Firstpost

The gay trucker and other misfits

It’s not just the fear of losing a job, or losing family that stops people from coming out. Steve Kornacki the news editor of Salon.com had no reason not to be out. He worked for a liberal media publication. He didn’t  come from some rabidly religious homophobic family. He lived in Manhattan. But as he wrote in “The coming out story I never thought I’d write” he just couldn’t relate to the gay world he saw out there. As an all-American boy, an ESPN addict who loved baseball, he didn’t feel like he fit.

It’s easy to dismiss him as a “self-hating homosexual” but gay activist Aditya Bondyopadhyay says he can totally empathize. Though he calls himself “loud and out” now, he says at one time he was like Kornacki. He drove trucks in Jharkhand’s coal fields. He had an NCC certificate and was a champion rifle shooter. He flew gliders. And he still doesn’t like bars and clubs and has no fashion sense.

He says the gay community often doesn’t have space for people like him. “By simply refusing to accept anyone who is not following the classic (and often melodramatic) coming-out 101, by refusing to accept anyone who does not follow the soft/sissy fashion-conscious makeup-savvy, hard partying way to gaydom as one of their own, the community is guilty of rendering alien a part of its own.”

This is not to suggest coming out is meaningless. Sonali Gulati remembers hesitating when an Indian news channel wanted to interview her. But she did it. A few weeks later, while on a flight, the air hostess came up to her and told her that her sister who was engaged to be married to a man was able to come out to her. The air hostess helped break off the engagement without outing the sister.

“I see that visibility brings about change,” says Gulati. “But for many, inhabiting the closet is about survival. This means that those of us who have the privilege of being out shoulder a far greater responsibility to speak up.”

It’s all tickety boo

It is ultimately not about being out but about being honest. “To say sexual identity is so different from sexual orientation is one of the biggest problems in India,” says Row Kavi. “So they marry and then they rationalize it.” I remember meeting an Indian engineer who said he had it all figured out. He was married with children, but was having a long-time affair with his best friend. Their wives were good friends as well, so the families socialized together all the time. He felt he was having the best of both worlds. It didn’t occur to him his wife might think differently if she knew.

Bondyopadhyay hopes that more public images and spaces for the “straight acting gay guy,” allowing for more nuance in the coming out story, will dissuade them from getting married and plunging into double lives.

Ashok Row Kavi knows of one man who has a lover in one bedroom, wife and family in another part of the house and they all go on cruises together. “And it’s all tickety boo,” laughs Row Kavi.

Not everyone will have partners who are that accommodating. But within that story lies a hint of the complexity of our lives, gay or straight. It is the urge to be ourselves and not to be reduced to only one thing or the other.

Coming out should not be about making you gay. You were already gay. It should just add that to the mix.

Nishit Saran came out to his mother, Minna on camera in his documentary Summer in My Veins. He died in a traffic accident a few years later. Minna Saran, interviewed on My Child is Gay is vociferously and touchingly supportive of gay rights. It’s almost an homage to her son.

But then she says almost wistfully, “Nishit was not just a gay boy. There was much more to Nishit.”

Watch the documentary My Child is Gay here:

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