Looking for gay male sex at the supermarket

Searching for gay male sex in contemporary India is a bit of a minefield. There seem to be several temporalities at work at the same time and the same place. Earlier, there used to be just a few types that were more or less predictable and manageable in one way or another.

These included the married man whose wife was not going down on him (or at least that was what he said and used as an excuse) and so he was looking for men; the rough trade on the streets of whichever city you were in (or village for that matter), desperate and up for anything and anyone you pretty much picked up off the streets; and the third was the gay man who was not out (more bottoms than tops), prowling on the internet and willing to be publicly gay in certain contexts (such as in an NGO office) but not otherwise. These three types and three temporalities were more or less handleable — the closet married man, the dehaati rough trade and the closet queen.

Now, suddenly, there seem to be so many more, besides the above three. There are more transgender folk, more cross dressers, even the odd guy looking for a shemale (and actually hoping he’d find one).

There’s the self-identified kothi (the new NGO category that suddenly became an identity in the ’90s), the straight guy who, thanks to the new visibility of ‘queerness’ in our cities, is up for an experiment (so the straight man up for it is no longer class-specific, if he ever was), the bisexual guy who is cool about calling himself bisexual, the full-fledged gay man (usually a bottom) looking for romance, the occasional muscular top showing off his boyfriend’s profile as much as his own, even the gay activist asking everyone to protest against a homophobic TV channel and, of course, the party animal asking where the next underground gay party is.

This would seem like a rich feast and a wonderfully diverse space but that’s an illusion — as much of an illusion as the capitalist supermarket. Old ideas still circulate under the fairground of the new queer culture. Men will frequently tell you that they do not kiss (as they always did). It is really strange this hang-up about kissing, and I think there’s something upper-caste about it — about germs and contamination.

Men will proudly tell you that they do not even kiss women (to which I say ‘Yeah, right!) and they will allow you to kiss them anywhere on their bodies but not on their mouths. But, more disturbingly, it shows an internalised homophobia. They do not — are not able to — see two men kissing as natural, right.

The second undercurrent linked to this is that they somewhere think gay relationships have no stability, no solidity. Most of them will be marrying women in the end. Only the heterosexual Symbolic gives stability and has heft. With friends like this, who needs heterosexual, homophobic enemies? Even the ones looking for relationships somewhere do not believe these are possible.

The third is that most of these men are selfish and care only about getting their rocks off and heading home. Whether you have orgasmed or not, whether or not you are satisfied is just not an issue to them. No sex education also means no bedroom etiquette at all for almost all of these men. The fourth is an internalised hatred for gay sex. Even the ones who kiss do not kiss once they have orgasmed. What does that mean? Why does the partner become repulsive once one has orgasmed. One thought only straight men did that with women.

Most of these men are also misogynistic. They are forever asking men not to be feminine, sissy, girlish and asking such men to avoid them. What does this say about how they perceive women?

What does this say about how they deal with the feminine in themselves? They are also asking for ‘real men’ and want only NSA (no strings attached) sex.

Muscular men are always asking only for other muscular men in a replication of the clone culture in the white gay world which makes one shudder. It appears we are always ready to copy the worst aspects of other cultures. The need for NSA is not because they are individualist but because they see relationships as outside the gay world which is in any case usually hidden from their regular lives.

All of this means that in the end one longs for only one of the first three types I mentioned. The dehaati man who is just honest about getting his rocks off. If he becomes regular, he may start asking for money but that is so much more preferable to all the multicoloured, seemingly diverse, soaps in the supermarket that in the end all smell of the same old shit.