Sexuality and Identity

Akshay Khanna New Delhi

I am going to be speaking a little differently about the issue of censorship and freedom of expression. I am going to try and make a case that the debate between censorship and freedom of expression is actually a false debate. I am going to put it across in a queer perspective and I am going to clarify at the outset that it is a particular perspective arising out of the queer movement and there are other ways in which similar issues are being discussed.

The last few months have been in some sense very exciting and quite disturbing for various reasons. We have the first Bollywood film, which uses the term “lesbian”. It happens in a context where the woman stands there and says “Haan, haan mein lesbian hoon. (Yes, I am a lesbian). I hate men.” But nevertheless it was a first time. The second important thing that happened was the Pushkin Chandra murder case. The reporting on it was quite shocking. I will just read a few bits to give you a sense of the violence contained in the media coverage:  

“In a double homicide that threatens to out Delhi’s upmarket homosexual culture, two men, one naked and one semi nude were found murdered in South Delhi’s posh Anand Lok, on Saturday morning. Investigations in to the Pushkin Chandra murder are throwing considerable light on the capital’s dark underbelly. Sources claim that Chandra was apparently out of a homosexual syndicate, which went out of its way to rope in fresh members.” 

“Gay community grows in the city. Homosexuality is on the rise in Delhi and so is the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS. A possible reason for the number of homosexuals going up in Delhi is the easy availability of a male member. The survey found that the city’s 35,000 street children made easy prey.”

Essentially, this talk of paedophilia, drug use, organised crime came to represent all homosexuals. The way we saw it was the creation of a new “other” and the role of the press was to go out and find the reality of this “dark, dangerous other” threatening our clean and pure society. This kind of reporting carried on for a good six days until there was a press conference in Delhi and there was a shift in the way the entire case was covered. After the press conference, I was contacted by the police and was interrogated not once, but thrice, about whether I was a homosexual and what homosexuals do etc. All the other people who were interrogated were also all gay. I know a lot of people who were at this party where Pushkin was and they did not receive a single phone call. I am trying to give a sense in which a certain kind of homophobia is created.

The media seems to be in the business of creating homophobia. I don’t mean this in a simple sense – that the media is in the business of creating fear and hatred against a certain group of people. The essential question is whether India is a homophobic society.

To be homophobic, presumes that society has to comprehend same-sex desire as related to certain types of people. We have to be able to imagine straight and homosexual people. Although in urban centres we are talking of a strong gay and lesbian movement, the larger reality is different in the Indian context. We don’t relate same-sex desire to an aspect of personhood. I don’t think there is this consensus that whom I fuck or whom I desire says something about the type of person I am.  Masti is a term used for same-sex behaviour between boys and men, in suburban and rural India. Men are having sex with each other. But it is not considered sex; it is just something you do. People then get married and may continue to have masti later on. This is a very different sexual universe where who I desire does not speak about what I am. When we are talking of the creation of homophobia we are talking of the emergence of different types of people. We are talking of the emergence of homosexuals who can be dangerous, paedophilic, etc. It is through this kind of media representation that the language we use to talk of the politics of sex and sexuality is being marked, the terms in which we talk of sex.

It is more complicated than the media saying that there are homosexuals and so there are. We ourselves have the need to identify. We need a location of speech to speak of our experiences. When the Pushkin Chandra murder happened, the gay and lesbian community response is very clear that you are attacking gays and lesbians, you are demonising us, as though “us” already exists at a pan-Indian level. When we talk of the regulation of the language we use to talk of sex, we are not talking merely of homosexuals same-sex desires; We are talking of compulsory hetero-normativity, to use Nivedita Menon’s term, the way in which compulsory hetero-normativity is being enforced and fortified. Nivedita writes, “Such a response leaves unquestioned heterosexuality as the norm i.e. most of us are heterosexual, but there are others out there who are either gay, lesbian, transsexual or transgender. The alphabets proliferate endlessly outside the unchallenged heterosexual space.”

If we are talking of a queer perspective, we are talking of challenging hetero-normativity and understanding the process through which heterosexuality becomes compulsory. We are talking of Bollywood across the board, the constant reinforcement of heterosexual monogamy as the norm, natural and normal thing, and anything outside that is deviation which is either dangerous as we have seen in the film Girlfriend or something to be ridiculed as we have seen in the film Ghulam.

The various media play a significant role in establishing hetero-normativity. In this context, let us look at censorship versus free expression. There are concerns relating to censorship and it is not necessarily State-centric. However when we talk of Freedom of expression and Free speech, whose free speech are we talking about? Is that not regulated by the same forces of market, of family, of the State, of Law? Is Free speech really free? If we want to look closely and address the way in which society is regulated through a hetero-normative frame, then we have to get beyond the question of censorship versus free speech and turn our gaze on the processes by which hetero-normativity is established.

Akshay Khanna works with Prism, an organiation that works on issues of hetero-normativity and marginalisation