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Amrita Rajan
May 2, 2005
“Yaargh!” said Cleopatra as she walked off stage. “She kissed me!”
As the despairing director of our terrible highschool production of Antony and
Cleopatra, I’d perked up the instant Cleopatra’s faithful handmaiden had leaned over the
unconscious form of her mistress after her famous meeting with an asp to sip the poison
from her lips. That one smooch had singlehandedly converted what could only be
described as a stinker into a popular, if not critical, success.
That day I learned two things: 1) homoeroticism sells and 2) teachers don’t like it. And
during the next few weeks, over much banter, I also learnt that in women it generates
much hilarity and lewdness but in men it is unforgivable.
So a few years later, when I met Govind – a young man with a lisp and a bald head, much
addicted to psychedelic sarongs and tieanddye kurtas paired with neon flipflops, all of
which for some reason were enough to fuel rumors of his homosexuality – it didn’t
surprise me to hear the canards being spread about him. He was well aware of them but
being loath to give up his sartorial or social affectations, he instead chose to deal with it
by escorting a series of anorexic supermodels to all the parties.
Which didn’t improve matters any. Instead, the sniggers got progressively more unkind
and soon men were making faces and gagging motions behind his back while their
girlfriends muffled their giggles.
“Why?” I asked.
“Ewww!” was the not very articulate answer.
In some circles, it was apparently infinitely better to be accused of having sex with
various female members of your family or be unflatteringly compared to various denizens
of the animal kingdom, than men who prefer other men and thus must be effeminate
deviants whose perversion just stops short of contagion.
So it was all the more interesting when I came across the term ‘masti’.
“Masti” denotes the homoerotic behavior of men who do not describe themselves as
homosexuals. It is not necessarily penetrative and neither does it fall within the Western
definition of homosexuality wherein two males are ultimately seeking a committed
partner much like heterosexual couples. Masti, a word that literally means mischief, is a
relationship that in most cases does not imply permanence or emotional attachment. It is
not seen as a substitute for a conventional heterosexual relationship leading to marriage
and children. Neither is it limited to a particular geographic location as studies in India
and Pakistan have proved.
Basically, it is a continuation of the subcontinental “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as
regards to all matters sexual. As long as a man does not openly exhibit his bisexuality or
homosexuality, the man is merely up to some mischief… as soon as he “comes out of the
closet”, he is a pervert.
However, Ashok Row Kavi, the man commonly hailed as India’s foremost gay activist,
would like to point out that the diversity of South Asia means that, unlike the West, a
common gay identity that holds true across socioeconomic and language divides is still
in the process of evolution across the region, and men who like to have ‘a bit of masti’ in
their lives refuse to see themselves as part of this process. It is further fractured by other
classifications such as MSM (menwhohavesexwithmen), kothi (penetrated males), etc
peculiar to the region.
But the introduction of Western sensibility into South Asia during the colonial period and
the increasingly urbanized global slant of culture today means that the Western
interpretation of homosexuality is also the best defined and most accepted. Therefore, any
openly homoerotic or even homoaffectionate behavior is considered to be homosexuality
as understood by the West. But on the other hand –
“Have you ever wondered if you might be gay?” I once idly asked my friend, A.
“What?” he yelled, horrified. “Do I look like that?”
This idea of visible sexuality is directly derived, I find, from equating gay men with the
popular subcontinental perception of eunuchs, the one obvious homosexual construct that
does exist for South Asian society in general. Eunuchs and Hermaphrodites in Indian
society occupy a space that fluctuates rapidly between the sacred and the profane. There
are tales of the evil eunuch who steals babies and abducts young men to slice off their
manhood to reinforce a possibly dwindling community. On the other hand, it is
considered opportune if they show up on auspicious occasions such as weddings and
births. On Bombay trains and Delhi traffic intersections, among other places, they
“extort” money from “normal” men by the free use of sexual innuendos and “a threat to
lift up their skirts”.
This same group is also one of the most abused – the police are at liberty to intimidate
and lock them up while their clients (if they are involved in prostitution as many are) all
too often treat them with more contempt and brutality than their female counterparts.
Popular cinema too has a less than kind view to take of them – they are usually the
villains, the perverts and the pimps in Bollywood if not the clowns and play to the worst
stereotypes available.
This hostility towards castrated men with feminine tendencies (although an increasing
number of the modern day “hijras”, as they are called, have their genitals intact) when
combined with the Western construct of homosexuality in which homoerotic or even
homoaffectionate behavior sets a man apart from the marital tradition he has been
brought up to respect, has only magnified latent and illinformed hostilities regarding
homosexuality around the region and especially in the urban, westernized parts of it.
Elsewhere, Javed Akhtar, renowned screenplay writer, poet and movie lyricist recently
took the idea that most men are highly sexed one step further when he remarked that
every man is a dormant rapist. So when this “rapist” is faced with a man who has sex with
other men – a thoroughgoing villain who is out to destroy the very fabric of society by
refusing to knuckle down to the allimportant business of marriage and procreation – does
he instinctively believe that all homosexual men are rapists waiting for a chance to assault
the “decent” and “normal” men of their acquaintance? Or could it be something else?
“How do you explain this hostility?” I asked M, a professor on whom most of us girls had
a tremendous crush that wasn’t dampened in the least by the fact that he was gay.
“Maybe it’s a fear of rejection,” he grinned, tongueincheek. “It’s one thing to be turned
down by women but to find that even the ‘fags’ don’t want you – ouch!”
Interestingly, many men carry their bias against homosexuality into their interactions with
women. Even as to be labeled a “queer” or a “faggot” or a “queen” is deeply offensive to
the male psyche, so they imagine it must be for women to be alluded to as “dykes”,
“lesbos”, etc.
In recent days, even as America debates the rights of gay people and at least one Church
is rocked by the issue of gay clergy, India’s Supreme Court wants the government to
explain exactly why it is illegal for two adults of the same gender to have sex.
“How do you feel about that?” I asked A.
“Yuck,” he said scornfully.
“What do you mean?”
He thought about it for a bit. “Yuck,” he said finally.
I see.