SCOTUS Judgement Is Great But It May Change Gay Love Forever

There comes a moment in the life of a movement when those it affects directly must ask themselves how they will feel about letting it go.

It’s a time to celebrate, of course, for the movement is now close to realising its blessed aims. But when a fight for equality or a struggle for rights seems within reach, the hitherto victimised must wonder how they feel about letting the baby out into the world, as it were, to grow and live its own free life. Their own nest, meanwhile, must dismantle.

I can’t help feeling that way about the US Supreme Court ruling on nationwide gay marriage that was announced last week. The ruling in no way affects me personally but already it is changing conversations around the globe. Back home, Union Minister Sadananda Gowda has indicated, or at least he seemed to until the collective force of RSS in general and Subramanian Swamy in particular forced him to backtrack, that his government might consider scrapping Section 377, the albatross around the gay rights movement’s neck in India.

Unbelievably (he really stretched it too far IMHO), Gowda also said, or was rather “misquoted”, that even gay marriage might be considered.

There is no reason for me not to feel ecstatic about these developments. Gay equality and marriage, when they come to pass, will be the realisation of the dreams that generations of gay men before me have nurtured.

As child of the ‘80s, I arrived at the party late, so I am not even going to imagine how hard life was before it was hard enough. Yet, there is something about the space that a lack of structure and expectations gives you, which I am afraid we stand to lose as we become more and more like the heterosexuals.

Till we were victimized, we had the freedom to find our own way through the messy but exciting alleys of love and romance, but now we will have a set pattern to follow, because marriage is, whatever you may think of it, that set pattern.

It will become this thing worth living and striving for. It has that power. I am greatly happy but I can’t help mourning the loss of something special too.

For we were different. We could run away from the staid normalcy we saw around us because we were not the same where it mattered. We did not have to do any of that. Our desires were different, and therefore, completely secure.

Two unmarried men could share a hotel room, no matter what all they got up to with one another. We were invisible and that invisibility could be painful, yes, but it could also be owned and made our own, as we did every time we sneaked away to form a community of twos or fours or hundreds.

And then we were different some more. After I came out, I launched on an interminable cycle of sex. It would be easy to say I was trying to heal my closeted wounds but the truth was I was just doing my thing. I knew this is what I was supposed to do, because this is what every gay man did. We met other gay men and often we slept with them, and ex post facto we decided what we wanted to do with ourselves.

To have that—the ability to meet someone for the first time and sleep with them right away—has been one of the great joys of homosexuality.

It also focuses the mind tremendously. Its utilitarianism stripped our interactions of any chaff. Sex was just sex. There was no way it could be more than that. It was a sort of love, sure, but nothing permanent. In bed, with someone inside us, we knew that all we had was that moment, and we embellished it with every colour possible. It was performance. Since we could not ladle it with hope, we aestheticised it. We made a cult of the male body. We worshipped it. It was our own private sanctum. Pleasure became its own end, and in its luxuriant bosom, we found a happiness that was uniquely ours.

It wasn’t peachy in the least, no. The act of sex was what it was, but the back and forward stories around it had not a spit of comfort about them. We had to snatch moments from the dirt pile of doubts and neurosis to create magic. If the sex threatened to tip over into love, we had to watch out and prepare ourselves to fill the giant space that had suddenly opened up between us, one that was riddled with complications. (His parents don’t know, nor does anyone else on Planet Earth etc.)

We could not feel our way to the destination; the questions had to be argued and debated and resolved. Our gayness had to be defined and shaped into being. Nothing could be taken for granted. Everything was intellectualised.

It was tiring but also refreshing. It was a new way of being. It was like living in the moment every moment, when all around us our friends were settling down and doing the hetero thing. We were on our own.

There was nothing to develop and little to look forward to, except for brief, intense connections. It may have been difficult, even traumatic to know this and to learn this at first, but learn we did. To accept it, even perhaps love it. It was us. It marked us out. It made us special. The rest of the world made things out of things. We did not.

But now, sadly, we will, or I fear we will. Now the clock is going to turn back and we will need to educate ourselves afresh. Phew!