Not there yet! Why India has to wait longer to be able to wake up to a Kal Penn-like coming out-Entertainment News , Firstpost

Kal Penn, that genuinely entertaining American entertainer of Indian origin, surprised many and shocked none (at least no one in his circle and community of  family friends and relatives) by coming out gay last month.

Penn is the most recent among a gallery of celebrities in the West who have come out gay. From talk show hostess Ellen DeGeneres to Elliot  Page (who came out a transgender in 2020), American entertainers have revealed a refreshing propensity to come out of the closet in the last two decades. Earlier, superstar-entertainers like Rock Hudson, George Michael, and Freddy Mercury nearly suffocated in the closet until they were forced out by AIDS.

 In  India, AIDS was never a disincentive for coming out. Societal prejudices were. In spite of the abolition of the draconian Article 377, homophobia continues to rule the Indian film industry. There are several gay and bisexual actors and filmmakers in the Hindi film industry but only a handful have come out. These include filmmaker Onir and writer-director Apurva Asrani.

Asrani has written Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh, the haunting saga of Professor Siras, who died under mysterious circumstances after being caught in a gay act. He says Bollywood is far away from an acceptance of homosexuality. “It’s too soon for that to be applicable here too. In Hollywood, many actors are out of the closet. Here, I can’t think of any who are. The day there is an actor pool that self identifies as gay, casting directors can get them to audition for a gay character first. But all said and done, the choice should be made for a good and capable actor, irrespective of their sexuality.”

Let alone come out of the closet, actors are still largely petrified of playing gay characters. Aligarh director Hansal Mehta, who describes himself as a subversive filmmaker, had a tough time casting for the film. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who comes from an extremelyconservative background, was reluctant. Eventually, the role went to Manoj Bajpayee, and he gave a hauntingly memorable performance as the lonely homosexual professor.

However, let it be known that Bajpayee, for all his dedication and commitment, refused to perform any intimate scenes with any male actor in Aligarh. Not even a same-sex kiss, like Randeep Hooda and Saqib Saleem did in Karan Johar’s Bombay Talkies segment.

A-lister actors, who condescend to play gay, do so under the chastest of circumstances. Akshay Kumar’s publicity machinery had gone into overdrive claiming he was playing gay in Rohit Dhawan’s Dishoom. It turned out that there was nothing to suggest homosexuality in his character’s personality, except the ‘man bun,’ which is as gay as muscles on exhibition in a health magazine.

I remember many years ago, my dear departed friend Rituparno Ghosh, who lost his life in multiple surgeries for a sex change, had approached Kumar to play a homosexual character. Kumar met Ghosh reverently. During those days (I think it was the early 2000s), Kumar was on a woo-avant-garde-directors trip. He  wanted to work with directors like Deepa Mehta and Ghosh. The minute Kumar heard what Ghosh had in mind, he clammed up.

Ghosh had to face many snubs and rejections in Bollywood. Once he was at Shah Rukh Khan’s residence when Khan’s son Aryan, who was four to five years old, walked in. SRK told  Aryan to say hello to Uncle. “But is he Uncle or Aunty?” the little boy asked. That incident did not hurt Ghosh as much as  the one where he was shooting a Shakespearean film with a legendary actor. When one day, Ghosh walked in for the day’s shot dressed in feminine finery, the actor shouted across the room, “Must you be so obvious about it?”

That really hurt Ghosh. That one sentence embodied all the homophobic prejudices of the Indian entertainment industry for Ghosh.

The one actor who never shyed away from playing gay was Rahul  Bose. In one of his  earliest films, Bom-gay (a series of short films), Bose played a gay character who was shown having sex with a stranger in the passive position. Speaking of  the far-reaching ramifications of the role (this was in 1996), Bose had said, “I did it because the director was a dear friend. I played a gay guy called Leftie who was deviant in every sense. He had to steal his guilty pleasures wherever he could. No actor wanted to do that role. I did it because I believe actors cannot afford to shy away from homosexuality. It’s the easiest thing for me to take a stand on the matter because I’m acting.”

Bose feels there was a stigma against homosexuality in films, and in society. “We haven’t moved one inch forward. Our cinema remains deeply hypocritical. Again, a reflection of society. Art exhibitions showing huge penises can only create outrage. Genuine social change has to come slowly, and from the fringes. We need to tackle homosexuality in a similar way. We only have crass movies reinforcing stereotypes on homosexuality.”

Bose does acknowledge the fact that it is tough for mainstream Bollywood actors to play gay.

“I guess I can drop my pants and my inhibitions because I’m not a conventional leading man. I’ve no image.

I’m marginal. To the mainstream actors, the image is more important than their integrity as an actor.”

As Indian cinema struggles to come to terms with the constantly changing world, homosexuality is aesthetically acknowledged in Aligarh, and the Malayalam Moothon, directed  by Geetu Mohandas.What is currently a trickle could turn into a torrent. But only in a more accepting, less bigoted society. Maybe later.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.