Gay Cruising in Modis India

The art of the pickup in New Delhi, where homosexuality is illegal,

Grindr is growing, and policemen are waiting just around the corner.

BY ISAAC STONE FISH-FEBRUARY 6, 2015

NEW DELHI Observing gay cruising in India felt like high-stakes
bird-watching the fluttering of something delicate and intense. On
a Sunday night in mid-December, I visited Nehru Park with a gay
rights activist; he agreed to accompany me but asked to remain
nameless, in part because homosexuality is illegal in India.

The 85-acre park, in a wealthy area of the capital that hosts most of its
embassies, was poorly lit, rambling, and quiet. The travel website Cruising
Gays called the park, which is named after Indias first prime minister, the
grand dame of New Delhis cruising places. On Sunday evenings, the
gardens are rocking with over a hundred men hanging around, waiting,
looking and just checking out the scene, claimed an undated post on the
site. If you are a novice and looking to meet other men, this is the place
you should start with. The technique, the activist told me, was simple.
Stroll, keeping your head up, and make eye contact with men who walk by.
If someone catches your eye and smiles, walk up and say hello.
The park was nearly empty. The activist pointed out one man and we
walked behind him stealthily, but he disappeared into the darkness. We
spotted another, ambling through a path about 40 feet away from us.
Twenty-five million people live in the Indian capital its the worlds
second-largest city but all I could hear were our footsteps, illuminated by
the light on my iPhone, and my overactive breath. As we neared, preparing
to say hello, I noticed the man was wearing a jaunty cap, and a uniform.
Stepping closer, I saw a gun on his belt. Thats a policeman, the activist
said quietly. If he knew what we were doing there, he chose to ignore it. We
quickly walked away.

In December 2013, Indias Supreme Court recriminalized homosexuality,

overturning a 2009 ruling by the Delhi High Court that had legalized samesex relations. Carnal intercourse against the order of nature with man,
woman or animal, can now once again be punished with up to 10 years in
prison, according to the law Section 377 of the Indian penal code.
Accurate statistics on the size of Indias LGBT community are hard to come
by, but some 7-10 percent of Indias population could be affected by the
law, estimates Arvind Narrain, one of the founders of the Indian research
organization Alternative Law Forum.
The ruling, however, appears to have barely affected cruising. Theres no
good measure on the extent of cruising in New Delhi, or in India as a whole,
but mobile apps like Grindr and Scruff and the meetup site PlanetRomeo
are gaining popularity. Grindr, probably the best-known gay hookup app,
has 69,823 average active monthly users in India, according to a company
spokesperson. While thats relatively low (roughly equal to the number of
active users the app has in Boston) its growing healthily, the spokesperson
said.

In the United States, cruising has been mostly supplanted by the Internet
and apps that facilitate meetups and hook ups. With the Internet came
online cruising and a way for gay men to connect with one another besides
the newspapers and clubs, Johnny Skandros, the founder of Scruff, said in
an email. In the United States, it changed chronologically. Technology
overhauled bars and cruising spots, Parmesh Shahani, a gay activist and
author of the book Gay Bombay, told me. But in India, these parallel
cultures [are] existing simultaneously.
The Nehru Park activist tells me that he now meets men mostly online. That
night, we ate at a restaurant called Soda Bottle Opener Wala in Khan
Market, a touristy area popular with foreigners.He pulled up Grindr, and his
screen was filled with nearby men, and a healthy backlog of unread
messages. So many! he said.Especially for those in the middle and upper
class, theres definitely been a huge transition from the physical space to
the Internet space, he added.

India is still more than two-thirds rural and overwhelmingly poor, however;
the countrys average per capita income on a purchasing power parity basis
was just $5,412 in 2013. And while cell phones are common, less than 10
percent of Indias 1.25 billion people have smartphones. Everyone talks
about India as a land of IT, where theres lots of nerds around, but its still
just a very thin veneer of the middle class that lives in that world, says the
journalist Ashok Row Kavi. Especially among the working class and the
lower-middle class, who make up the majority of Indias gay population,
the cruising culture is still very strong, he told me.
***
In an industrial area of New Delhi, full of gaping, half-finished buildings
and shops selling cricket equipment, I visited one of Indias only gay spas. I
had read about it online but at the requests of activists I spoke with, I
wont reveal identifying details about the place. For a roughly $20 dollar
entry and massage fee a price that put it out of reach for the majority of
New Delhis gay population the attendee manning the front desk led me
to a small room where roughly eight male prostitutes sat and watched
television. They were diverse, to account for customers tastes: muscular,
skinny, short, tall with skin colors ranging from olive to dark brown. One
of the massage rooms featured a single bleary red light hanging from the
ceiling, and little else.

Like many of the people I spoke to, Row Kavi had been to the spa but he
didnt like it. It was very tacky, he told me. There isnt much talk,
socializing, or chatting. No reasonable discourse. Its a wham-bam-thankyou-man kind of place.

Row Kavi has been to Nehru Park too, but its not his scene either. You see
upper-middle-class queens cruising the bylanes, quick checks and off you
go, he told me. Thats fine, but it doesnt end up with any sort of social
interaction. He prefers the park above the Palika Bazaar in Connaught
Place, a busy shopping area. I used to go there once a month, he said.
Its like a fraternity of sisters gossiping away.

The activist from Nehru Park told me that he also used to like the Palika
Bazaar area. It was extremely thrilling, he said over dinner.The thrill is
that youre doing it knowing that it was slightly dangerous, and its kind of a
chase. Its quite addictive.

But I found the space incredibly depressing. The first time I went was on a
Monday afternoon. I didnt see anyone cruising; the only people I came
across were slack-mouthed hucksters, with the physical tightness that in
the United States might mark a flyweight boxer; in India, it screams
malnutrition.

***

Indias Congress Party, long the dominant political force in the

country and the party of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, has been
relatively liberal on the issue of gay rights. When the Supreme Court
recriminalized homosexuality in 2013, Congress spoke out in favor for the
rights of Indias LGBT community. Other minor parties, including the
Communist Party of India, have also voiced support for gay rights.
But in May 2014, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by
Narendra Modi, won a resounding election victory. Many gay rights activists
I spoke to said they didnt vote for Modis party because of its social
conservatism, but that they were in a wait-and-see mode: wary of the
aftereffects of the December 2013 ruling, but unwilling to speak out against
the BJP because they didnt want to force Modi to comment on
homosexuality. Believed to be celibate, though previously married at a
young age, Modi has been quiet on the issue. Homosexuality is a matter
for the courts, not the government, M.J. Akbar, a spokesman for the BJP,
told me. I dont have any sense of whats Modis view [is] on
homosexuality.

Still, the status quo is dangerous. Indian government data shows 587
people arrested under Section 377 from January to October 2014. But as
some Indian states lack complete reports, the total is almost certainly
higher. The problem, however, is persecution not prosecution. Narrain
describes it as a pyramid, with the hundreds of cases actually recorded at
the top, and at the bottom, an uncountable number of cases where the law
is used to blackmail, harass, and extort.
The activist whom I walked Nehru Park with became much less enthusiastic
about cruising after cops caught him in a park several years ago. The
inspector was a nice guy and let me go, he told me. He had been lucky.
Friends of his had been beaten up, abused, and blackmailed. But the
experience scared him. Its not quite pleasant, the activist said. I decided
it wasnt worth it.

In December 2013, Rajnath Singh, then BJP president and now minister of
home affairs, told reporters, Gay sex is not natural and we cannot support
something which is unnatural. Since then, some gay rights advocates have
made the Hindu case for queerness. Devdutt Pattanaik, a popular Indian
author, recently published a book called Shikhandi: And Other Tales They
Dont Tell You, which he describes as an appreciation of queerness in
Indian mythology. Pattanaik sees references to queerness throughout Hindu
mythology being ignored from the male god Krishna braiding his hair as a
woman to stories of men who become women, and women who become
men, of men who create children without women and creatures who are
neither this, nor that, but a little bit of both. Hijra, Indias third gender
which encompasses eunuchs and people who are transgender or intersex
is legally recognized, although they are ignored by the mainstream, often
rejected by [their] own family, reduced to a joke in popular entertainment,
notes Pattanaik.

The book opens with an admonition appropriate for India, both today and in
the colonial era:Beware of a land where celibate men decide what is good
sex. Celibacy runs through Indian political culture, and the countrys
independence leader, Mahatma Gandhi, is also its most famous celibate. He
found intercourse problematic, and would reportedly occasionally sleep
naked next to attractive young women, to demonstrate his mastery over
desire. But Indias Section 377 is a legacy of the British Raj. (Homosexuality
in the United Kingdom waseffectively criminalized until 1967.) In one of the
earliest known usages of the law, in 1884, [T]he somewhat aptly named J.
Straight was called upon to adjudicate whether a person who habitually
wore womens clothes and exhibited physical signs of having committed the
offence had indeed committed the offence, Narrain wrote in an essay.
Police arresting men for acting gay still happens today, he told me. If you
perceive them to be L, G, B, or T, then you got them under this law, he
said.
And Bollywood, Indias hugely influential film industry, isnt helping.
Making jokes at the expense of alternate sexual preferences is the norm in
Bollywood, writes film critic Komal Nahta. There are a few openly gay
Bollywood directors, but no gay icons, no major Bollywood stars who have
come out, no influential CEOs who have made their sexual orientation
public, the novelist Manil Suri wrote in a June 2013 essay in the literary
magazine Granta.

For some, there is a joy in proclaiming ones sexual identity. In The Man
Who Would Be Queen, a collection of autobiographical fictions by the
Indian author Hoshang Merchant, the narrator proclaims, As everyone
knows by now, Im homosexual. To write this sentence and to speak it
publicly, which is a great liberation, is why I write. But like many of the
people associated with the Indian gay rights movement, Merchant has
spent substantial time away from India. Suris essay is entitled How to be
Gay and Indian; he lives in Maryland.
Back in India, gay culture remains mostly in the shadows. Later in my trip to
New Delhi, I returned to the park above the Palika Bazaar, recommended by
the activist from Nehru Park. It was the time of evening haze, and unlike the
silence in Nehru Park, this well-kept lawn pulsated with the cacophony of
car horns and tires screeching and loud and soft and angry and happy
voices. There I saw a short man, with a clean, oversized gray hooded
sweatshirt and a bit of a paunch. He walked around the space like it was his
own, and then returned to the fence he had been leaning against, as
dozens of men milled about the park, ignoring him. He smiled warmly, and
then raised his eyebrows as if trying to lead them to an overwhelming
question.