The Man Who Let India Out of the Closet
SEXUALITIES, 20 Feb 2017
Aatish Taseer – The New York Times
Karan Johar at an event last month in Mumbai. Credit Ritam Banerjee/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures
16 Feb 2017 — The most ubiquitous man in Bollywood is under tremendous pressure to utter three simple words: “I am gay.”
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 synonymous with “popcorn, bubble gum and frivolity.” All the stars are his friends, and the brightest of them appear on his immensely popular talk show “Koffee With Karan.” He has some 10 million followers on Twitter and almost three million on Instagram.
As a young protégé of his told me, “He is Bollywood.”
An ocean of innuendo has always surrounded Mr. Johar’s 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. “The only time I’m tight-lipped is when I’m asked about my sexuality,” he writes in his recently published memoir, “An Unsuitable Boy.” “It’s the only part of me I feel I’ve caged.”
What makes Mr. Johar’s case so much of a piece with this particular moment in India 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 “Bombay Talkies”; 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.
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’s gay kiss hit movie screens across India, the Supreme Court reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which places homosexuality, alongside bestiality, as “against the order of nature.”
What the ruling in practice has come to mean is that gay sex for the most part is permitted — the authorities turn a blind eye — 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 — which can mean Grindr on one end, and the right to marriage on the other — 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.
It is in this context that Mr. Johar’s 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 “Aligarh,” an affecting film about a gay professor in a Muslim university town, wrote in The Wire: “Sadly Karan’s public image reeks of the very same gay stereotyping that Bollywood infamously propagates — the frustrated sexual predator, the comic relief, the closeted ‘butt of all jokes.’ ”
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 “family” audience, but he works vigorously within them.
I’ve 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 “Dostana” (“Bromance”), his 2008 romantic comedy in which two men — both major stars — pretend to be gay so that they can rent an apartment with a pretty Indian girl abroad. Last year, he produced “Kapoor & Sons,” 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.
No major actor was willing to play the role. “I went to eight or nine stars,” Mr. Johar told me over lunch in New York, “and they all said that if the character is gay in the end, then no.” 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.)
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 “popcorn, bubble gum and frivolity,” it turned out, is only a way to conceal something tart and acid and provocative.
One recent night in Mumbai, I found myself at a small party at Mr. Johar’s house. A group of stars had gathered on a balcony, overlooking the liquid darkness of sea and city lights. I’d just finished Mr. Johar’s book. Its last line is: “Death doesn’t scare me, life sometimes does.”
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 — even, as he writes in his memoir, resorting to an agency that deals exclusively with the ultrarich and famous — faces the prospect of growing old alone. It’s a theme he returns to again and again in the book, as does his desire to have children. I hope he does.
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’t 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 — and, needless to say, gay.
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Aatish Taseer (@aatishtaseer) is a contributing opinion writer and the author, most recently, of the novel The Way Things Were.
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