When Reporting About Gay Rights in India Gets Very Personal

 Supreme Court, India

 

 By Kai Schultz

NEW DELHI — For over 150 years, a law called Section 377 has imposed up to a life sentence in prison on “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” Section 377 is vaguely worded, an archaic law introduced by British colonizers with stiff, Victorian morals. Essentially, it criminalizes gay sex in India.

Over the last six months, my reporting has taken me across the country to understand how the law works officially and unofficially, as a cover for blackmailing, harassing and sexually assaulting gay and transgender Indians. In the coming days, India’s Supreme Court is expected to rule on the law’s constitutionality.

During July hearings in a packed courtroom, lawyers read from moving petitions filed by dozens of L.G.B.T. Indians who are challenging the law. In minute detail, they described the challenges of living openly here, demanding their right to love. 

One evening, as hearings wound down, a wave of emotion caught me off guard at home in Delhi. I realized I had become a part of the story.

I am a gay man reporting on gay rights in India. But I am also invisible in many situations, asking the questions but never answering them. As a journalist, I struggled with my own place in the narrative.

Three years ago, when I left New York City for South Asia to give journalism a try, I barely thought about the consequences of moving to a part of the world where sex between men is illegal. The longer I stayed, the more I felt unsettled.

Forty-five million people populate Delhi and its suburbs. Assuming five or 10 percent of the population is gay, the community should reach into the millions. But attend Delhi’s annual pride parade or stop by one of just a few L.G.B.T. organizations in the city — you will realize how few people are out.

In part, I volunteered to cover gay rights in India because I wanted to know: Where were all the gay men?  

Finding sources willing to speak with me was challenging. I contacted the groups working on L.G.B.T. issues in India and asked if they knew of anyone who had been targeted by Section 377. The answer was almost always the same: The people they knew would not speak on the record, or were caught in legal binds, or were simply afraid. The risks of family ostracism, extortion or police involvement weighed on many people’s minds.

Posting in closed Facebook groups for L.G.B.T. Indians sometimes worked. Several men privately messaged me, saying they were comfortable with part of their names being published. To my surprise, it was easier speaking to people in villages than in cities. One lower-income gay man, who lived alone in a shoebox room in India’s interiors, defiantly told me he had nothing left to lose. In the last year, he had been raped several times, he said.

Traveling around the country, I found that progressiveness on the issue did not necessarily predict progressive mores on others. In a rural patch of central India, a transgender woman told me she planned to break up with her boyfriend because “he should marry a woman of the same caste.” Later, in a city a few hundred miles away, a gay man ran his fingers along my arm and remarked on the whiteness of my skin, saying he wished he were fairer; it was more attractive, he said.

When my questions were perceived as too pointed, I was told to worry about my own country’s problems. After I met a police superintendent leading sensitization training in a nearby district, I informed him that transgender locals often felt unsafe approaching law enforcement officials. Clearly irritated, he posed a question: “Aren’t transgender people all in the mafia in the United States?”

As I dug in, I weighed whether to reveal my sexuality in interviews, looking for ways to set people at ease, but also wondering whether the idea was connected to my own loneliness. Section 377 thwarts the formation of supportive communities — it is not uncommon for cops to demand bribes from party organizers at the few clubs in Delhi that hold events for the gay community.

The loneliness was jarring. Many nights, I stared at the ceiling and cried. I wondered if other people here felt the same way. Through my reporting, I realized some of them did.

Among the more affecting interviews was one with a young man who went by A., his first initial. In conversations that lasted for hours over text, Facebook and in person, A. recalled the night in 2014 when he was drugged and raped by two men at the bare-bones hostel of a medical college. 

A. decided not to report the crime, fearing that he, too, would be arrested.

After we met in Delhi, A. asked that I keep his identity confidential. In a country of 1.3 billion people, he hesitated to let me use even his first initial, whispering stories of gruesome hate crimes and the fear that his own parents would “literally kill me” if they found out he had been raped.

Over several months, I fact-checked details of A.’s story, and asked how he was doing. He never revealed much about himself, telling me he did not want to have extended contact with somebody who knew about the rape. But when I asked A. why he had decided to speak out, his answer was one that has lingered.

“People should know that bad thing happen,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2018, on Page A2 New York Times