From: udcrusd@meaddata.com (Sylvia D'Cruz)
Subject: Gay Men in India ?
Keywords: Gay India
Organization: Mead Data Central, Dayton OH
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 14:06:57 GMT
Distribution: usa

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                         Copyright 1992 Southam Inc.
                                 Calgary Herald

                     August  16, 1992, Sunday, FINAL EDITION

Gay men find voice in new magazine

BY DEREK BROWN, THE GUARDIAN

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   A short walk from Apollo Bunder, in the smartest part of  India's  smartest
city, is a liquor shop of the kind here called an English bar. That is, it sells
what is quaintly known as Indian Made Foreign Liquor: domestic approximations of
whisky, gin, vodka and rum.

   This particular bar, one of hundreds in Bombay, is big, basic, and generally
busy. Never more so than on Saturday nights when it becomes a temporary focus
for gay men.

   Or rather, those gays who can afford English booze, and who have the
middle-class confidence to cruise in central Bombay. The bar is one of the
favorite places to meet, make weekend plans and generally, in the words of one
man, to camp it up.

   It's hot, smoky and noisy. When it closes, the men here can go to Apollo
Bunder to cool off in the midnight air under the shadow of the huge stone bulk
of the Gateway of  India.  That's another of the favorite gay meeting places of
Bombay. Or there is Chowpatty Beach, where the activity is more fevered and
frequently commercial.

   These articulate, educated young men may not be exactly representative of the
vast but largely uncharted gay community of  India.  But they have at last
thrust an iceberg-tip of visibility above the hypocritical surface of Indian
society, where every minority taste is routinely dismissed as a Western
perversion.

   The voice of this new assertive gay movement is the Bombay Dost (Bombay
Friend) a quarterly magazine which aims to inform and campaign for gays, 
lesbians and others of alternative sexuality.

   It's a huge potential market. Editorial chair Ashok Row Kavi, extrapolating
from national and international surveys, reckons that at the very minimum there
are 22 million, and probably 50 million, gays among  India's  burgeoning 860
million people.

   That's a plausible, even conservative, estimate by generally accepted global
standards. Kavi, however, believes it could be an absurd underestimate, given
 India's  history, culture and social patterns.

   "There have been suggestions that we should admit bisexuals and married gays
into our organization. That would mean letting in a majority of Indian men," he
says.

   Allowing a bit of hyperbole, there is a quantity of anecdotal and
circumstantial evidence, and plain old-fashioned observation, to back that
sensational claim.

   Any visitor to the subcontinent from countries where male contact is
discouraged is instantly struck by the number of men here who hold hands and
caress in public. Policemen stand arm in arm, directing the traffic. Taxi
drivers, especially at night, often are huddled on the front seat with younger
men or boys. In the north and west especially, the male greeting is a robust
embrace, and sometimes a prolonged cuddle.

   "It's called male bonding but in Asia we don't really know when it is just
that, and when it is erotic. I can only tell you that in trains and anywhere
there is a crowd, there is a lot of serious feeling up," Kavi says. Other gays
say the same. The pages of Bombay Dost have many testimonies of lonely young
men, desperate to express themselves sexually yet unable to interpret even the
most blatant of homosexual come-ons in public places.

   In spite of Indian-style male bonding and casual contacts, many gays argue
that repression here is just, if not more, cruelly widespread here than in the
West. "A lot of gay sexuality is suppressed by young marriages," says Kavi.

   He also argues that homosexuality also is often lightly dismissed, even by
gays themselves, as the result of the many obstacles to heterosexual
relationships. Dating here is an elite minority pastime.

   "So high is the barrier between the sexes in  India,  that even when a man
buys sex from another men he won't acknowledge that he is behaving in a
homosexual way," Kavi says.

   Bombay Dost, after a tentative start two years ago, began regular publication
last summer. The response was immediate, with 25 letters a week. That is now 125
a week, and climbing.

   Most are enthusiastic about the emergence of a public gay movement. But
inevitably many reveal anguish, enormous pressure, and agonized doubts about
coming out.

   Already, there have been ugly incidents of gay-bashing by the police in
Delhi, and there are ominous homophobic undercurrents in the swelling debate
about AIDS.

   For that reason, the Bombay Dost team is deliberately tight-lipped when asked
about the rate of HIV infection among gays. "You can say that a lot of our
people are looking ill," Kavi says. "We know that it is going to be a huge-scale
thing, but it will help nobody if we spark off a campaign of homophobia."