My friend did a double take when she looked at her Uber app. Her route had turned rainbow-coloured. She was apparently riding with #Pride.
The Supreme Court had decriminalised gay sex that week, and corporate India was suddenly covered in rainbow sprinkles. Zomato was telling us ‘Let’s get one thing straight. Love is love’ alongside a rainbow burger. Netflix agreed that #LoveIsLove. Starbucks was offering ‘Pride in every cup’ and Indigo, which prides itself on punctuality, cleverly said ‘About Time’ next to a rainbow jet stream.
There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but there just might be be a wad of pink currency notes. In 2009, Forbes India and Out Now Consulting did a study that pegged India’s LGBT population at about 4%, that is 30 million people, and “many of these consumers are DINK — double income, no kids — and thus have a greater disposable income.” But has all this rainbow confetti translated into HR policy changes in these companies? Non-discrimination based on sexual orientation? Health insurance for partners? On that issue, mum’s largely the word or rather, in this case, meme’s the word.
Brand Gay
The pink rupee was already a reality even before the Supreme Court verdict. Amul once offered buttered bread to two girls with the caption “Out of Closet, Out of Fridge.” IndjapInk billed itself as India’s only boutique gay travel agency and sold a ‘Life is a Beach’ package. Now, everybody else is piling onto the bandwagon. That’s to be welcomed, of course, but it comes with a price of admission.
The LGBTQ+ movement could quickly find there’s not much queer about it any more. I remember watching the famous San Francisco LGBTQ Pride Parade. The mayor was marching. Political candidates were waving to the crowds. There were trucks filled with dancing go-go boys and drag queens perched perilously on platform heels. But a gay friend laughed, “The people who seem to have dressed up most for it are straight people who’ve come to watch.” The gay people in the Parade were in sweatpants and Google or Oracle t-shirts; they were pushing twin strollers with toddlers. They didn’t have the time to make costumes out of feathers and spangles. Being gay might not yet be cool in India, but being gay-supportive is certainly getting there. A gay friend makes for a super party accessory, a must-have to establish liberal creds. Sure, people will still snigger behind your back or share that homophobic joke on the WhatsApp group but no one wants to admit to overt homophobia any more. That’s so Subramanian Swamy.
This new discovery of gays (or to be specific urban cosmopolitan gays) is rather unsettling. For decades everyone wanted gays to blend in. Why do they have to flaunt it, someone once told me before a Pride March in Kolkata, not realising that when he put a picture with his wife on his office desk, he too was flaunting his heterosexuality. Now Brand Gay is hot, like Fabindia once was before everyone discovered it.
Journalists are doing sensitive stories. A friend remembers a well-meaning journalist pressing him for traumatic memories. He didn’t really have any but she pressed on. Surely, there was a time when he felt really helpless. Was he bullied terribly? Did he despair? What was the lowest point? The sad, repressed gay emerging into a new heaven of freedom thanks to a 500-page judgment, that’s the story everyone wants to write.
The outsider
Until this point the gay existed as an outsider. Now the judges of the Supreme Court have thrown open the doors to respectability. It’s a moment for rejoicing but also for acknowledging that something will shift. So much of queer art has come out of that sense of being an outsider looking in. When you’re no longer outside the law, there’s no excuse to be an outlaw any more. “Congratulations. Now we get to be as boring as everyone else,” messaged a gay friend. In a way every movement for equality ultimately is fighting for that right — to be as boring as everyone else, to have the same responsibilities of marriage, mortgage and medical bills.
There’s no same-sex marriage in India but the march towards conformity is under way. Our real test of the Section 377 verdict, however, will not come from the LGBT community, but from those around them.
A Supreme Court verdict will not mean that the effeminate teenager won’t get bullied in the schoolyard any longer. The litmus test of the verdict we are hailing with rainbow memes will be what the school does about it when that happens. That will matter more than all the pretty rainbow branding exercises.
Justice Indu Malhotra said history owed LGBT Indians and their families an apology. If they can’t get that or a non-discrimination clause in corporate HR policy, could gays at least get a free drink? Perhaps a free frappuccino with rainbow sprinkles?
The writer is the author of Don’t Let Him Know , and like many Bengalis likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.
