BackTHE SEX TALK | A slice of queer life
Watch out for the upcoming edition of 'Mint Lounge', which marks the first anniversary of Section 377 through stories you haven't already heard
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On Saturday, Mint Lounge will come out with an edition to mark the first anniversary of the recriminalization of homosexuality. Last year, as you all must know, the Supreme Court of India said that Section 377, which had been read down four years previously by the Delhi high court to not apply to consenting adults, found that applied to everyone, whether straight or gay, consenting or not, adult or not. In doing so, it made the high court verdict redundant.
Many things ensued. Barely a few days after the apex court delivered its judgment, a protest so huge in scale, unfolded in over 38 cities across the globe and India. On 15 December, 2013, people came together in places like Sangli, Imphal and Ahmedabad besides Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai to protest against the verdict. This was probably one of the first instances that the Indian LGBT community found such outspoken and support from people across the globe, from Palestine to California, Helsinki in Finland to Lahore, Pakistan. Several politicians came out in support of the community and spoke against the judgement, too, including the then law minister Kapil Sibal, and Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Even Aam Aadmi Party came out in full support of the LGBT community, and even held a meeting with community members in Mumbai. Rajnath Singh, the then Bharatiya Janata Party president and current Home Minister, however, said that his party wasn’t in support of the community. In the euphoria of support, as thousands proclaimed their sexuality proudly, not many paid heed to Singh’s note of censure. The community’s hope now lies with the parliament to treat this law as it is doing with other, outdated laws, and either get rid of it, or make it amenable to its citizens.
It has been a year since the verdict was delivered on 11 December. In the past year, after the initial months of frenzy of reporting and talking about the issue, you may think that things have died down a bit in mainstream media. You wouldn’t be wrong to think so—what more can be said about the LGBT community and Section 377 that you haven’t already heard?
Quite a lot, actually. The upcoming edition of Mint Lounge on Saturday attempts to offer a slice-of-life look at a few queer Indians and what have they had to face in the past year. Blackmail and extortion (as much by policemen as by goons); violence from family members and intimate partners; emotional abuse and parental torture; forced marriages, marital rape; suicides—aren’t new to the community, but the past year has been witness to much tragedy. Section 377, as you will read, isn’t just a law that punishes a crime. It is itself the source of crime, as it legitimizes an atmosphere of violence. It is part of a constellation of laws that is used routinely to violate the rights of queer people. You will read about draconian state laws like the Karnataka Police Act that requires policemen to keep tabs on the hijra population. Laws like these stem from an institutional distrust of ‘abnormals’, and only augment it further in society.
To separate the strands and say that a law isn’t responsible for all the things that it brings in its wake is to give too little credit where it’s due. Yet, lest we be accused of the same crime, we must credit the Supreme Court judgement for the one thing that it did do—it separated identity from the sexual act. In other words, you couldn’t go to jail for calling yourself gay. For the thousands—perhaps lakhs, who knows?—who came out in the four years since the Delhi High Court decriminalized homosexuality in 2009 and before the Supreme Court recriminalized it, this was the silver lining.
Part of the problem in writing about the ‘LGBT issue’ is that it tends to package the community as an easily consumable whole. In this Saturday’s edition to mark the first anniversary of the verdict we wished to present the intersections. Sexual orientation doesn’t exist in a silo—we are all products of our times, sure, but also of existing social inequalities like class, caste, religion, region, and gender, among other things. To understand what’s going on in the lives of queer people, you’d need to look at each one’s context. The laws, the social mores, cultural opprobrium, but also what their neighbours think, what the policeman on the street looking at them wonders, what friends and family presuppose, what heterosexual couples in a monogamous relationship assume what’s normal. What can be shown to the public, and what can’t. What could possibly be common between a queer transgender activist from the north-east and an upper-class lesbian couple living in a high rise in suburban Mumbai?
Not much, perhaps, but one thing for sure. Both deserve dignity, above all.
A fortnightly blog on gender, sexuality and blindspots
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