{"id":87051,"date":"2017-02-20T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=87051"},"modified":"2017-02-17T15:19:57","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T15:19:57","slug":"the-man-who-let-india-out-of-the-closet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/the-man-who-let-india-out-of-the-closet\/","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Let India Out of the Closet"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Karan Johar at an event last month in Mumbai. Credit Ritam Banerjee\/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures<\/p><\/div>\n

16 Feb 2017<\/em> \u2014 The most ubiquitous man in Bollywood is under tremendous pressure to utter three simple words: \u201cI am gay.\u201d<\/p>\n

If these three words have acquired the force of absolution, it is because Karan Johar is by miles the most famous Indian ever to almost be openly gay. Since he burst onto the scene in the late 1990s, this 44-year-old director-producer has reached vast audiences with his movies. His name is a byword for family entertainment, his films by his own admission<\/a> synonymous with \u201cpopcorn, bubble gum and frivolity.\u201d All the stars are his friends, and the brightest of them appear on his immensely popular talk show \u201cKoffee With Karan.\u201d He has some 10 million followers on Twitter and almost three million on Instagram.<\/p>\n

As a young prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of his told me, \u201cHe is <\/em>Bollywood.\u201d<\/p>\n

An ocean of innuendo has always surrounded Mr. Johar\u2019s sexuality. He has done more than anybody to introduce the idea of homosexuality into the Indian home. It would seem no closet door was better primed to spring open than his. And yet when he tries the latch, he finds it sticks. \u201cThe only time I\u2019m tight-lipped is when I\u2019m asked about my sexuality,\u201d he writes in his recently published memoir, \u201cAn Unsuitable Boy.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s the only part of me I feel I\u2019ve caged.\u201d<\/p>\n

What makes Mr. Johar\u2019s case so much of a piece with this particular moment in India<\/a> is that while he has been circumspect on his sexual orientation, he has, both in his life and his work, been breathtakingly explicit about sex: In 2013, he gave the Indian screen a smoldering gay kiss in \u201cBombay Talkies\u201d; two years later, as roast master in a comic event that millions saw on YouTube, he joked before a live audience, with his mother present, of being the recipient of anal sex; in his new book, that same curious mixture of reticence and candor pervades. Mr. Johar will not use the male pronoun, but he writes openly and often movingly about everything from the pain of unreciprocated love to the aridity of having to pay for sex.<\/p>\n

It is impossible not to see Mr. Johar against the background of the society in which he lives. India right now is in the grip of a strange schizophrenia when it comes to gay freedom. The gay dating apps are teeming with activity. Everyone is having sex. Even in small towns, men are furiously soliciting other men. But the legal recognition of same-sex love is stuck firmly in 19th-century Britain. In 2013, the same year Mr. Johar\u2019s gay kiss hit movie screens across India, the Supreme Court reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which places homosexuality, alongside bestiality, as \u201cagainst the order of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

What the ruling in practice has come to mean is that gay sex for the most part is permitted \u2014 the authorities turn a blind eye \u2014 but is criminalized on the books, which means of course that marriage, or even any social or legal acknowledgment of same-sex love, is a distant dream. This has created a society where gay freedoms \u2014 which can mean Grindr on one end, and the right to marriage on the other \u2014 are reduced to carnal pleasure. India, as a consequence, feels like a place where love and sex have parted ways, and where the arc of freedom is bending toward license.<\/p>\n

It is in this context that Mr. Johar\u2019s equivocations acquire special meaning. He is not popular among activists and the intelligentsia. They accuse him of reducing gay characters to effeminate parodies. Apurva Asrani, the script writer of \u201cAligarh,\u201d an affecting film about a gay professor in a Muslim university town, wrote in The Wire<\/a>: <\/em>\u201cSadly Karan\u2019s public image reeks of the very same gay stereotyping that Bollywood infamously propagates \u2014 the frustrated sexual predator, the comic relief, the closeted \u2018butt of all jokes.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

But Mr. Johar knows that he is far more subversive than his critics admit. He has introduced the idea of homosexuality by stealth into the Indian home. He knows the limits of his \u201cfamily\u201d audience, but he works vigorously within them.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve known Mr. Johar over the years, and when I ran into him in New York this winter, the impression I had was of a man who had quietly been pushing the edge of the envelope for years. He was a long way from \u201cDostana\u201d (\u201cBromance\u201d), <\/em>his 2008 romantic comedy in which two men \u2014 both major stars \u2014 pretend to be gay so that they can rent an apartment with a pretty Indian girl abroad. Last year, he produced \u201cKapoor & Sons,\u201d a film about the golden boy of a middle-class Indian family living a secret gay life abroad who eventually comes out to his distraught mother.<\/p>\n

No major actor was willing to play the role. \u201cI went to eight or nine stars,\u201d Mr. Johar told me over lunch in New York, \u201cand they all said that if the character is gay in the end, then no.\u201d Finally he found Fawad Khan, a Pakistani actor, who gave a magnificent performance. (Mr. Khan was later forced to leave India because of tensions between India and Pakistan.)<\/p>\n

Mr. Johar can reach many more people than an art-house director, but he also has to be more careful. He is a man working within the limits of a tradition, quietly assimilating outside influence. He has to make palatable to his vast audience changing attitudes, sexual mores and values. But the \u201cpopcorn, bubble gum and frivolity,\u201d it turned out, is only a way to conceal something tart and acid and provocative.<\/p>\n

One recent night in Mumbai, I found myself at a small party at Mr. Johar\u2019s house. A group of stars had gathered on a balcony, overlooking the liquid darkness of sea and city lights. I\u2019d just finished Mr. Johar\u2019s book. Its last line is: \u201cDeath doesn\u2019t scare me, life sometimes does.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I watched the producer among his friends, now a star lovingly nurtured, now a hero, aging but still handsome, I became acutely aware of his solitude. He is of that generation that came of sexual age maybe five or 10 years before the freedoms of this recent time burst upon us. That meant that Mr. Johar, though he has tried actively to find love \u2014 even, as he writes in his memoir, resorting to an agency that deals exclusively with the ultrarich and famous \u2014 faces the prospect of growing old alone. It\u2019s a theme he returns to again and again in the book, as does his desire to have children. I hope he does.<\/p>\n

Mr. Johar may not have uttered the three magic words, but his life and his work are a portrait in courage. Watching him play the host that night, I couldn\u2019t help thinking that, for all his contradictions, he is a man who has done more than anyone to make India safe for love. One wants him not merely to be brave, but happy \u2014 and, needless to say, gay.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/p>\n

Aatish Taseer (@aatishtaseer<\/a>) is a contributing opinion writer and the author, most recently, of the novel<\/em> The Way Things Were.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

16 Feb 2017 \u2014 The most ubiquitous man in Bollywood is under tremendous pressure to utter three simple words: \u201cI am gay.\u201d If these three words have acquired the force of absolution, it is because Karan Johar is by miles the most famous Indian ever to almost be openly gay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sexualities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}