What I found was that I lost the ability to distinguish who was gay. I think that's culturally determined. It's like when I first went to Canada, I thought everybody was straight. I couldn't tell. When I went back to India ten years later, I reversed that: Everybody seem to be gay because they all walked in hand in hand. They all were limp-wristed. It's so cultural, but no one wanted to talk about it. That put people off. In a cruising area, for example, people came to have sex, not to have a chat about it. I was trying to collect audio interviews as well as photographs, for artistic purposes. I guess I looked like some kind of social scientist with a tape recorder and a camera, and people were not keen to speak, and they were definitely not keen to be in a picture. Everybody was in the closet still, and I thought it would be very unfair to publicize them all over the world without their knowledge. [...]
To add to what Sunil said about how the scene has changed or really hasn't changed: Gay men are all still married. Back in the 1980, when I was taking the pictures meeting these people at the parks, they were claiming to be gay, and I used to say, "Well, you're not gay because you're married with five children." They're not gay in the sense that the West knows—that you walked of your house, left your biological family home, and didn't get married to the opposite sex and had children. That's a huge social pressure and norm in India, and it's still there [today]. [...]
In the 80s, when I was finding that men had no speech about [being queer] and they were voiceless or in the closet, but were able to have a lot of public sex, women had a relatively opposite experience. Streets [in India] can be dangerous to women, so they're not hanging out on the street corners, and so women did have a voice. Privately, women were talking a lot more about a women's movement, in which there's space for sexual difference. Some of India's more recent gay liberation and the politics of it from the 90s, early 2000s, emerged from the women's movement.
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