A number of well-known LGBT personalities filed a petition before the Supreme Court this week in support of the curative petition against Section 377, which criminalises consensual homosexual acts between adults. In February, the SC had referred the matter to a five-judge bench, and on Wednesday, it sent the latest petition to the Chief Justice of India to decide whether a Constitution Bench should hear the appeal.
The petition was filed by five persons: Bharatnatyam dancer Navtej Singh Johar, journalist Sunil Mehra, restaurateur Ritu Dalmia, businesswoman Ayesha Kapur, and Aman Nath, the founder of the Neemrana chain of hotels. The original petition against Section 377 was filed in Delhi High Court by Naz Foundation, an NGO dedicated to LGBT rights, making this week's petition the first instance of LGBT persons themselves approaching the court with a plea that invokes their personal stories.
Coincidentally, this week was also when pictures from last Saturday's Gurgaon Pride flooded my Facebook timeline. The pictures showed a community whose struggles arise from a difference that is so deeply ingrained that coming to terms with it is the foremost of many challenges. There were men and women in colourful masks, smiling big smiles while hiding their faces in rainbow hues. Their presence indicated an urge to demand equal rights for themselves and their kind but the masks pointed to an ongoing journey to inform the world at large of their LGBT status.
It is a paradox that most LGBT people learn to wrap their head around: how to walk the fine line between, on the one hand,gingerly opening up about something as personal as sexuality and, on the other, becoming part of a vocal community that must fight for its rights, including the right to exist.
All difference emerges from individuation, that is to say, the individual is the political animal on whom we map the battles of difference. This difference can operate along any number of axes, from caste to gender to race to sexuality, or a mix of these. Concomitantly, individuation guides an awareness of this difference, for instance, building a distinctive stance on what homosexuality is and what, in the homosexual's particular case, it ought to present itself as.
Coming out is a heady time for the LGBT person, as they bask in the freedom not just to define themself but to create a singular narrative about their life. Since they're different, dominant modes of conduct do not apply to them. The long years of hesitation give way to the blinding acknowledgement that they can fashion their own codes of morality and their own path to the future.
In contrast, the urge to belong to a community, by its nature, has a definitively external locus. The Pride march in Gurgaon - indeed all Pride marches - are essentially expressions of protest. They work best in a group setting, so that the movement derives its strength from the numbers that make up the marchers. Managing the space between the intensely private and the baldly public is a matter of some discretion, as the masked faces at Pride attest.
Recent events have thrown this dichotomy into sharper relief. As a group of patrons partied in an Orlando nightclub on the night of June 12, a gunman opened fire, killing 49 and injuring 53 others. The tragedy, while another in a long line of gun-related violence in the United States, was much more than that. It brought out, this time in flagrantly violent terms, the conflict between discovering oneself, as represented by the heady promise of a gay nightclub, and exposing oneself to violence in making that discovery.
Meanwhile, on June 26, exactly a year after the United States Supreme Court legalised gay marriage nationwide, President Obama named the Stonewall Inn and the surrounding Christopher Park in New York City a national monument, the first such devoted to LGBT rights. Stonewall was the site of riots sparked in 1969 by members of the LGBT community protesting police highhandedness.
The stark difference between the Orlando carnage and Obama's consecration of Stonewall is a reminder of how legal changes are nearly not enough in saving beleaguered communities from discrimination, or worse, violence. While the perpetrator, Omar Mateen, may have been mentally disturbed, discrimination against the LGBT community predates the Orlando tragedy and is likely to continue. The LGBT person must therefore, on pain of death, become a political animal. His personal growth and the beatific visions he safeguards it in must yield to a less magical fight, but one that his very survival depends on. The death that I speak of may not just be a departure from life. It also includes the extinguishing of promise, the snuffing of opportunity in the face of a system that deems some love criminal.
It is this realisation that has prompted prominent LGBT Indians to shed the cloak of privacy and plead the Supreme Court to take down Section 377.
vjohri19@gmail.com
