CHENNAI: What does it mean, though, gay bar?” Let me tell you. Some of the best times of my life involved dancing on tables and painting other people’s eyelids in unisex bathrooms and reading my poetry out loud in gay bars, in countries where the right to love and to wholly exist are not guaranteed. Queer allies don’t do a service to queer people by offering their support; we are here because of their generosity and trust. Someone wrote that a massacre like the one at Pulse in Orlando couldn’t happen in India because we have no gay bars, but we do. Some just don’t advertise. Others occur like flash mobs, with seeming spontaneity: a random afternoon when the “Private Event” sign is placed in front of the door, an evening at the end of June when the décor, the music, the drinks are the same, but there are discreet rainbows on the flyer and flagrant ones on people’s bandanas.
Gay bars are not about sex. They’re about safety. They’re about selfhood, community, solidarity and fun. They are not divisive, compulsory, or automatically elitist. They are not (just) about partying and revelry; they are equally about resistance, defiance and speaking truth to power.
And sex with complete strangers? Wait, that’s not gay bars you’re thinking of, but your average heterosexual arranged marriage, in which all of Indian culture’s precious glory is banked (honour, of course, is stockpiled inside female bodies).
In gay bars you will hear the word family. Among those who have been disowned, those who had to create their own tribes, it means “s/he is also queer.” It means people among whom you belong. In the holy month of Ramzan, in the heartfelt month of Pride, on Latin night in a club full of — mainly — young men of ethnic minorities, a hateful person opened fire and committed a massacre.
As I write this, I have deliberately not looked at the lists of names of the dead. What little I stumbled on regardless — one man who texted “I love you mommy” as the gunman drew near, another who helped build a Harry Potter ride in a theme park — undid me. I do not think I knew any of them, but in another way, I know every single one of them, that disparate group of dreams and flaws and ‘kindredships’ and ‘would-never-have-gotten-along-withs’. Most were queer. Many were men. Some had to have been women. (Trans, cis, non-binary, human). Some might have had children. Some must have been allies.Some could have been outed for the first time, in death.
We’re watching Pulse from the outside, we’re watching it in retrospect. You may never have stepped into a gay bar, intentionally, and you may say you never will. “What’s a gay bar, really? What do they do?” you ask again. But you already know. Because if you’ve ever sought love out — filial love, sexual love, companionable love, love that knows you — and if you’ve ever believed it to be a radical force, then you know what the inside of a gay bar looks like. It looks, under any light, just like the inside of your heart, your hope.
(The Chennai-based author writes poetry, fiction and more)