Gay Men and Mischievous Boys

“Yaargh!” said Cleopatra as she walked off stage. “She kissed me!”

As the despairing director of our terrible high-school 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 single-handedly 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 tie-and-dye kurtas paired with neon flip-flops, 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 socio-economic 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 (men-who-have-sex-with-men), 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 homo-affectionate 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 homo-erotic or even homo-affectionate behavior sets a man apart from the marital tradition he has been brought up to respect, has only magnified latent and ill-informed 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 thorough-going villain who is out to destroy the very fabric of society by refusing to knuckle down to the all-important 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, tongue-in-cheek. “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.