"Once again I was a criminal in my own country, an outlaw for being who I was, with little hope for freedom in my lifetime." 

In most reviews about books, to begin with the closing line would be considered sacrilege.  In this case though, this final anguished statement about the re-criminalization of homosexuality in India stands as a brief comma punctuating a much larger journey that is far from over. The Supreme Court of India's Suresh Kumar Koushal judgment that effected this re-criminalization in December 2013 was a widely derided move, inciting outrage, both domestically and across the world.  It is also, in Siddharth Dube's account, one of the more recent chapters in a story that spawns decades, that brings together a massive range of actors, and one that intersects with the story of other movements.

It is these stories that Dube sets out to explore in No One Else: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex. The book begins as an intimate account of a gay man's tentative coming out process, his struggles with his femininity in male-dominated environments at school, his gradual emancipation as he moves into less regimented spaces, and his eventual joyous discovery of sex. Gradually, the breadth and scope of the story expands as it sweeps through crumbling slums and glittering international corridors of power. The narrative finally revealed to us is the contemporary history of three major intersecting movements  – sex worker rights, rights of persons living with HIV/AIDS, and LGBT rights –  as seen through the eyes of the author.

The most remarkable factor about Dube's sweeping accounts is how he ensures there is a personal core at the heart of these stories. Statutes and policies, both national and international, hold a vast potential to obfuscate and reduce the sum total of human complexity into reams of dry language.  This book cuts through the haze of such officious language to tease out the damning impact that such innocuous looking texts, particularly as witnessed in international policy documents, have on the domestic stage. Dube's pen is keen and unsparing in his attacks – particular scrutiny is reserved for the Bush administration's disastrous policies relating to HIV/AIDS and sex workers rights that in turn pushed creditable institutions like UNAIDS into vastly diluting their commitments on both fronts.

There is at least one intersecting oppressor in the struggles faced by LGBT individuals, by persons living with HIV/AIDS and by sex workers: the idea of sexual shame. ….. And it is this shame that ultimately requires HIV/AIDS to be recognized as a human rights issue in a manner different from prior epidemics, as persons afflicted with it face an incomparable stigma.

This personalizing narrative comes through most powerfully in his account of the AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan's report on rights violations faced by the LGBT community. A document harking back to 1992, Less Than Gay is widely considered to be the first report to highlight human rights abuses faced by the community as well as providing a blueprint for legal and social change. In Dube's hands, the report becomes a space for the re-imagination of the domains of what is possible. It also stands as a labour of love, a final rage against the dying light from the remarkable activist Siddharth Gautam, whose life was tragically cut short by terminal illness.

Another thematic element that foregrounds the book, but is never actually mentioned by name, is the idea of intersectionality. This oft used and abused term has soaked into contemporary rights speak, but continues to be understood more in its absence. The question often arises: how does one do intersectionality? This might be asked along two routes: First, how one might effectively inculcate an intersectional approach, and second, how one might push oneself to internalize this ideal.

For Dube, the first aspect comes from locating points of commonality. There is at least one intersecting oppressor in the struggles faced by LGBT individuals, by persons living with HIV/AIDS and by sex workers: the idea of sexual shame. It is this shame that stalks the author in his own inability to deal with his sexual desires even as he comes out of the closet. It is this shame that explains why sex workers face such massive opprobrium right to the international level, even as client numbers continue to thrive. And it is this shame that ultimately requires HIV/AIDS to be recognized as a human rights issue in a manner different from prior epidemics, as persons afflicted with it face an incomparable stigma.

If we can understand intersectionality through abstraction, we can internalize it through empathy.  Dube finds himself sharing a strong commonality with sex workers for instance, " … intellectual as well as personal. Sex workers and gays seemed to share the fate of being demonized because of commonplace prejudices about sex. People thought of us as immoral, driven to sin by greed or lust. While sex workers sold their private parts for money, gays defiled theirs out of unnatural lust."  Empathy and the quest for justice isn't merely a route that is facilitated by one's experience of marginalization: it becomes an act of healing the self as well. As Dube notes early on, his work on social justice issues in turn bolstered his nascent feelings of self-respect and self-worth.

Dube's final words, his despair at re-criminalization, might strike one as a bleak note to conclude on. But we only have to recall Martin Luther King's words: "The arc of the moral universe is long and bends towards justice". It isn't a clear progression, this arc of justice, as we see in the massive pushback on sex workers' rights following a period in the late nineties when sweeping reforms seemed to be on the horizon. And yet, many setbacks are hidden milestones.  The Koushal judgment for instance led to sustained discourse on the issue, even causing a range of political parties to come out with supportive statements on the issues. Just last week,  the Lok Sabha voted against even discussing Shashi Tharoor's private members' bill to amend Section 377. As dispiriting as this move was, it also generated a great amount of public debate on the matter, and may yet galvanize civil society further.
Siddharth Dube's book then becomes both, an important chronicle of struggles by sexual outlaws, and an impassioned testament in the continuing stage for the battle for social justice.

The post I am not a Criminal appeared first on SabrangIndia.

"There are so many roots to the tree of anger   
that sometimes the branches shatter   
before they bear …."
 
Audre Lorde, Who Said It Was Simple
 
"How about beef lover, man eater?"
"How about eats beef and men?"
"What does this even mean?"
"Why are you mixing issues?"

We are sitting in the Good As You office in Bangalore, a week before the Pride March of 2015. The atmosphere is celebratory – we are in the middle of a poster making workshop. Palettes have been flecked with paint, the floor carefully covered with yellowing newspaper, conversations and comments over slogans cascade over each other. Many old favourites are rolled out: "Closets are for Clothes"  and "Let's Get One Thing Straight – I'm Not"  are two of the more ubiquitous ones. The comments around me focus on my attempt to link the beef paranoia with queer struggles. "Beef Eater, Man Lover" I outline in rainbow strokes on my poster. Across the room, I can see my colleague working on his "Put AFSPA in the Closet, Not Us" poster. And again, a question sifts out from the harmless drone of conversation:

"Why are you mixing issues?"
Bangalore Pride comes and Bangalore Pride goes, In the rush of images that circulate online, I notice "Beef Eater, Man Lover" has somehow managed to incite a range of conversations. There are a number of fault lines to the debate: is it injurious to animal rights activists? is it harmful to the queer agenda insofar as it links up unnecessarily with another deeply contested issue? And, again, that hydra like question – why are you mixing issues?

A week later, Delhi marches. In the rush of images posted online, I spot a set of placards that seem to be in conversation with ours: "Homos hate BJP" announces one defiantly; another, more cheekily: "I like my men beefy". Another poster adds a different dimension to the conversation in just three words: "Queer, Dalit, Proud". More images, and another set of contestations around the meaning of Pride.

What does Pride mean?
I recall how this question has been repeatedly debated, year after year in Pride organizing meetings in Bangalore. At one level the debates have been around funding – the importance of this being a community funded event, the importance of staying away from any kind of institutional support. Looped into this assertion has been the debate around institutional representation in the form of shirts, signage and other paraphernalia during the march. The argument there roughly mirrors the one on funding – this is an event by the community, for the community, and bringing in larger institutional participation as signalled through organizational logos tends to distort, if not wholly swallow that. The further questions that arose this year have of course occupied the fray in past Prides – what was new perhaps was the level of engagement that they were received with.

I am unaware of what contestations preceded the Delhi Pride, but once the images began to circulate, they were accompanied by very illuminating write-ups. In "A Short Response to those who said we were derailing Pride this Year" (http://www.gaylaxymag.com/articles/queer-voices/a-short-response-to-those-who-said-we-were-derailing-the-delhi-pride-this-year/#gs.RUxf1X0), Dhrubo Jyoti sums up the opposition to such invocations in the course of his title, then goes on to highlight exactly why this derailing argument is unfounded. Where the focus of Pride for many years has been the repeal of Section 377 that criminalizes same-sex lives and has no place in a modern democracy, he notes that

"such a struggle cannot be isolated from other forms of violent suppression of rights around – be it centred around caste, class, religion, disability or the ability to express dissent…… So many of us live in fear everyday at our homes, our workplaces, schools, colleges and on the roads – scared that we’ll be targeted for our gender, sexuality, caste, class, religion, ability and so on. Delhi’s queer pride this year asserts that it is time to end all these fears, and that queer freedom is inseparable from a broader culture of respect and space for diversity."

And right there, I see this unacknowledged conversation reverberating back across the two cities. The first week of Bangalore Pride brought together activists from the city for an event where we looked back at the history of queer activism in the city. One of the most powerful moments of that conversation was when we went back to the 150 year old text of Section 377. "Carnal intercourse against the order of nature" reads the section and as one of the panellists asked, what was truly ‘unnatural’ in the Indian context? Isn't the term ‘unnatural’ a fig leaf, a convenient blanket term to sweep aside any challenge to the hetero-normative space – also considered unnatural are intimate alliances across religion and caste.

So many of us live in fear everyday …..  scared that we’ll be targeted for our gender, sexuality, caste, class, religion, ability and so on. Delhi’s queer pride this year asserts that it is time to end all these fears, and that queer freedom is inseparable from a broader culture of respect and space for diversity.

In the space of relationality, our struggles intersect on the right to choose whom we love. In the sphere of freedom, they intersect on the broader level of autonomy – our right simply to live our lives in the way we please.  None of these struggles are individually possible without us being aware of the others. In Audre Lorde's poem "Who Said It Was Simple" she sits at a bar where an "almost white" counterman passes an already waiting black customer to serve a group of white women. The women are about to march themselves, but here they sit and neither "notice nor reject the slighter pleasures of their slavery". But Lorde?

"But I who am bound by my mirror   
as well as my bed
see causes in colour
as well as sex
 
and sit here wondering   
which me will survive   
all these liberations."
 
I end wondering that same question. Which fragment of us do we want to survive liberation? Does it have to be fragments at all?

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