Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India (46 page)

Others, like Yudhisthir were fearful of the future—

RIGHT NOW IT DOES LOOK A LITTLE DEPRESSING. I AM 30, I HAVEN’T

HAD A RELATIONSHIP AND I DON’T KNOW IF I WILL EVER HAVE ONE.

I AM LOOKING AHEAD TO 30 YEARS OF LIVING ALONE. IT LOOKS SCARY

SO I TRY NOT TO THINK ABOUT IT. PARENTS—WHEN YOU COME OUT

TO THEM, AFTER THEY HAVE GOTTEN OVER YOU BEING GAY AND THEM

NOT HAVING GRANDCHILDREN AND STUFF… THE ONE THING THEY

ARE CONCERNED ABOUT IS—HOW WILL YOU MANAGE WHEN YOU ARE

ALONE? THAT’S A BRIDGE I WILL CROSS WHEN I COME TO IT. THAT IS

TOO SCARY FOR ME. WHEN YOU READ ABOUT PEOPLE WHO LIVE ALONE

AND ARE KILLED AND STUFF… I DON’T WANT TO GO THERE NOW.

NOTES

1. Jeremy Seabrook,
Love in a different climate: Men Who have Sex with Men in India
(New York/London: Verso, 1999), p. 50.

2. Barry Adam, ‘Love and Sex in Constructing Identity Among Men Who have Sex with Men’,
International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies
(Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), Vol. 5(4), p. 322.

3. This phrase is the title of Ashok Row Kavi’s essay ‘Contract of Silence in Hoshang Merchant’s,
Yaarana: Gay Writing from India
(New Delhi: Penguin India, 1999).

4. Douglas Sanders, ‘Flying the Rainbow Flag in Asia’, Conference Paper—Second International Conference on Sexualities, Masculinities and Cultures in South Asia Bangalore, India, 9–12 June (2004), p. 7.

5. Hinduism is the predominant religion in India. According to the 2001 census, about 83 per cent of the population identified as ‘Hindu’. The latest Indian census facts and figures may be viewed on the world wide web—http://www.censusindia.net/

6. Devdutt Pattanaik,
The Man Who was a Woman and Other Queer Tales from Hindu Lore
(New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002), pp. 5–8.

7. Maria Bakardjieva,
‘Virtual Togetherness: An Everyday-life Perspective
’,
from
Media,
Culture & Society
(Sage Publications, 2003), Vol. 25(3), p. 291. Bakardjieva reverses Raymond Williams’ 1974 concept of ‘mobile privatization’; her term ‘immobile socialization’ denotes the ‘socialization of private experience through the invention of new forms of intersubjectivity and social organization online’.

8. David Woolwine, ‘Community in Gay Male Experience and Discourse’,
Journal of
Homosexuality
(New York: Haworth Press, 2000),
Vol. 38(4), p. 21.

Straight Expectations
269

9. Peggy Wireman,
Urban Neighborhoods, Networks, and Families: New Forms for Old Values
(Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1984); cited in Barry Wellman and M. Gulia ‘Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities’, in Mark Smith and Peter Kollock (Eds),
Communities in Cyberspace
(London; New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 176.

10. Barry Wellman and M. Gulia, ‘Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities’, in Smith and Kollock (Eds), op. cit., p. 181.

11. N. Charles and A. Davies, ‘Contested Communities: The Refuge Movement and Cultural Identities in Wales’,
Sociological Review
(Blackwell Publishing, 1997), No. 45, pp. 416–436; as cited in Mihaela Kelemen and Warren Smith, ‘Community and its Virtual Promises: A Critique of Cyberlibertarian Rhetoric’,
Information, Community and
Society
(Taylor and Francis [Routledge], 2001), Vol. 4(3), p. 374.

12. David Woolwine, op. cit., p. 21.

13. ‘Weak ties are more apt than strong ties to link people with different social characteristics. Such weak ties are also a better means than strong ties of maintaining contact with other social circles’. M. Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’,
American
Journal of Sociology
(University of Chicago, 1973), 78(6), pp. 1360–1380; referred to in Wellman and Gulia, op. cit., p. 176.

14. David Woolwine, op. cit., p. 30.

15. See Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,’ in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (Eds),
Global Modernities
(London: Sage Publications, 1995), pp. 25–44.

16. Wellman and Gulia, in Smith and Kollock, op. cit., p. 187.

17.
Holi
and
Raksha Bandhan
are Hindu festivals and national holidays in India.
Iftaar
is the daily fast breaking meal performed during the holy month of Ramadan in the Islamic calendar.

18. See Sally Munt, Elizabeth H. Bassett and Kate O’Riordan,
‘
Virtually Belonging: Risk, Connectivity, and Coming Out On-Line’,
International Journal of Sexuality and Gender
Studies
(Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Vol. 7 (2,3), p. 127, for an overview.

19. Anthony Giddens (1991),
Modernity and Self- Identity, Self and Society in the Late Modern
Age,
Cambridge (Polity Press), p. 54 quoted in David Gauntlett,
Media, Gender and
Identity: An Introduction
(London/New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 99.

20. See Munt, Bassett and O’Riordan, op. cit., p. 128, for an overview.

21. Judith Donath, ‘Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community’, in Smith and Kollock (Eds), op. cit., p. 53.

22. Ibid, pp. 30–31.

23. Ibid, p. 44.

24. See Ketan Tanna, ‘Bombay Gays’ Night Out—New Year’s Eve Parties’,
The Hindustan
Times
, 31 December 2003. http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/919_514378, 001800010001.htm

25. Jeremy Seabrook,
Love in a Different Climate: Men Who have Sex with Men in India
(New York/

London: Verso, 1999), p. 75.

26. Read ‘GayBombay’,
Salon.com
(2 December 2002), where the writer Sandip Roy speculates whether the Internet keeps ‘gay men from really coming out’ and instead, puts them ‘in a giant virtual closet’. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/12/02/

gay_india/print.html

270
Gay

Bombay

27. David Woolwine, op. cit., pp. 16–17.

28. Source—Email posting to the Gay Bombay Yahoo! Group ‘Hep B inoculation meet so many pricks’ dated 27 June 2006.

In this post, Vikram describes how a medical type of event becomes into a party.

‘Boyfriends would hold their partners hands as they got inoculated, much to the amusement or envy of everyone else there. Then people started forming circles and when the guy at the centre got his dose, everyone around him would scream—so that he didn’t have to!’

29. Message to the Gay Bombay newsgroup ‘Announcing the GB Poz Forum’ posted by vgd67 on 29 July 2007.

30. For example, Kavi’s post on 3 August 2006 on the Lbgt-India Yahoo! Group (‘Re: 5th GayBombay Parents and Relatives Meet—A Report’) where he states that ‘what GB is doing is great and absolutely worthy of every support.’

6

Conclusion: Disco
Jalebi

Observations, Concerns, Hopes

Often truth is neither this nor that. Or rather it is a bit of both—this and that. The truth can rest on the threshold, in the twilight, somewhere in the middle, between contradictions, slipping in as a possibility between two realities….1 (Devdutt Pattnaik, 2002)

This chapter covers my analysis of how Gay Bombay came about, what being gay means to its members and how they negotiate locality and globalization, their sense of identity as well as a feeling of community within its online or offline world. My conclusion aims at a compromise between the need to make a fully knitted closure—weaving all my threads together in a giant sweep—and the realities of ambivalence and the futility of drawing any definite end results from such a poly-vocal endeavour. My compromise, just like the rest of the work, is a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

WHO AM I?

Friend cosmopolitan grandson top shopaholic son boss gay teacher brother
versatile male Hindu Bombayite student entrepreneur advisor Indian TV

junkie gossip shy homo ingénue researcher foodie catalyst Bollywood fan
scholar corporate fashionista NRI…oh, fuck it! How do they expect me
to compress my identity into a little Friendster box that says ‘About Me’?

I write—‘I’m fun loving, trusting, sensitive, high-spirited, curious, zany and
passionate. I love meeting new people with interests and passions different
from mine. I enjoy hugs, languid afternoons in bookstores, picnics by the river,
love stories with happy endings, orange sunsets, railway stations, Pringles
272
Gay

Bombay

Sour Cream and Onion, chicken
a la Kiev
, the colour red,
Acqua Di Parma
,
masala tea, oxidized silver, sunshine… I believe in both eternity and transience’ and stop. It seems so put on and incomplete. Is this really the way
to meet Mr Right?

I am a time traveller slithering in and out of many skins, crossing time
zones into different Bombay worlds every day. Shop, shop shop. This could
be New York or Paris. Except that couture doesn’t cost you an arm and a
leg (Oh dah-ling…I just made a pair of fah-bu-lous gold raw silk pants from
my tailor…. You’ll never believe how good they look!) and you can have
Pepsi and
lassi
next to each other. Broadband Internet and cheap servants.

International cable and local mafia. Expensive Martinis and 40 different
types of coffees. Tall buildings right next to slums. Fucking outstanding
street
chaat
on hellish post apocalyptic streetscapes. Twisted metal forms
melting into stinking garbage mounts amidst an ever-pervasive stench surrounding another gelato parlour franchise. Party all night and while coming
out avoid the accusing eyes of beggar children, who’re waiting, with grimy
hand outstretched, be careful not to stumble over the bodies sleeping on
the city’s streets. Unlike other cities, Bombay doesn’t hide its poverty and
its misery faraway; these co-exist right next to its opulence.

Ha! It all sounds so fucking clichéd, that it’s laughable. (Like one of those
desi
writers who exoticize India and make fat sums of money writing for
the West and then jealous journalists back home enjoy ripping them apart
to shreds while secretly wishing that it would have been them, but their
manuscript came back, rejected, so sad…what to do…we are like this only,
par
aakhir dil hai Hindustani, baba
!) But these are also my clichés and
I’m sorry that they’re so pathetically lame but really, what to do, man…

I am always reflexive in India. I mean, how can you not,
na
—when the
entire world and their country cousins come to India for their Karma Cola®

spirituality fix and dump their angsty shit on it—why the fuck shouldn’t
I, you know? I belong here after all. Yes? I
belong
here. Right?

I am Bombay.
Pukka,
100 per cent (guaranteed, otherwise free exchange,
boss
—tension kaikoo leney ka
?) I belong to Colaba and Churchgate and
Bandra and Lokhandwala in a way I have never belonged to Cambridge or
Manama or anywhere else I have lived. I am a kitsch Krishna poster on the
street outside the Prince of Wales museum. I am the frenzy of Oval maidan
Conclusion
273

cricket. I am the fury of Ganpati at Chowpatty. I am soft
Holi gulal
smeared
on a wet forehead. I am a crunchy
papad
in a Chinese restaurant. I am
Irish coffee at Prithvi theatre. I am the first edition of
Mid-day
, read from
back to front. I am a game of
Antakshri
played on a six hour bus ride back
home from a picnic. I am the indignation and exuberance of Shilpa Shetty on
Big Brother
. I am a pink feather boa draped Hema Malini, slowly descending
in a basket, from the sky singing
‘Mere Naseeb Mein’
.

I am a bright orange disco
jalebi
, hot and soft and syrupy, eaten after dancing for three hours non-stop at a Gay Bombay dance party, with random
strangers who’ve suddenly become my new best friends. I climb back into the
basket and rise high above the heat and noise in my circular
jalebi
pattern
that makes me dizzy…. From far above, this seems to be any group of gay
men dancing anywhere in the world. Same dance floor layout. Same crystal
ball. Same strobe lights. Same DJ booth, same smoke, same everything,
yaar
. Except that I can hear the faint strains of ‘
Hai Re Hai Tera Ghungta’

playing, and I have a sweet aftertaste in my mouth. And this feels like
home in a way no other place in the world does. Another night, another
place.
Sholay
party, New York. Same brown gay men. Same Bollywood
music. Same heat. Inexplicably different.

I am gay Bombay. I am straight acting gay Bombay. I am straight acting
and hating it gay Bombay. I am straight acting and enjoying my straight
acting life gay Bombay. I am I wish I could change but I can’t gay Bombay.

I am I change a little bit every day gay Bombay. Perhaps I am a coconut.

Brown outside, white inside. (But not white white. Brown white. But brown
is the new white, didn’t you know… India shining, India poised and all
that? Not the new black? So confusing. Not really. It’s simple—repeat after
me—same, only different. Same, only different!) I am a spice. (
‘Namaste!’

Ka-ching. Same only different). Exoticize! It’s an order. No, subvert, subvert,
you’re a subaltern who speaks, no? Subsume. Subvert. Subjugate.
Subkuch.

Follow? Yessir. Sameonlydifferent.

I float high above…now everything is a speck. I am a cloud, evaporating
in Bombay’s sweltering heat… I can feel the monsoon pouring out from
within my skin…I am feeling alive and full and soon, I will burst open…but
till then, I am pregnant with infinite possibilities… I want to float, float,
float…float away. Happily ever after.