Two queens and a prince
14 Oct 2007, 0047 hrs IST,Vikram Doctor,TNN
PHOTO
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Review/Two_queens_and_a_prince/articleshow/2456333.cms

A Pakistani drag queen at Lakme Fashion Week. A transgender fronting a Tamil TV show. A gay prince from Gujarat who will be appearing on Oprah to talk about his work for gays and lesbians. These are just some of the stories on alternative sexualities that made it to Indian newspapers in the last week. A foreigner might conclude that this was one country where being gay was not an issue.

It isn't just newspapers. Switch on the TV set and you could easily find a show discussing alternative sexuality. One Hindi channel in particular has a fetish for it, talking about lesbian relationships, married gay men, male sex workers, and even a show on homosexual horoscopes that must be one of the most bizarre things ever broadcast (unexpectedly it turned out gay supportive, since the astrologers all agreed that being gay might not be good, but if it was in your stars there was nothing you could do about it!)

If its not news channels it could be entertainment where Koffee With Karan was replete with gay insider jokes, or film channels where Brokeback Mountain recently aired. And as for Bollywood, it seems like a gay reference is almost obligatory today. Its not just more sophisticated films like Honeymoon Travels Private Ltd. (two gay subplots), Ek Chalis Ka Last Local (a gay don) or Life in a .. Metro (Konkana Sen Sharma reprises her Page 3 role as the girl who finds her boyfriend with another man). Even entirely masala films now have a gay character, like Om Puri's bisexual sadhu in Buddha Mar Gaya or a gay colleague of Preity Zinta's in Jhoom Barabar Jhoom who lusts after Bobby Deol. In Marigold there's a line where Salman Khan's disapproving dad meet's Ali Larter's boyfriend and asks if he's Salman's!

It might seem like a rocking time to be gay in India if it wasn't for two small facts. The first is that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which is used to criminalise homosexuality is still firmly on the books. And second, with a few honourable exceptions like Honeymoon Travels, all these gay or bisexual references—there are curiously few lesbian ones—are presented in mocking or sensationalist ways. Even when an attempt at fairness is made, there's little further attempt to give the gay characters any real depth. "You're gay... And its allright, gay or straight, its your life. But you don't have the right to spoil someone else's life," Konkana yells at her ex-boyfriend in Metro, and who could disagree? But beyond this, the boyfriend's story is one life in a metro that the film does not want to dwell upon.

Just one year back things looked different. The action taken by Vikram Seth, Swami Agnivesh and other activists to write to the Indian government asking it to amend S.377, and the powerful letter written by Amartya Sen in support had received wide publicity. Two films, Sridhar Rangayan's Yours Emotionally and Amol Palekar's Quest (Thaang in Marathi) had taken a serious look at homosexuality and relationships in India. One year before Onir's My Brother Nikhil had become the first mainstream Bollywood film with a central gay relationship to receive commercial release and critical applause.

Rangayan does have a new film out—68 Pages, with a gay relationship in one plot strand, and a transgender sex worker in another. But the film's theme is HIV, not homosexuality, and until this strikes the gay couple is shown leading a remarkably trouble-free life. Which could suggest one positive interpretation of this sudden spurt in gay stories. In certain sections of society acceptance of being gay no longer seems an issue, so they're free to move beyond, either to dealing with the few issues like HIV that might affect these otherwise well assimilated gay people, or one can treat being gay as just another excuse for a joke. Rangayan, who's always been open about his sexuality falls in the first category, the gender bantering jokers of Koffee With Karan in the second.

Both options are fine, perhaps even the future, but for now the reality is rather different. The fact is that S.377, far from being the irrelevancy that some imagine, is still a potent force either directly, in low-profile cases that don't get reported, or indirectly, as the empowering force for blackmailers who make good money from the miseries of gay men, or for families who use its endorsement of homosexuality as unnatural to force gays and lesbians—and their unknowing wives and husbands—into mockeries of married life. And for every good natured joke that Karan's friends crack, there's the spite and scorn of the likes of Madhur Bhandarkar, who seems to be fabricating a fiesta of homophobia with his upcoming film Fashion (being sold as based on the rivalry of two male designers over a male model).

In this context the near absence of lesbian issues is telling. It's easy to mock men, effeminate ones above all, but women gets you into difficult territory. So while there must be many men longing for yet another sleazy Girlfriend, for now it seems safer to keep off. Perhaps this is just a phase, as a nervous nation deals with changing values by mocking or making light of them. But it can only be hoped that we grow up soon, and retain this level of coverage of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, but more evenly spread out and more seriously and sincerely expressed
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Review/Two_queens_and_a_prince/articleshow/2456333.cms

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Man [...] must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." (Jean Paul Sartre, 1943)