Why does the city’s LGBT community want to march? Vikram Doctor has the answers.
When the Delhi High Court delivered its liberating verdict on Section 377 at the beginning of July, the most obvious and immediate opposition came from religious leaders. Their diatribes are being countered, but there’s probably little chance of any real dialogue with such blinkered people. Still, I’m hoping that this won’t be the case with other strains of opposition or discomfort. Like the one articulated by antediluvian Congress politician, Vayalar Ravi. “As far as I am concerned, this is an issue of the elite with which we do not agree,” he said, using the standard tactic of political elites to dismiss progressive issues that don’t fit their agenda.
A more nuanced argument came from those who welcomed the verdict, but warned that too bold a coming out for the queer community could invite retaliation and also confirm the accusation of homophobes that this was a flamboyant Western imposition on Indian values. “Will the nasty jibes stop now that gays are ‘legal’?” asked Shobhaa De in The Week. “I’d say, ‘Hold those exuberant celebrations.’ The time to pop the bubbly is still a distant dream.” Santosh Desai in The Times of India noted that blatant displays of difference could backfire: “Imitative acts of protest, like some of those seen at the Gay Pride parade, make it easier for those already anxious to label the movement as being frivolous, derivative and elitist.”
They may have a point. When you’re trying to convince people gays and lesbians aren’t frighteningly different, it is perhaps not the smartest thing to march in public decked in rainbow colours and having a blast. “Milord, these people, they want to have fun,” spluttered one of our opponents’ lawyers during the Delhi High Court hearing, and it is certainly true that a Gay Pride march, along with its many serious messages, is also an occasion for much fun. So why, at the time of writing this, are queer groups planning to organise another Queer Azaadi March just like the one we had last year?
Because, in a way, it’s the real answer to Ravi’s dismissive remark. With a few honourable exceptions, the elite gay and lesbian crowd and their friends were never really involved in the campaign against Section 377 because it never mattered for them. Shobhaa De, always the social observer, described this world in The Asian Age: “educated, urbane, well-travelled cool guys as comfortable in Miami as they were in Mumbai. This new breed was predominantly gay… but determined to stay in the closet.” She went on to describe a power gay mafia in the entertainment and fashion world who employed gay stylists, designers, music directors, cameramen – who all created images of muscular, sexualised males and skinny, desexualised females for their private appreciation, which the unknowing public lapped up and internalised.
I have to say I find this a bit glib. I know gay people in Bollywood, though hardly in the numbers De seems to know. (I also know plenty of straight people who create the images she describes, and plenty more who appreciate them simply because both men and women like looking that way.) But what I don’t get is a direct connection between them and the fight against Section 377. Yes, their use of gay themes raised the issue in India, but very few have been publicly involved in the fight, apart from designer Wendell Rodricks. In general, the elite gay crowd has never been too interested in gay rights, because they had faced no problems, and perhaps feared some would crop up with a more open gay culture.
So who wanted the law to change? The ordinary people who faced real problems. The gay college students who were bullied and called names and saw their names and numbers written in the toilets. Their mothers, who support their resistance to the bullying. There’s the butch lesbian woman who got dirty looks, and sometimes even direct confrontation, when she got into the ladies compartment in the local train. And the hijras who face the same problem, and even worse treatment from the railway police, getting beaten up and even sexually abused, which they don’t dare report, because the law makes them criminals.
Then there are the workers at organisations like Humsafar who have government funding to distribute condoms and spread awareness about AIDS among men who have sex with men – but who are still abused and harassed by policemen as they go for their work in the evenings. Or there are the two women who fell in love in a small town in Punjab, but when their relationship was discovered they had to run for their lives, and now struggle to survive in the big city. Or there’s the gay couple who have been together 30 years, but are afraid that when one of them dies, his family will throw the other out of the property to which they have no joint right. When they tried to buy a flat, their loan application was rejected because their relationship was illegal.
I could put names on every one of these ordinary Mumbai stories and still have more such tales of people whose struggles to cope were made all the more difficult by the knowledge that the law considered criminals. None of them would consider themselves part of Ravi’s elite, yet these are the ones who have organised to fight Section 377, who have contributed from their small earnings for the costs of the case, who have dealt with their fears of exposure to give testimonies that can be quoted in court – and who came out to march last year. This year, it is these people who want to march again, not to shock and titillate the public, though they know that’s how most of the media will treat it. It is these ordinary people who want to march to prove to themselves that they can – and to prove to this city that their stories are this city’s stories too.
As it happens, I think the last time I met De was a couple of years ago at an event that was almost literally a dress rehearsal for these marches. This was a fashion show organised by the queer community at Damodar Hall in the Marathi millworker’s heartland of Parel. Whatever attitudes De might take in her writing, she is always gracious and a good sport in person and she readily agreed to be the judge. With not a single elite gay designer or director in sight, one half of the crowd comprised queer people and their families, while the other half was composed of Damodar Hall’s regular (slightly surprised but appreciative) audience. The show presented glamorously bedecked drag queens and stylish lesbian drag kings, tight T-shirted muscular gay men and one bi woman friend of mine wearing heels, corset and a whip.
De sat appreciatively through it all, and even gave a speech in Marathi at the end. She didn’t tell the participants to hold their enthusiasm then, so I hope she’ll understand when those same people come out to march at the parade. Not in any expectation of immediate or easy change, but with the knowledge that our first steps must be taken, with sequins and style, on Mumbai’s streets.
Vikram Doctor is a co-founder of the Queer Media Collective.
The Queer Azaadi March will start from August Kranti Maidan in Nana Chowk on Sun Aug 16 at 3pm. The march is open to all. See queerazaadi.wordpress.com for updates. The Humsafar Trust is organising a poster-making session on Sun Aug 9 from 2-8pm at the Municipal Transit Building, Fourth Floor, Nehru Road, Vakola, Santa Cruz (E).
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