Gaysia (39 page)

When you've been in India for a month without contracting food poisoning, you become cocky and complacent. You break the rules. You drink water from carafes, order garden salads and start going to the toilet like everyone else: no toilet paper, just water and your left hand. Staying at Srini's place, I would leave my toothbrush on his windowsill and gargle with water from his shower. I did pretty much everything travellers are told not to do. And so it transpired that the night before the QAM pride march, I spent the evening rushing to the toilet every hour, close to tears, leaking what felt like hot soup. It was as if my guts had become a faucet of horror, passionately rejecting something evil inside me.

I didn't sleep. The next morning, the bags under my eyes made me look as if I'd been assaulted. I felt frail and dehydrated, as though I'd been out in the unblinking sun for an entire day without water. Srini was already awake and dressing
for the parade in a grey polo top and bright orange wrap with a rainbow trim.

‘Are you getting into costume?' he asked.

I wondered if a diaper constituted a costume. Already, the day's heat was seeping through the walls and the thought of taking a bumpy rickshaw to the parade made me nauseous. My guts clenched horribly. Avoiding eye contact with Srini like a shame-ridden dog, I rushed to the toilet again and closed the door behind me.

‘Ben?' Srini said through the toilet door. ‘I'm going to order a taxi so we don't have to take a rick.'

‘That's a good idea,' I said through gritted teeth. ‘I'll pay.'

We arrived early, landing at a large public sports oval of red dirt. Teenagers played cricket while bleary-eyed shift workers slept on benches around the gates. Sleep-deprived, I followed the workers' lead, finding a space on a park bench and falling asleep. When I woke an hour later, throngs of people had arrived for the march. Most were local Indians, but there were also men from the United States and England, and women from Australia and Germany. I made friends with a bunch of teenage American exchange students, rude with good looks and youth.

Just past midday, the crowd grew and stretched across the oval until there was barely room to move. Thousands of people had gathered around a stage on the far side of the oval. Middle-aged, middle-class women carried placards that said, ‘I'm Proud of My Gay Son,' while
hijras
arrived in hordes, holding hands and wearing elaborate pots on their heads, decked out in saris of every imaginable colour. People led call-and-response chants in Hindi, carrying banners and flags, and I didn't see one painted face in the crowd. These people didn't care if they were recognised. On the oval, the
hijras
danced the
Karakattam
, a Tamil
Nadu folk dance, shrieking and whooping as an American exchange student joined in and the drumming grew more frenetic. Newspaper photographers, sensing an opportunity to convey the international flavour of this event, pounced on the
hijras
and the American girl as they squealed and laughed.

A car pulled up behind the stage and the Bollywood actress Celina Jaitley got out wearing rainbow fairy wings. Everyone adored Celina, who had fiercely debated on TV for the repeal of Section 377 in the lead-up to the court ruling. I was standing there, awestruck, when I noticed an Indian prince standing to my left.

Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil was a little jetlagged, having just flown back from Chicago after his second appearance on
Oprah
to update her on the progress of gay rights in India. He might've been tired, but he still knew how to make a joke.

‘Hello, Your Highness,' I said, quietly introducing myself.

‘Pleased to meet you, Benjamin,' he said. ‘I am Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil of Rajpipla and I breed hermaphrodites.'

It was his standard introduction. Manvendra might have been provincial royalty, but he also had a degree in farming and bred earthworms professionally. The self-proclaimed only openly gay royal in the world, Manvendra was in his mid forties, had a thin moustache and long manicured fingers. His laugh was adorably muppet-like.

Manvendra's story was as famous in India as it was tragic. When he publicly came out as gay in 2006, people in his home state of Gujarat burned effigies of him in protest. To them, he was an abomination. Gujarat was ruled by the BJP, the Hindu fundamentalist party that in 1996 had burned down cinemas screening
Fire
, a film which matter-of-factly depicted lesbian love. Unsurprisingly, Manvendra's father publicly disowned
him in a statement to the local newspaper.

Still, Manvendra continued living at the palace. By that stage, he didn't talk much to his parents outside formal settings and he was already running his HIV organisation, the Lakshya Trust, and involved in the case against Section 377. He wrote supporting documents for the Naz Foundation's original petition, stating that he was both royal and openly gay, and reciting the history of ingrained homosexuality in traditional Indian culture over centuries. Homosexuality had been rampant in the royal families forever, he told me, and was especially so these days. He'd said so in the court documents.

‘You really used the word “rampant”?' I asked.

‘I can prove it!' he said.

I laughed. ‘Do you know that, or are you just speculating?'

‘We know that for sure. Our gay network is very strong in India! We know who is gay and who is not. There are a
lot
of royals who are gays or lesbians, but they don't talk about it. They're all closeted, we know that for a fact.'

Someone in the crowd bumped into me hard and we were cut off mid-sentence. Turning around, I faced a particularly foul-looking drag queen, pouting at me from underneath her sunglasses as if I'd hurt her feelings. She was shorter than me, a little chubby and her ill-fitting outfit – plush novelty top hat, ridiculously tight red dress – was an assault on the eyes.

‘Excuse me,' I said coolly.

‘Don't you recognise me with my beautiful hair, bitch?' she said.

I peered closer and gasped. ‘Ashok?'

Ashok Row Kavi laughed as he lowered his sunglasses, then gave Manvendra and me each a kiss. A luxurious brunette wig came right down past his shoulders, and he was holding an
A3-sized banner printed by the new gay magazine
Fun
, which was Manvendra's latest enterprise. The banner had the slogan: ‘Better to Be Gay than Grumpy.'

For once, engines were stopped on the main roads leading to Mumbai's coastline, and the honking of ricks and cars ceased as they watched the entertainment. Every queer group from Mumbai and beyond seemed to be there, including the group Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action, who had either the most appalling or inspired acronym of all the groups – I couldn't decide. Trumpets blew in the park as the parade set off, and a giant rainbow flag was passed over the heads of the marchers at the front. The crowd gave a gentle roar as dozens of drummers kicked and punched out a rhythm to accompany us.

A long-haired, wild-eyed lesbian, Sonia, led the parade. During the past week's QAM events, Sonia had displayed a superhuman ability to holler with animalistic enthusiasm from the base of her gut. She had recently broken her legs in a drunken accident, though, so Sonia was wheelchair-bound for the parade. Despite not being able to use her legs, Sonia's face was wild with happiness.

‘ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!' she screamed.

The drums were deafening. The American college students gyrated and sweated alongside the
hijras
under the giant flag.
Hijras
grabbed each other's forearms in a crossed monkey grip, spinning wildly until they were a blur, daring each other to go faster. Parents carried small kids on their shoulders. And on his own, multi-tasking with his mobile phone as he marched, was the lawyer Anand Grover.

As we marched with Manvendra, Ashok explained the significance of the parade's route. The red patch of dirt from which we'd started was the place where Gandhi had issued his
clarion call to the Indian people to fight for independence from the British in 1942.

In the middle of the march, I moved to the edge of things – partly to take photos, but also because I needed a break. On any other day, I would have been enjoying myself. But after the food poisoning, I was dehydrated, sweating and dizzy. Then I heard someone call out.

‘Ben!' he bellowed.

Hovering over me was Srini, the gung-ho QAM volunteer, standing on a cement pedestrian bridge that stretched over the road. Waving back, I climbed the stairs to where he was. Monkey-like, I used my remaining energy to boost myself up onto the railing, dangle my legs over and look down. The drop was possibly fatal, but I felt safe. In the distance, I could see thousands of marchers – not quite the 3500 expected, but close – from all over the world, dancing and stomping to the beat of the drums. Bringing up the back of the parade were the girls from LABIA. The giant rainbow flag was passing right beneath us.

I had never liked the rainbow flag before this. I'd always thought it was a little over the top, retina-searing and too, well,
gay
. It took going to India – where even the poorest and most disenfranchised people dressed in vivid greens and reds, and saris of pinks and golds – for it finally to feel right to me. Watching the flag trail under the bridge, I thought of Harvey Milk's San Francisco of the '60s and '70s, when the jeans were tight and the homosexuals were furious. No one could re-create the Castro Street of that period, but as I watched the men and women dance in Mumbai, I felt what seemed to be a similar energy, the same spirit, the unbeatable optimism that came only after an arduous, bleak stretch of digging upwards, followed
by the daylight of major victory.

My stomach was still cramped from the food poisoning, but sitting on the bridge I felt the illness begin to subside. Behind me was the ocean, the natural port that had always connected Mumbai to the rest of the world. What Mario had told me was right: this was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. It was my first ever march and I had a lot of mixed feelings. Gastro was one of them, sure, but there was something else. We might have been in Mumbai – in India, in Asia – but it felt bigger that that. It was possibly the heat or my illness talking, but in that moment, watching everyone march for a single cause, what I felt was something closely resembling pride.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

M
Y UTMOST GRATITUDE TO
everyone at Black Inc., especially my publisher and prince of an editor Chris Feik, for his unwavering support, faith and guidance. Thank you also to Nikola Lusk, for her killer editorial chops. Without them, this book would be a mess, worse than any Asian squat toilet you could imagine, and I've seen some doozies. Special thanks to my co-conspirator and literary agent Benython Oldfield, not just for being there during my nervous breakdown in a forty-degree Beijing heatwave, but for all the future breakdowns he will inevitably witness.

Researching and writing
Gaysia
was generously supported by the Asialink Writing Residency at Peking University (Beijing, China), the Youkobo Art Space (Tokyo, Japan) and the Varuna Writers' House fellowship (Katoomba, Australia). A hat-tip to my Varuna comrades Anna Goldsworthy (who read early chapter drafts and offered invaluable notes), Linda Jaivin, Shalini Ahkil and, of course, my dear friend Krissy Kneen.

I made heaps of friends writing this book, and I'm especially grateful to Pear Bunsupa and Kristian Dowling (Pattaya, Thailand), Aya Hamashima (Tokyo, Japan), Rachel Ryan (Yangon, Myanmar), Martin Cosier, Jen Clark, Sally Brand, Carl Flanagan, Silvano Zheng, Dinah Gardner and Yusu ‘William' Wang (Beijing, China) and Srini Satya (Mumbai, India) for the stellar company. Back home, I'd like to
apologise
to my friends for my neglect (especially to Meg and Ross, Kate and Roger, Rebecca and Jeremy, Julia and Kalem, and Kirana and Tyrone, whose weddings I missed while writing this book).

Seriously, though, thank you to all my friends, especially my writing buddies. Lorelei Vashti and Michaela McGuire have both been very helpful with advice, because that's the kind of people they are. Fiona Stager and the staff at Avid Reader in Brisbane have been there from the start. And of course, thank you to my honorary wife and best friend Anna Krien, for having my back, keeping my sanity in check and somehow always making the horror seem bearable, even funny.

Thank you to my family – Mum, Dad, Gar-Jer, Gor-Gor, Tammy and Michelle – for, well, basically everything. And to my criminally handsome boyfriend Scott, not just for his patience, support and superb brain, but for not dumping my sorry arse while I was gallivanting around Asia writing this goddamned book, acquiring various repulsive illnesses before returning to him an absolute mess. Researching these stories reminded me I'm one lucky son of a bitch to have him in my life.