A gay friend phones from Delhi: “I met the most beautiful 30-year-old on the Internet. Things were going wonderfully well in bed but then he said he won’t kiss!”
“Did he say why?” I ask.
“He says he’ll do it only when he feels completely comfortable with me as it is the most intimate act.”
Fellatio, also, is an intimate act, my friend informed him. Most men enjoy being fellated by others, women or men. But they treat the passive gay as a hired help, a prostitute, a trick. Intimacy, this Delhiite figured, grows at the third tricking. The magic third? Why this holding back?
Sex is not only about love. It is also about power. Men call all the shots. Others (gays, girlfriends, prostitutes) will be treated in accordance with the man’s whims and fancies. But, you might sanely protest, there are two men here in a sexual equation. However, one plays the ‘female’, the passive role. Gender roles are imported into gay life from the straights. Refer to the eunuch in the Kama-Sutra section on ‘Fellatio’ (‘Oral Congress’). Gay sex is despised. Even by gays themselves in self-hatred; an internalising and a reflection of societal prejudice.
I know that there is a great romance, a pre-marital ‘bludbruderschaft’ (blood brotherhood) of every Indian boy with another boy, his school or college classmate, next-door neighbour or village buddy. This romance may or may not be gay; one of them or both of them may or may not be homosexuals. The slogan is, ‘Sex is with women; romance is with one’s man-friend’, ie, romance is ideally possible where sex would be normally absent. However, it does not often stay that way.
A boy from the Nizamuddin region told me of his seven-year romance with a similar boy, also like him, a seventh-standard school dropout. They slept together, kissed, saw each other naked and had even hugged each other, but they would not have sex. I encouraged them to have sex. The seven-year friendship ended abruptly. This is the idea of sexual ‘sin’ from Christianity and Islam grafted onto Indian homoerotic lives. I felt sorry, but I, a gay agony-aunt, had destroyed a homoerotic fantasy to set two sexual beings free to lust without guilt. Incidentally, even now they occasionally lust after women — a proof of essential human bisexuality (what the West now calls as ‘Queer’).
Kiss is elevated to a spiritual status while the body is debased. An old friend kisses me on the mouth out of love each time we meet. “We kiss our souls out and away’’, writes Rilke in one of his Duino Elegies.
Primitives once thought that the camera would capture their souls. Fellatio, on the other hand, carries connotations of vampirism (could the hot, new vampire movies that our young flock to have something to do with ‘69-ing’ as a liberated sex-act within the youthful counterculture?).
I remember, in my parents’ days, anything but the missionary position in bed was considered insulting to women, especially to the Bhadra-nari. Those marriages ended up with the husband (or, sometimes even the wife) having an affair, chaste or unchaste, on the sidelines of the marriage; if not an outright divorce.
During the same era (the India of 1940s, 1950s and 1960s) raged the great debate in the Indian film-world: ‘To kiss or not to kiss?’ The reason against it was : ‘Kissing is against Indian tradition’.
‘What about Khajuraho?’ was the riposte. In Tantric sex, just as the temple-shikhara’s (world-mountain’s) sex-carvings shielded the garbhagriha’s (womb’s) emptiness below; so too, the sex-energy properly channelled led to quietitude; to a kind of emptiness, a sainthood via sublimation of sex.
A lover of mine, a rustic fantastic and illiterate, was advised by a semi-literate friend of his, another rural man, never to fully undress a future wife in bed. “Sar par chadh jayegi’ (the wife will start bossing her husband out of bed if she has her way with him in bed) was his explanation. This comes not out of a need for hygiene, nor from a lack of emotion but from a need of control. I told my friend that frustrating his wife could only mean two frustrated lives viz, hers and his.
Almost always, the first question an upper class Indian psychotherapist asks his or her core clientele of so-called ‘mad’ housewives is, “Sukh hai?’’ Do you achieve ‘bliss’ (a codeword for orgasm)?
In such a claustrophobic, verschlossen (ie, closed) culture, it is, of course, hard for urban gays to get their partners to “open up”.
“Opening up” sounds like a woman yielding up her virginity; its prelude being a long courtship. Fellatio is a mere dropping of inhibitions, along with the pants. The last inhibition is the kiss, the exchange of souls.
My advice to passive gays — grow a beard, like me. If your lover kisses you despite it, then you’ve found true love!
— Hoshang Merchant is a poet and writer. He teaches English at the University of Hyderabad.