I have always lived at the frontiers of sexuality. Between my 20th and 40th years, I travelled outside India in order to gain sexual freedom. I left in 1968, the annus mirabilis. The Age of Aquarius had dawned with the body as an instrument of knowledge. At 20, at Occidental College in Los Angeles, I was introduced to Peyton Place: American suburbia in need of excitement. I dressed like the Pope (in a black Nehru jacket) and oozed sex. Addressing a Lions Club gathering (on India) I was approached by a young blond man in his 30s who wanted ‘to take me home to his wife’. The phrase’s meaning dawned on me years later, so innocent was I (though in a hurry to shed innocence, then considered a burden). But my intuition saved me as did my policy of refusing anyone who makes the first move, be he Svengali or Cupid.
The next threesome was proposed by classmates. Sexuality is in flux in one’s 20s. I thought I was ‘normal’ like everyone else. A girl of Italian descent in my class, a beauty, had spurned my advances. But after she married, she sent her husband to propose a threesome. Was the husband gay? Probably. Then their marriage broke up. My teacher wisely counselled that I “run as fast as I can, without looking back”. Thank god for sage teachers. Sex is funny, unless the joke is on god.
My next introduction to a new world of gender was in Berlin in the late 1970s. ‘Softies’ were men who wore make-up and earrings but were otherwise straight. Shah Rukh Khan’s metrosexual man hit India 20 years too late. (Mahesh Dattani takes credit for coining the term). Please do not take the categories ‘straight/gay’ too seriously.
In Iran, I met a black English teacher who was gay but said he had a child called Kimberley (now dead). My friend was once married. Stranger still, moving to Israel I met an Israeli dancer whose father has helped build the Bhakra Dam and who, as a child, learnt Kathak in Delhi. He loved a Punjabi boy, in his alley. “Yeh toh hamari galli ke Krishna aur Balram hai,” is how the neighbourhood women mythologised their dissident sexuality. A lesbian had approached him to give her a child on condition he give it up later. “But I got attached to the child,” he moaned, when the child’s mother refused him visiting rights. This was in the early Eighties.
Recently, a divorced European woman approached my gay Indian friend in Delhi for a baby. A radical gay of the 21st century, by way of Cambridge, he was most offended: “Don’t these women know we are gay men?” he asked, incredulous. I write in my new book on matriarchy that it is only the need for sex that makes a liberated woman, who does not wish to become lesbian, approach a man. Since these women have done away with the macho man, they approach the gay.
When I was at Purdue, then wisdom said, “A bisexual was only a gay hiding within a straight marriage.” A professor decided to end his marriage and sought me out. I avoided him. Many ended their fake marriages in the Seventies under the impact of the Sixties sexual revolution (which is yet to fully hit India). Their children mostly sympathised; their wives were mostly offended. The professor claimed he was bisexual. Now such people call themselves ‘queer’.
The strangest case was of a friend, a PhD with a tenured job at an American university who christened herself, ‘Thad’. She looked and dressed like a little boy. Everyone thought her lesbian. She denied it. Instead, she fell for elderly ‘reformed’ gay men who anally f****d her, sodomised her with sex toys and gifted her motorised ones to satisfy herself. These were real friendships. She quit her job, learnt Italian, moved to Italy where she curates exhibitions of Italian erotica and, most importantly, nurses her 70-year-old lovers back to health when ill and mourns the occasional death sincerely and pathetically. This is how the brightest mind can work to subvert the taboo of homosexuality. (She was born Jewish but raised Catholic).
At a JNU conference on erotica, I heard a lecture on Japanese manga. Some comics specialise in gay characters. They are written by straight Japanese women who relish the softness of passive gay men as they are repelled by Japanese macho men and their macho porn. Their readership is the large constituency of women who like the male penis but as virgins, fear it. A gay phallus in a comic is no threat to a life-and-blood virgin. I must add that when eager to meet the translator of my last gay book Forbidden Sex/Text, hoping he would be a handsome young Japanese man, I was told the translator could be a woman, most probably, in her 40s.
— Hoshang teaches English at the University of Hyderabad