He could be your neighbour going for a Sunday outing with his wife and two children—a picture of a happy family. He could be the school topper who got into one of the IIMs and you heard had married a batchmate. He could be the office peon who gets you sweets after a son is born to him.
He could be 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70 years old. He could be a grandfather, the patriarch of his brood. He could be any man in this country—until one day his wife commits suicide and leaves a note that says he has always been a homosexual.
Do you fault him for the situation he finds himself in? Does he become guilty of cheating his wife and everyone else whom he has caused hurt by his deceit? Is he solely responsible for his wife’s death?
Most people have been outraged by the recent story of the AIIMS doctor in Delhi who committed suicide, driven to despair—as her last note says—by the knowledge that her husband of five years, also a doctor at the hospital, was gay.
Why does an independent gay man living a modern life in a cosmopolitan city need to marry and ruin his partner’s life, they seem to ask. But what few have considered is that such a man’s life has never been about black-and-white. His responsibility for such a tragedy cannot be denied, but the answer to all these questions is also far more complicated.
A gay man in India grows up in a culture that worships masculinity. Society, with its institutional and social prejudices, bears down upon him to think of his feelings and desires as unnatural. He usually has to spend a lifetime hiding his real self in a closet and pretending to lead a heterosexual life, the kind every man is expected to. It is in such an environment—where the mind is brainwashed and coerced since childhood— that he approaches marriage. By this time, after an entire adolescence of pretence, he gets proficient at concealing his sexual orientation. He will be a good dutiful son like other good heterosexual males. He will marry, have children perhaps and provide for his family. Some may remark that he appears effeminate, but there will otherwise be little occasion to doubt who he is.
When he is alone, though, the mask will slip. The farce that he participates in day in and day out, and which he knows he has to sustain for the rest of his life for his well being, will find solitary relief in the porn he watches and risqué online chats with other gay men he engages in. He will cautiously hook up with other gay men when the opportunity arises. But when the night gives way, he will return to his wife and family, and the social convenience of the closet. He will lead a deeply duplicitous life.
And what about the woman who marries him? If the gay man is an unwilling entrant to such a marriage, it is the woman who is its unwitting victim. The act of marriage—a signal post of heterosexuality, so crucial to the gay man who wants to conform to the demands of his surroundings—is also a cruel and inhumane one. By marriage, he extends the farce and pain of a closet life to an unknowing partner. Often with unpredictable consequences.
In the case of the AIIMS couple, the wife committed suicide. Last year, a wife in Bengaluru, using a hidden camera, caught her husband in a sexual encounter with another male and had him arrested under Section 377. So many others, upon the discovery of their husband’s sexual orientation, either deny it completely or accept it and join the farce.
The husband is to blame, of course. Maybe the wife too could have just left him instead of taking her life and turning her grief into a final act of vengeance. But they are not the only ones who are accountable for their misery. All of us in this intolerant country are also to blame for the tragedies that attend the gay husband’s life.
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