grown up in would have been reason enough. His parents’ home was the poorest of the hutlike structures in an impoverished area, the brick-and-tin structure seemingly on the verge of disintegrating. There were just two small rooms, virtually bare of possessions.
His parents were probably my age, no more than in their mid- to late forties, but both looked aged in a way that is commonplace among the impoverished in India. Mahavir, too, looked many years older than twenty-nine, his frame small and bony, the delicacy of his facial features nearly obliterated by gauntness.
Ever since Mahavir could remember, the history of his family had been one disaster after another. He had been a toddler when his father, an alcohol addict, had been thrown out of his job as a supervisor at the adjacent factory, which manufactured cement drains. His father had soon squandered the family’s meager savings on matka, a popular form of gambling. It was only the endless hours that his mother had worked as a housemaid that had saved Mahavir and his sister, some years younger than he, from begging or starvation. They had gone hungry routinely, he told me.
And Mahavir had had his own particular source of childhood torment: he was a “girly-boy.” “When I was seven years old, I first felt something is lacking in me,” he said. “I used to play with small girls and wanted to help around the house. I’d be teased at school, so I’d often stay at home.”
By his teens, Mahavir’s family faced destitution, with his mother permanently incapacitated by a life-threatening seizure. Mahavir dropped out of school and begun to work as a cook, trying desperately to provide for his parents and sister—so that they had enough to eat, so that his sister could continue in school, so that his mother had the medicines she needed.
“But then, later, I started doing dhandha,” said Mahavir. Dhandha literally means “business” but in Hindi-speaking areas is a code for selling sex. “I still do this. Every night I have two or three customers. I charge them fifty or a hundred rupees each. If I spend the full night with a customer, I charge much more, five hundred or even a thousand.” The earnings were many times greater than he could ever make as a cook or in any other job within his reach. It was only that trade, he said, that ensured he could look after his parents, his sister, and himself.
Life as a gay man in small-town India would have itself been sufficient cause for despair. I had seen enough of it to know how soul-destroying it was—a lifelong sentence of secrecy and loneliness, of being trapped in a loveless marriage, settling for furtive sex instead of love and intimacy, and fearing violence, blackmail, and ostracism at every turn. Every risk was magnified for feminine gay men like Mahavir, rather than straight-acting men who could hide their orientation and claim that they had sex with men or trans women because women were unavailable. I saw that bleakness afresh in the days I spent with Mahavir.
He took me to all the places that amounted to life in Sangli for gay men. There was the busy area around the train and central bus station, the crowds providing anonymity and cover to strike up a flirtation. There was the park as well as the riverfront along the Krishna, both with dark groves and corners to have sex in. There was the Shivaji Sports Stadium, where college boys stayed on to find sex. There was the Padma Truck Rest Stop, unending, dusty, tire-worn, diesel-choked fields with countless long-distance trucks pulling in and out for a few hours of rest, the truckers longing for alcohol, food, and sex after risking their lives on India’s lethal roads.
It said everything about the lack of alternatives that just in this small town there were so many cruising spots, with dozens of men searching for sex in each place. From what I saw on the ground and Mahavir’s estimates, several hundred men were seeking out other men or trans women for sex and love every night in Sangli. And they were of every income level, background, and age—owners of businesses, middle-class professionals and officials, college students, truckers, and laborers—their differences obliterated by desire and loneliness.
Those furtive, dangerous meeting places that came to life only in the dark had long been the only places in Sangli for gay men or trans women to find some faint sense of community with others like them. “I first came to these places with a friend,” Mahavir told me. “I felt much better knowing there were so many others like me. We had sex, of course, but even more these were places to meet others and to become friends, almost like community clubs.”
All that was shadowed by the constant threat of exposure, blackmail, and persecution, as well as violence, sexual and otherwise. “We could never meet the eyes of anyone speaking to us,” Mahavir told me. “When local boys spoke to us, we’d lower our eyes and walk on.”
Then there was the impunity with which the police and thugs could act against men found out to be homosexual, particularly feminine kothi men such as Mahavir. “The police and the goondas were the worst problem,” Mahavir told me in anger. “They have thrashed us, stripped us, and paraded us naked. They’d come at night, not alone but in a group of four or five and have sex with us. They’d do this to all the kothis. In fact, there was one policeman who demanded free sex from me regularly at two a.m., when he got off duty.”
Bitterly, he said, “We kothis are always scared of society because we feel there is something inferior in us, something weak or bad. But when we see such behavior from heterosexuals, we feel there is something inferior in them, too, that you forcibly demand sex from us, that you don’t care about injustices that are done to us, that you are so full of hate for us!”
Then there was the threat of AIDS, present even before Mahavir became sexually active. It was more serious in this area of India than in almost any other.
He had started to lose friends to the disease in 2000, and about “fourteen or fifteen close friends” had died, he said. “One friend who had HIV hung himself at home.” Mahavir had started out selling sex without protection, and two of the friends who had died had been his sexual partners. Mahavir had gone for his first HIV test in 2007.
He felt like fainting at the thought of the test results. “I thought to myself that I should just not go back to the testing center at the hospital to collect the report! When I tested HIV-negative, I was very happy. But I have always felt so bad that I couldn’t save the others.”
In spite of all the bleakness that Mahavir recounted, I was buoyed by his palpable sense of self-worth, even of happiness and fulfillment. No less remarkable, I saw that Mahavir had become a key figure in gradually transforming life for other gay men and trans women in Sangli and its environs. All those changes, personal as well as larger, Mahavir said he owed to Muskaan, a support group for Sangli’s gay men and trans women started in 1999 by the activist Meena Seshu, the founder of the HIV prevention organization Sangram and the sex workers’ collective VAMP. Muskaan means “cheerfulness,” and the support group was the one subject that Mahavir spoke of with excitement rather than his characteristic watchful reserve.
Years back, a chance meeting at a cruising area with a Sangram staffer—who was estimating the number of gay and bisexual men and trans women in the town—led Mahavir to Muskaan. During his first visit to the nascent group, a condom demonstration was under way. “It felt very dirty!” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t know about AIDS then or what a condom was or how to use one.” In those early years, the group had no more than a dozen members. They met every Saturday to spend time together, but just that in itself was “a big help psychologically to all of us,” Mahavir recalled. “If someone wanted to wear a sari and dance, he could—we could do whatever we couldn’t do outside. Until then, all of us were so nervous and fearful.”
An Indefinite Sentence Page 33