A Queer Rehearsal: Towards an Indian Gay Image

Situating an Indian gay image has been a central theme for artist and visual activist Sunil Gupta. In this article, I first set up a context for cruising, after which I discuss a specific example of Gupta’s work and its significance to the politics of cruising and AIDS. Until September 2018, homosexual sex was illegal in India under the colonial law, Section 377. However, there are other colonial laws that make cruising punishable and continue to affect underclass men at cruising sites. Yet, some of these other discussions get subsumed within the visibility project without creating spaces where queerness could be freely embraced. That is partly because of the short-sightedness of such projects and because of an exponential theorization of oppressive sociopolitical systems that people in the cruising park might have inhabited. Such theorization takes away the courage, pleasure, and creative ways in which queer people have found their own stylistics of existence. Drawing upon a complex subject formation, Gupta’s practice, this article also illustrates a methodology that could be called “a queer rehearsal.”

As I sat down on a bench in the park, I notice that men are everywhere – they look, they smile, they come, they go, they roam, they stand around, and more importantly they stare endlessly – before they can find their desired match. They all have a large spectrum of masculinities to choose from, a variety of tastes for every palate, colliding into the park on a sultry afternoon. And just as I was catching my breath, after the first glance in the park, it’s then that another man smirked and said, “Huh, first time,” and he stared again. This time more intensely, ambiguously, yet he continued in his quest for intimacies, he could not find elsewhere. “Cruising is not an easy art of looking,” indeed it requires, patience, deliberate pauses, and precise movements – it is a rehearsal, until one becomes perfect in this art.[1] Alas, in this time of endless scrolling in the online dating apps, cruising feels like an ancient art of courtship. But, as someone who grew up in the nineties, when cruising was one of the key technologies to seek intimacies with other men, I can easily be accused of feeling nostalgic for the past and its ways. However, cruising was an integral part of queer-becoming and provided a space where men made their own communities. As queer theorist Leo Bersani suggests, “cruising like sociability, can be a training in impersonal intimacy.”[2]

But the nineties were not the easiest time. On the one hand, economic liberalization had unleashed large-scale migration towards metropolitan cities to foster industrialization; on the other hand, people had witnessed many religious and socio-political upheavals. Amidst all this, HIV/AIDS rapidly gained its foothold across the country. However, it took a long time before the men in the cruising park could access correct public health information, which often consisted of a referral to an NGO or other health services. Although, in a neoliberal regime, some NGO sites began to function as, or rather became, fenced-up dwellings in which all social and sexual anxieties were contained. People, who frequently visited these sites were unwittingly transformed into a perfect constituency for HIV/AIDS governance, and for human rights campaigners. They were shown hope of freedom and equal society, even if they could never access the fundamental right to privacy, and freedom always existed somewhere in the distant future. The only rewards for such disfranchised groups of people are that, in the end, a sense of community – the we – is conjured up. But Susan Sontag has warned that “no ‘we’ should be taken for granted,” advising us to consider such consolidatory forms of identity with ethical principles.[3] Sontag also describes as an inevitable phenomenon the fact that “the illness fleshes out an identity that might have remained hidden from neighbors, job mates, family, friends. It also confirms an identity… the risk group […].”[4]

The nineties was also the time when I found myself becoming a foot soldier in an HIV/AIDS prevention campaign. However, “it was a strange war: literally and metaphorically, the battlefield was our body.”[5] And the war metaphor was used by many authors, but more relevant to my conversation is anthropologist Lawrence Cohen’s analysis. He used it to describe the invention of a biopolitical category, as testified by the title of his poignant essay, “The Kothi Wars.”[6] Through mass campaigns, people were made to believe that knowledge is the only weapon to protect themselves. And yet, I lost many friends in this battle despite having all the knowledge – or what we thought was the correct knowledge. In fact, my friends were the ones who were religiously offering this information to others. Years later, I became aware of the fact that this form of humanitarian work was already termed the “AIDS service industry” by sociologist Cindy Patton, due to the massive scale of its impact and response worldwide.[7] Nonetheless, while sitting at the bench in a cruising park in Delhi, it was hard to imagine the industrial scale of our work. And I was also unable to have an understanding of the virus itself and what it was doing because of the way in which knowledge was produced and distributed.

Self-inflicted shame and stigma around sex and sexuality led to discrimination, consequently AIDS did not emerge as a “gay disease” in India, as it did in the West. In fact, an early citizen’s report by AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) states that “gay people in India have, so far, and for the most part, escaped the kind of scapegoating for AIDS that gay men and lesbians in some other countries have been subjected to.”[8] Moreover, AIDS prevention programs that began mitigating its impact had to adopt a universal language such as the term MSM. It was coined because there was a large population outside the gay-straight binary that needed to be targeted. Therefore, such programs were reluctant to use terminology such as LGBT or gay, or at least it was not spoken in the same sense as it would have been in the West.[9] This reluctance divided queers and those who might be called subaltern queers into two separate groups. However, in fact for a long time, the middle-classes were in denial; therefore, they too, were deprived of representation, as it was noted by the artist Sunil Gupta in his photographic work Exiles.[10]

Humayun’s Tomb, 1987. From the series Exiles. Courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Vadehra Art Gallery. © Sunil Gupta, all rights reserved, DACS 2021.

One doesn’t need to know every possible thing written to understand the disparities in cultural representation of queer people and to recognize the archival holes of queer desire in India, yet it takes a lifetime of work to carve a gay image. In 1982, following his quest to find an Indian gay image, Gupta returned to his beloved city Delhi from London after being part of the Gay Liberation Movement in Montreal and spending time in proceeding years in the post–Stonewall New York. As an art student in the UK, he witnessed “the absence of an Indian gay image.” These experiences fueled Gupta’s unsettling desire to situate an “Indian” identity within a visual discourse that led him to conceptualize a photographic project called Exiles, about a subject who was in a self-imposed exile.[11] It emerged as the result of a series of conversations among friends and partly from his own experiences of the city. Gupta located this series at various cruising sites which also happened to be historical monuments. Gupta captures these monuments – the silent witnesses of history, across time and regimes of power and changing attitudes towards same-sex love. These sites used to be the cruising grounds for men who seek affection and love without the prejudices of the world and the rules of colonialism that disallow them to express their desires.

Exiles, art historian Natasha Bissonauth writes, “is not a documentary of gay Indians per se, but a parody of documentary – a staged series that deploys artifice in order to communicate the genre’s limitations, in this case around capturing censored gay publics.”[12] And by staging this, Gupta also names an unnamed queer desire of finding one’s belonging, one’s own kind, by a mere chance meeting. This project, commissioned by The Photographers’ Gallery (London 1986), visualized the experiences of gay men in the city through constructed scenarios at these cruising places, with a quote from conversations at the bottom of each image. It was a methodological choice for him; the quotation gives a voice, as it were, to the people we see in the photographs, where rather than being the passive subject of the camera, they participate in a dialog with the viewer. The identity of all the models was protected. This was a crucial strategy for Gupta to make sure that they all remained anonymous in this constructed but playful documentary project. One of the images was of Humayun’s Tomb in which a man is standing in the foreground, looking away from the camera. The man in the foreground appears to be gazing at another man who is approaching him from a slight distance. While, this image is perhaps a depiction of the popular Bollywood song, Chalte-Chalte Yunhi Koi Mil Gaya Tha, it also appears to be an homage to the iconic work, entitled Chance Meeting (1970), that was created by photographer Duane Michals, both of which are highly suggestive of the act of cruising and queer desires. [13] However, Gupta amplifies the tension of this moment by inserting a quote from people he met. The text below reads, “Americans – talking about AIDS and distributing condoms. Nobody believes them. They’re always telling us what to do.”[14]

In this discussion, I have chosen this specific example of Gupta’s artwork for a few reasons. Firstly, to situate my own quest for visual representation of queer men outside the canon of Western art, but in this case it also means a quest for an image outside the NGO world. Secondly, for Gupta’s strategic use of text to include the voices of the subjects. This particular work shows that middle class gay men were still in denial that AIDS existed in India; some resentfully blamed the West. The quote also reflects certain attitudes even amongst the activist community, as noted in the ABVA report. This example of Gupta’s work names the two crucial aspects of my discussion around the representation of cruising and AIDS, but also situates this denial of HIV into a historical framework. In a recent conversation while talking about this series of photographs, Gupta reflected upon his ethical stance on the problematics of documentaries that deal with vulnerable populations. As a practitioner he believed that one has the responsibility to protect the subject’s right to confidentiality. Therefore, Gupta’s practice highlights friendship and collaboration as modes of making and inventing life, as it were. “[…] We did not arrive at the ‘picture’ but come together with an intention to invent a gay image” Gupta emphasizes, and while foregrounding his need to invent, he says, “we walked into this documentary space” to disrupt the silence and to assert our presence.[15]

In relation to the perpetual absence of a queer subject of desire in the context of HIV/AIDS, where desires have always been pathologized, and the need to belong almost becomes a curse for the men in the park. These photographs reveal and create a space for these desires to exist. However, men in the cruising park remain anonymous, and still in many cases are deprived of a social presence. Therefore, my intention here is to draw attention to the purposefully placed quotes underneath the images, where in its mundane, everyday lives emerge. The subjects of desire who also have other material realities such as illness, law, liabilities, and heterosexual marriage, and the next of kin in his photographs. And, so “[…] though an obscure corner of culture at the time served as a rehearsal for the seismic shift in culture,” globally but more importantly in the context of India, Gupta’s photographs began to question the representations of gay men in the cultural context.[16] Returning to the nineties, while sitting on a park bench, I would never have imagined that the meanderings in a park would become a cultural reference for future generations. Gupta managed to name a desire through his images that resonates for a population of men who continue to seek their belongings in those spaces – it offers all those anonymous men at the cruising park a certain form of intellectual visibility, a testament of Gupta’s relentless queer rehearsal.

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Endnotes

[1] Nicholas de Villiers, (2007), Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking, https://brightlightsfilm.com/glancing-cruising-staring-queer-ways-looking/#.YT_KwC1Q1QI (Last accessed on 19^.Nov.2021.)

[2] Leo Bersani, (2009), Is the Rectum a Grave, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 60.

[3] Susan Sontag, (2004), Regarding the Pain of Others, (London: Penguin Books), 6.

[4] Susan Sontag (1989), AIDS and Its Metaphors, (New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux), 25.

[5] Cindy Patton (1989), Power and the Condition of Silence, Critical Quarterly, Vol 31, issue 3, 26-39.

[6] Lawrence Cohen (2005) The Kothi Wars: AIDS Cosmopolitanism and the Morality of Classification, in ‘Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective’, ed. Vincanne Adams & Stacy leigh Pigg, Duke University Press, Durham & London.

[7] Cindy Patton (1991), Inventing AIDS, Routledge, New York.

[8] As it was noted in a report compiled by ABVA an activist group led by Siddharth Gautam & et al, (1991), Less than Gay: A Citizen’s Report on the Status of Homosexuality in India, 63.

[9] Both Cohen and Puri discuss the binarism between ‘indigenous’ and ‘elite’ activism in relation to HIV prevention. Very limited literature on gay liberation and sexuality was available to non-English Kothi. See Cohen (2005), Kothi Wars; also, see: Puri (2016), Sexual States.

[10] Sunil Gupta (1987), Exiles, Ten.8, (Birmingham). See: sunilgupta.net/exiles.html (Last accessed 19th November 2021).

[11] Exiles (1986/87) began as a photographic series at almost the same time as Suniti Solomon discovered the first few cases among the female sex workers in the south of India, also when authorities believed that no such gay community existed in India.

[12] Natasha Bissonauth (2019), A Camping of Orientalism in Sunil Gupta’s Sun City, Art Journal, 78:4, 98-117, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2019.1684112.

[13] “Chalte-Chalte Yuhin Koi Mil Gaya Tha” (While Walking, I Met Someone by Chance). Pakeezah, (1972), dir. Kamal Amrohi, India.

[14] Sunil Gupta (1987), “Humayun’s Tomb” from the series “Exiles”, published in Ten.8, Birmingham, UK.

[15] The Living Room Series – A Conversation: Call Me By Your Name (2021), Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi. A conversation held online on 14th August 2021.

[16] Chris Boots (2021), From Here to Eternity, Aperture, The Photobook Review Issue 019, Fall 2021.

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