My sexuality is your business

Of course, it is completely fine if you are gay. What you do in your bedroom is none of my business. But why do you need to talk about you...

Of course, it is completely fine if you are gay. What you do in your bedroom is none of my business. But why do you need to talk about your sexuality? Why do you need to make a public issue of such a private matter? Not a day passes without someone or the other asking me this question, and it angers me to no end. However innocent it might be on the surface, there lurks behind it a mo-st disturbing sort of ignorance about the living reality of gay persons. Which is all the more disturbing when the question comes from educated people who claim, with great sophistication, that they are cool with my being gay.

What I do in my bedroom has to be your business, my sophisticated friends. For you made my sexuality a public matter even before I was born. Have you heard about Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code? Section 377 is our ridiculously archaic law against quot;unnaturalquot; offences. It states: quot;Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punishedwith imprisonment for lifequot;. Section 377 officially sanctions the public disgust and hatred of homosexuals in this country. It makes me, in the eyes of the law, a criminal subject to imprisonment for life. It effects a whole gamut of civil and criminal laws that deny gay persons the rights that heterosexuals take for granted every day. And you say that my sexuality is a private matter!

Section 377 might be yet another anachronism in the Indian legal system. But, unlike other archaic laws, this particular Section continues to have a devastating effect on the daily lives of an estimated 50 million Indian citizens. It stands in sharp variance with international law and with covenants to which India is a signatory such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. More crucially, it is likely unconstitutional. Section 377 violates Articles 14 and 15 of our Constitution since it arbitrarily and oppressively discriminates against persons on the basisof their sexual identity. It also violates the right to life and liberty under Article 21, which has come to include the right to privacy. Section 377 was a gift from our wonderful colonial masters who, it must be noted, repealed the law themselves in 1967.

In 1860, as part of the colonising effort, the British introduced a standard Indian Penal Code which replaced, among other things, a rather tolerant Indian attitude towards sexuality with a highly moralistic and hostile Judaeo-Christian one.

No surprise, then, that the concept of quot;unnaturalquot; offences is an obsolete, Victorian one suspicious at best of sexuality and no longer in any accordance with living realities. Look at the law again: the quot;order of naturequot; in the statute refers, of course, to sexual acts that are intended for procreation. The idea that sex is only meant for making babies is ridiculously outdated.

Section 377, by the way, makes the entire government effort of Family Planning illegal, since this encourages acts against the order ofnature as well! Should we now ban the use of condoms and outlaw the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare? Section 377 does not differentiate between consensual and non-consensual acts. It also does not differentiate between adults and minors. It, therefore, puts homosexuality on the same criminal footing as, say, child molestation. Is there no difference between the violent rape of a seven-year-old child and the loving and completely voluntary decision of two adults to sleep with each other?

Most people do not even know that this law exists. And one could just let it be if the law was not enforced in the particular way it is. Many studies have shown that Section 377 is used most often for blackmail and extortion, but more importantly, the law is preventing crucial work in HIV prevention in a country with the largest number of HIV-infected people in the world.

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Let us start talking about 377 now, and let us scrap it before it is too late. After all, we are not talking only about a ridiculous law on paper.We are also talking about the lives of millions of real people and their collective fear and pain.

The writer is a filmmaker