Complicit As Conspiratorial

The year 2010 was a good, good year to occupy queerness. Partly because it was the year Guzaarish came into our lives – when maudlin, mostly unpalatable Bollywood made way for Ethan Mascarenhas. Hrithik Roshan was magic, naked tragedy, the romance of death, and magnificent tresses in one, and my 13-year-old queerness surrendered as sweetly as it grasped itself. Of course I had known that something about me and men was really 'wrong', as I remember telling a friend in school, but Guzaarish made it sickeningly obvious.

As if Justin Timberlake in Sexy Back hadn't been enough. I was in love. Partly, perhaps, because 2010 was when 2009 was a year old, when the law sanctioned that desires beyond the normatively inscribed could flow uninhibitedly; when the Naz Foundation assumed the fulfilment of its unthinking endeavour; when 377 was the terror and violence of history.

As someone who reads and tries to write history now, when 2010 is seven years old and 2009 is eight, the cruelty of history is not lost on me. Things, as we found out, can change in a day. Or in three years. Despite having never felt, unlike many others, the need to navigate the proverbial closet, the horror of 2013 was too palpable. On 11 December 2013, only a few months before Narendra Modi and the flagrant electoral triumph of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Supreme Court overturned the joyous judgement of 2009 – desires had to be inhibited, the Naz Foundation lamented the loss of the 'liberty' it conceived as emanating from law, and 377, us queers were plaintively told, was here to stay.

The palpability of this horror for my generation was and remains embedded in the creation of the queer subject of the modern liberal state betrayed by law and egged on by an affective public that understands and 'feels' its constitutional betrayal. It is in this betrayal of law that pride is born and negotiating the secure closet made possible. Having read our Benjamin, after all, we know that a critique of violence is to be premised on the inextricability of Gewalt and Recht, violence and law, and in turn of Gerechtigkeit, that is, justice.

For the many who lived before 377 acquired brutish currency and the many who live under its so-called regime of terror, the queer movement's (if there is 'one' queer movement at all) complex relationship with law and constitutionalism is discomforting beyond its immediate, overwhelming affective significance. I am rather baffled, more often than not, by the metaphor of the closet, by the discourse of pride, and how the performance and performativity of being 'out' renders the queer normative. Queerness, bizarrely so, is fashioned into making oneself intelligible to the violent normative: whether it is to love, make love, marry, or in becoming no-longer- betrayed citizens of the nation-state and subjects of the implicit, abiding cause of Labour, capital, and child.

But my queerness does not settle for easy, comfortable answers. My queerness does not want to be like you, even as I may be like you in ways more than necessary. If to come 'out' is to go back 'in' and remain seamlessly wedded to violent intelligibility, why be 'out' at all?

My political rejects the realpolitik and my queer politics makes itself one with my gender and caste politics even as it refuses to settle into gender, gendered, and caste(d) frames and structures of present political life. I do not know where gender, caste, race, and class begin and end except in each other. To leave the closet is to leave life as we are forced to know it. I am not only proud, but outrageous, unintelligible, threatening, conspiratorial, and in that flux, incorrigible. I do not want to be liked by gender as a familiar anomaly. Of the many meanings that coming out has taken, mine is affirmative sabotage.

Kartik Maini is an undergraduate student of history in St. Stephen's College, Delhi.

 Tell us how you came out of the closet at sexualitydna@gmail.com​