I just saw a TV report about how Dostana is changing lives — one gay man said he came out to his sister after seeing the film, who then asked him if he was gay like John or gay like Abhishek. This was followed by a gay boy’s mother who said she connected with Kirron Kher and that, like her, she has accepted her US-based gay son. I’m sure homosexuality is good seasoning for the 9 pm news, but the film is being touted as a social message film. How far we have come from alternative/parallel cinema that this crap is called socially meaningful?
But the more important point is that the film is allowing identifications that chime with the neoliberal shopper’s desires. This film is making a more ‘positive’ move towards encouraging identification with new, ‘sexy’ social roles: gay boy’s mother, gay boy’s fag hag, and, somewhere, the gay boy himself, the centre of this spectacle, because gay boys love spectacle. But gay identity is reduced to spectacle. When the credits roll, the last shot is of a photograph of the two guys together. It’s that dinky — the flip, static photo that is supposed to tell that whole other story that was never told, and never will be told. Gayness will function as the flip, sexy, static photo: designer gayness.
In the ‘kissing’ scene, the two men are being incited by the girl and the crowd to kiss, after confessing that they are not gay. They even do a comic routine of coming close to a kiss but then recoil, because they are disgusted. The film presents the scenario not in terms of homosexual panic, but in terms of physical disgust: that there is a physical deterrence when two men kiss because their guts recoil at the idea (indeed, even Indian men who have sex with men often make it clear that they will not kiss). This is the level of the film’s homophobia that it relies on disgust as the test for homosexuality (it has borrowed this from Crying Game and Y tu mama tambien). In Crying Game, by the end, the disgust has transformed. In Dostana, it does not and never will.
The two men do end up kissing, but it’s two straight men kissing and it takes a gay person to see the irony of the situation, someone who has yearned for a similar kiss but never received one because he is not straight. Finally, the cosmic irony is that this film is made by ‘gay’ people too cowardly to come out and ostensibly to promote goodwill for gays.
The filmmakers appear to have no idea that homophobia does not simply consist of disgust, but that gay people are actually beaten, slashed and often killed. They are so class-blind that they hope just the cool factor will suddenly make gayness acceptable and fashionable. But who are they kidding? How will this happen if the ultimate frames of the film are deeply homophobic, not to mention the entire length of it, where the men are at great pains to show they are not gay: by hating the idea from the start, by playing ‘gay’ badly and through clichéd ways, by constantly inserting their heterosexuality into the narrative?
The film normalises homophobia through the disgust routine and reduces homosexuality to everything cool about it (in the clichéd, upper-class, popular imagination, largely borrowed from the West) which can be used: shopping, sexual voraciousness, effeminacy, stylishness, the risqué. That’s the shallowness of Dostana and the Indian media want to make it a social message film.
Shad is doing a PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA. He can be contacted at shad.naved@gmail.com