‘Your average Hindu temple is more fabulous than the Gay Bombay New Year’s Party’

This considered and erudite anthropological observation was a sentence I found myself muttering in conversation on the eve of my departure from Mumbai. I was visiting India with relatives and had traveled around Karnataka for a few weeks before flying to Mumbai (which the local folks I was staying with persist in calling Bombay) for New Year’s festivities. Traveling in a place as culturally rich as India is a thrilling and humbling experience for the anthropologist. On the one hand, there are fascinating things going on everywhere all the time. In Coorg, our van was stopped by a tribal group that was blocking the road in protest of state restrictions on their access to the forest they claim as theirs. And we celebrated Christmas at Bababudangiri, the site of a shrine controlled by Muslims and long hosting syncretic worship, but in recent years subject to antisyncretic Hindu agitation. Indeed, a dispute over a particular Hindu observation called Datta Jayanti had occurred just two days before our arrival there — but we added a further tradition to the mix by visiting the place on Christmas day itself! So if there is lots to think about, there are also lots of reminders of what one doesn’t know. This is true of life in general, I suppose, for those of us who fancy ourselves experts — but I feel it is especially true when anthropologists find themselves as tourists. Yet, since so much tourist activity in the contemporary world is a sort of ersatz ethnography (people go to places to experience exotic others and to learn about them), the expert compulsion to ‘know more’ than your average tourist perhaps reveals a narcissistic impulse generated by that not-so-small difference between ‘the tourist’ and ‘the ethnographer.’ In India, the sheer magnitude of what you don’t know basically requires that you let go of your own pretensions.

Anyway, a highlight of our trip was the Gay Bombay New Year’s party. We went with a Mumbaikar friend of ours. As in many places, gay identity is barely present in Bombay — the gay scene is super underground. Many gay men in Bombay lead completely closeted double lives. Gay Bombay is introducing and promoting a Western-style ‘gay’ identity in a place whose norms and forms of sexual identity conform to a completely different sort of sensibility, and in a place where gay men are not infrequently targeted for harassment, violence, or blackmail. There’s a lot of anthropological work on this dynamic in different parts of the world — work on ways in which ‘homosexuality’ as an identity category is being taken up and refigured cross-culturally, often in politically-fraught contexts. One thing that struck me, however, was the irony that in the context of Bombay, and perhaps in the context of India more generally, Western-style gayness appears tepid by comparison to styles of comportment and self-presentation apparent on an everyday basis on the street already. Indian street culture glitters with golden bangles, it glows with magenta or chartreuse or electric blue saris. Young men in Bombay wear spiffy tailored shirts and tight polyester pants and they show no compunction about displaying their warm feeling for each other in physical embrace. It probably sounds cliché, but there is an intense (baroque, over-wrought, hyperbolic) fabulousness to Indian aesthetic sensibilities, including those often on display at Hindu shrines, garlanded as they often are with marigolds and tinsel.

By comparison then, the pink balloons that comprised the sum total of the decorations at our New Year’s party seemed kinda, um, unfabulous. This is not at all to criticize the organizers who are obviously engaged in important work promoting tolerance and providing a forum for folks who find it very meaningful. I am just noting that although gays often pride ourselves on the rainbow-colored fabulousness of our culture, in fact ‘global gayness’ may sometimes end up encouraging men to lose some local color as they pursue freedoms associated with a new-fangled identity.

This has often bugged me about a certain strand of gay aesthetics. The last time I had this impression was in New Orleans for one of the many AAA meetings held there. You knew you had reached the gay end of the street when the jazz stopped and the monotonous thud of some dance remix could be heard.

3 thoughts on “‘Your average Hindu temple is more fabulous than the Gay Bombay New Year’s Party’

  1. Funny. I wonder how much this has to do with class aspirations? The upwardly mobile Indian middle classes often seem quite embarrassed about the garishness of Indian popular culture.

  2. That sounds about right, at least in respect of our gay friends there who definitely aspire to higher class status. I was assured that those guys who were at the party in question were from elite backgrounds for the most part, so there must be intersections between class aspiration, international orientation, gender, and so on that are visible in the way in which emergent gayness is ‘styled’ in Bombay.

  3. I know EXACTLY what you mean about the ‘gay end of the street.’

    The kind of ‘styling’ you talk about is going on all around the world; I noticed it in China, where on top of the many different strains of homosexual identity that have run through the culture throughout history, the aesthetics and the superficialities of this kind of Queer as Folk lifestyle have started to show up in what kind of clubs guys think are cool or comfortable, ideas about femininity, about sleeping around… In North America, it might not be such a visible process, this kind of growing up as a gay or lesbian or bi or trans kid and seeing all these models in the media of what those identities look like and then sort of adapting that whole package as your own identity (maybe because that package is moving around within the bigger sort of Western framework already), but it’s here too.

    Because that process tends to simplify what can be really complex pictures of what a person is really like, I like to wander back and forth between the jazz and the shitty dance music.

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