
(This is a review from our December 2015 print quarterly, ‘The Marriage Issue: Loves, Laws, Lusts’. See more from the issue here.)
The book release of Siddharth Dube’s memoir No One Else: A personal history of outlawed love and sex in New Delhi was most opportunely timed. It was at the crossways of three significant events related to issues central to the plot of Dube’s personal narrative. Many of us were celebrating Pride month in New Delhi, marching the streets with courage and colours on 29 November 2015, followed swiftly by World AIDS Day, while also simultaneously organising in protest of the two-year anniversary of the 2013 Supreme Court judgment that upheld Section 377, the draconian colonial law that criminalises sexual activities that are “against the order of nature”. Chronologically, the chapters draw a parallel to the sequence of events that (will) go into the making of a public history of outlawed love and sex in India.
I found myself at the book launch in a conference hall near the Lodhi Gardens, coincidentally located near where Siddharth Dube found “one of the greatest loves” of his life. It was here that one morning he accidently ran into Tandavan with whom he went on to spend many years of his life, discovering love, desire and other hard truths. It was also here, that one of his greatest fears of “being discovered” walked up to him in the guise of the police invoking Section 377:
My tensions would cross into fear whenever Tandavan and I were being intimate with each other – whether it was kissing, having sex, or just cuddling together. I was aware that we were violating India’s criminal laws – even if it was in the privacy of our flat – and we could be arrested and imprisoned as a consequence.
As we sat there, listening to Dube reading choice extracts from the book, talking about his college days at St Stephens that felt to him “entirely heterosexual, a universe of men and women attracted only to the opposite sex”, and his affectionate friendship with his first female friends, Rosemary and Alka, my partner whispered to me that it sounded as if nothing had changed in Stephens in the two decades between their times spent there, as if only the world was moving forward but somehow all our lives had remained standing, how these stories of loves and lives, ‘the personal history’ of each of us still stood the same. In the same way, Dube sees himself in the intimately political testimonies published in a 1991 report by the AIDS Bhedbhav Vidrohi Andolan(ABVA) entitled Less than Gay: A Citizen’s Report, and in the accomplished works and difficult lives of Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin. ‘No one else’ is actually all of us.
The memoir is an intimate history that is courageous as well as candid, and it left me wondering if there is any other way to talk about something that fills you with pride and shame at the same time? When asked what made him write about his personal and public life so openly, Dube said, that having lived a life of fear, one starts losing patience and begins to nurse a quiet kind of anger. That, by the time he entered his fifties, he realised that silence is never worth anything.
The “no one else” in the title suggests loneliness and hopelessness of growing up in a country that not only constantly reminds you that you are a criminal, but also that you don’t exist. And if you do, you exist as a “miniscule minority”, which does not matter and is not worth the trouble. This is a feeling shared not just by LGBT persons but also by sex workers and the millions who are forced to be outcasts by virtue of a draconian law. For Dube, “no one else” began to find another meaning as he began writing the book. No one else but me – me, as in the all of us – Dominic D’Souza, Siddharth Gautam, Selvi, each of whom find space in the memoir, and various other activists and individuals, who not only stand up for themselves and others, but also fight back and keep passing the flame forward. A sense of self-reliance, faith in oneself, the sentiment resounded by a sex worker he met in Sangli, “Anything anyone can do, I can do better!”
“I was in turmoil. Had I made a mistake? Had I imagined the penis? A woman with a penis! It couldn’t be!”
HarperCollins has marketed the book as India’s first gay memoir and it reminds one of photographer Sunil Gupta’s Wish You Were Here: Memories of a gay life. While Gupta’s monograph tells tales through photographs, exploring race, gender and sexuality through related issues of access, place and identity, Dube sketches out a public history of homosexuality, of women sex workers, of injustice and brutality. Gupta’s book is autobiographical in that it tells his story through others, documenting memorable moments, capturing cityscapes and personal portraits and creating what looks like a family album, complete with touristy photographs. Gupta’s work, like Dube’s, is shadowed with AIDS, showing how gay lives are constantly preoccupied with fears that are familiar and often fatal. Both the books, through their different narratives and the texture of their stories go on to show how the public is private and the personal is political.
In the interest of knowing our own stories, and having resources for young people to use when coming out, I’d recommend “Lotus of Another Color” by Rakesh Ratti. It was published in 1992, and was the first publication of memoirs of South Asian LGBTQ people. Some of the individuals and organizations mentioned in this article contributed to that publication.