Swinging sixties [gay liberation in India]

Swinging sixties

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Mumbai/Swinging-sixties/articleshow/4711088.cms

28 Jun 2009
Vikram Doctor

Sunil Gupta probably shouldn't have been there when he first saw
other gay people. He was 14 or 15 years old and in the most notorious
place in Delhi in the late 1960s. This was The Cellar, the first
nightclub started outside a hotel, and Gupta was there as his
sister's chaperone. "I'd be given a Coke and told to sit in a corner
seat," he recalls.

It was while sitting there that he heard people talking. "They said,
did you know that guy there is gay,'' says Gupta. He had heard about
gays from magazines brought by Berkeley students who were paying
guests with his family. "They had gay personals ads, and while the
students weren't gay, I could talk with them about it.'' And now, at
The Cellar, he could put faces (some still well known in Delhi,
though still not out) to that term and realise there were gays living
in Delhi, just as he could be too.

The Pride marches taking place across the world this weekend
commemorate the 40th anniversary of New York's Stonewall riots which
started on June 28, 1969. That night, the police raided a gay bar, a
routine harassment, but this time instead of submitting, people
fought back, kicking off the public struggle for queer rights. Today,
it's easy to forget that the struggle existed here too back in 1969.
And impossible as Pride marches in India would have seemed then, it
was the community's sheer existence at that time that would provide
the soil from which today's movement would spring.

Men and men, women and women, have always been sleeping together in
India, as evidenced in sources like the Khajuraho carvings, Urdu love
poetry and literary references like Ismat Chughtai's Lihaaf. The
criminalisation of such practices, as brought in by the British,
stifled any open growth of the community, yet it continued to exist.
Police reports hint at the persecutions the community faced, yet it
survived, as is shown by literary references, in sources as diverse
as the sensational stories of Ugra (Pandey Bechan Sharma), Paul
Scott's Raj Quartet, and a wonderfully badly written, yet campily fun
novel called The Dew Drop Inn by Leslie de Noronha, who was for years
the theatre critic of Mumbai's Catholic newsletter The Examiner. That
novel paints a picture of a freewheeling gay scene in Bombay and
Delhi in the '60s, but always in private and mostly at parties.

"It was vital to have a place of your own,'' says S., a writer who
came to Delhi in his teens. He remembers a maharajah who had a huge
house in Delhi from where he made full use of his position as the
Indian representative of an international sporting association. "It
was really quite an exploitative scene, that was the unpleasant side
to it,'' says S.

Foreigners were a large part of it. Many had stayed on after the Raj,
usually as agents of foreign firms, enjoying the freedom their status
gave them to lead a gay life they couldn't back home. They also
enjoyed the many Indian men who preferred sleeping with foreigners,
because they saw it as safer than sleeping with other Indians. By the
late '60s though, another younger type of foreigner was being
seen-Peace Corps workers or the first hippies.

Another change of the '60s was the chance it allowed a few young
people to experience gay culture in the West. This was courtesy Air
India which, hard as it is to imagine now, was one of the leading,
most stylish airlines in the world then. Run by worldly bosses like
Bobby Kooka, it attracted many gay and bisexual men (and a few
lesbians as well) to work as aircrew.

Going abroad was still hard for Indians, so for the aircrew it was a
great chance to experience gay life abroad. N., one of them,
remembers how, on one of his first trips to the US, soon after they
checked into a Manhattan hotel, two other gay crew members, who had
figured him out, took him to a bathhouse where gay men met. "They
went off to have fun and left me alone. I was so embarrassed it took
me about three to four visits before I picked up the courage to
approach someone!''

In the years after Stonewall, N. did notice a greater openness in New
York: "Before you'd take the cab to the head of the road the
bathhouse was in, but later on they had no problem dropping you to
the door!'' But no change seemed forthcoming in India. Many of his
gay colleagues got married, arguing that an open gay life in India
was impossible, while others, like a lesbian couple he knew,
emigrated. In Delhi too, S. saw gay IAS officers he knew getting
married; there seemed no other option, and the sex they could always
get on the side.

And yet even then there were a few who resisted. B., an academic in
Bangalore, cites the example of two older friends-a historian and a
businessman-who never came out about their sexuality but never
concealed it either and always remained friendly and supportive, but
not exploitative, of younger gay men. "They really played a mentoring
role to me,'' says B.

In 1990 journalist Ashok Row Kavi started Bombay Dost, India's first
gay magazine. In Delhi, a group of gays and lesbians started meeting
to discuss how to start fighting for gay rights; they called
themselves the Red Rose group because a flower was always kept on the
table to identify it for newcomers.

In time more people would come out, more gay and lesbian books would
be published, Fire would be made, attacked and defended, HIV would
force government to tacitly acknowledge groups representing sexual
minorities. And ultimately, in however unlikely a way, one has
reached a time when both Dostana and Pride marches are possible. It
is a huge change, yet it would not have been possible, here as in New
York 40 years ago, without the gays and lesbians who lived their lives then.

.