”Gay India”?

Terry Goldie

English Department,

York university, Toronto, Canada

This paper is not so much about India as it is about certain paradigms of male to male sexuality. The contemporary view of sexual diversities is implied in the call for papers for this conference: traditional sexualities and alternative sexual identities are disappearing or transforming as a result of the diffusion of modern western sexual identity constructions and the emergence of global gay and lesbian subcultures modeled on North American and European cultural models. It can be argued that a queer globalization has taken place.

The very word “queer” suggests a world beyond modernity, something rather postmodern, which has not just “taken place” but rather “taken the place” of traditional sexualities. Cindy Patton has a warlike view of queer: “‘Queer,’ if it is to have any utility, is best understood, not as a model of identity and practice that can be imitated or molded to a local setting, but as evidence of a kind of unstoppable alterity that flies, like a stealth bomber, beneath the annihilating screen of nation.”(210) The title of this conference goes still further to see these distinctions in terms of a battling binary. “Traditional sexualities and western sexual identity constructions” constitute two “competing diversities” feuding to be the supreme alternative to heterosexuality. 

Throughout the world, activists are looking back to precolonial sexualities to identify indigenous possibilities, as in the photograph of the Zuni We’Wha on the conference poster. Many ethnographic texts attest to earlier forms of male-male love. The obvious Indian examples are the erotic sculptures on temples and in prints and drawings but also stories from various sources.

Some depict mythological couplings. In both Hindu and Muslim contexts the relations often follow what might be called the catamite model, with a noble or superior person enjoying a boy, a eunuch or a servant. Another model is provided by the hijras. Are they a traditional communal culture of homosexual transvestites? Are they transsexual prostitutes? Or are they?

The opposite is that referred to by the conference organizers as “North American and European cultural models.” Large cities tend to have a bar or two that service a gay crowd. The social dynamics are similar to the west: young men preen on the dance floor and older men leer from the corner. The former have the latest fashions and the latter have the money. There is also a more above-ground gay culture, in such forms as the magazine, Bombay Dost, now apparently defunct, various gay websites, and the Queer Studies Centre at the University of Pune.

There is a third alternative, however. Raj Rao’s recent novel, The Boyfriend, published by Penguin India, has been acclaimed as a major “coming out” for gay India. It depicts an  urban male sexuality that has a limited relationship to the western gay ideal or to those sexual diversities so popular with anthropologists and historians. Contemporary western cultures see some people as homosexuals and others as situationally homosexual, as in prisons.  I would instead refer to “opportunistic” homosexuality. 

This responds to the individual’s degree of same sex attraction, sex drive and. the situation which presents. While homosexual acts remain illegal in India, opportunistic male-male sex has been tacitly accepted as “masti” or play, a form that does not necessarily disrupt the essence of Indian society, which is heterosexual marriage.

This paper will pay brief attention to the “traditional” forms of  Indian sexual diversity, as depicted in studies such as Rakesh Ratti’s A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience, Ruth Vanita’s Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society and Serena Nanda’s Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India, but will emphasize the type of sexuality depicted in  The Boyfriend and  a few sociological studies, such as those by Shivananda Khan. It will compare these to studies from western gay culture about stranger sex, such as Gary Dowsett’s Practicing Desire: Homosexual Sex in the Era of AIDS and William L. Leap’s collection, Public Sex/Gay Space. I will also consider attempts to produce an Indianized gay culture, exemplified by a “Hindu” gay wedding I attended in Bombay and Bombay Dost’s opposition to closeted homosexuals in heterosexual marriages.

Abstracts

Información en español: Diversidades en Competencia: Sexualidades Tradicionales y las  Construcciones Modernas de Identidad Sexual de Occidente,

Sede: Centro Médico Nacional Siglo XXI, 

Ciudad de México, Junio 1° – 5 de 2005