Karan Johar: Why he won't say he's gay and why rumours linking him to Shah Rukh Khan hurt

Among the most awaited celebrity autobiographies this year is Karan Johar’s cheekily named An Unsuitable Boy, co-authored with journalist Poonam Saxena. And while the book hasn’t been launched yet, it’s already making waves, thanks to some excerpts that were released by The Times of India in its Monday, 9 January edition. [caption id=“attachment_3194798” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Karan Johar’s autobiography ‘An Unsuitable Boy’ promises to be a no-holds-barred account[/caption] The excerpt that has been released has the filmmaker addressing issues of sexuality. Karan has been very open in talking about sex. In June 2016, his regular column on NDTV — ‘Karan Affairs’ — proclaimed: “I Don’t Get Sex - And I’m No Longer Trying”. In the column, Karan had talked about being a late bloomer when it comes to sex, of thinking that blow jobs meant ’lying under the fan with all your clothes off’, and how he battled feelings of undesirability due to his weight issues in the early part of his life. However, the Unsuitable Boy excerpt released by TOI goes a step further. In it, Karan answers the question that everyone seems to have in their minds concerning him: “Is he gay?” Here’s what Karan has to say on the issue: “Everybody knows what my sexual orientation is. I don’t need to scream it out. If I need to spell it out, I won’t only because I live in a country where I could possibly be jailed for saying this.” “I have become like the poster boy of homosexuality in this country. But honestly, I have no problem with people saying what they want about me,” he adds, describing how he is afraid to be seen with any single men because the assumption, automatically, is that they are sleeping together. Karan goes on to explain why he won’t spell it out in the ’three words’ that everybody seems to be waiting to hear from him: “The reason I don’t say it out aloud is simply that I don’t want to be dealing with the FIRs. I’m very sorry. I have a job, I have a commitment to my company, to my people who work for me; there are over a hundred people that I’m answerable to. I’m not going to sit in the courts because of ridiculous, completely bigoted individuals who have no education, no intelligence.” Karan also talks about how he gets hate messages on social media every single morning, something he’s learnt to ignore over the years. What was harder to simply brush aside were hurtful rumours linking him with close friend Shah Rukh Khan. Karan says that he has always looked up to Shah Rukh as an older brother, and it was “traumatising” to hear the talk about them. “For years there were rumours about Shah Rukh and me. And I was traumatised by it. I was on a show on a Hindi channel, and I was asked about Shah Rukh: ‘Yeh anokha rishta hai aap ka,’ the interviewer said. He worded it in such a way that I got really angry. I said, ‘If I asked you if you are sleeping with your brother, how will you feel?’ So he said, ‘What do you mean? How can you ask me this question?’ I said, ‘How could you ask me this question? For me, no matter what ups and downs Shah Rukh and I have been through, he is a father figure, an older brother to me. For me to look at him in that way or be subjected to those rumours was just ridiculous.”