History owes an apology to LGBT people for ostracising them – Supreme Court
The squeals on streets and bordellos alike, 377 no more, we say, 377 no more! The felony is gone, the fun never did. Love wins. Hashtags and corporates are on a roll. Whose love and to what ends?
This is an emotion, an affective state, carved in the contours of our bodies, as blood and semen, as tears, goosebumps often, that twitch, that twinkle; we have arrived where the end begins the beginnings, where the eclipse gives away to warmer days and colder nights.
A battle, not ours, us queers privileged of the written word, but one of every whose flesh were filaments of every word the law laced itself with; ‘unnatural’, ‘against the order of nature’, ‘carnal’, ‘imprisonment for life’.
We think of homes, of privacies dear to us middle classes; we think of candlelight dinners, of tasteful intimacies and woke Instagram stories; we think of living the age, life like never before.
Homosexuality is not a crime anymore in India
This is our verdict. But the verdict isn’t ours. I wasn’t there rebuked for selling condoms to jailers in 1994, nor did I dare protest in front of the Delhi Police Headquarters against 377’s arbitrary arrests alongside AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA).
I wasn’t arrested in my own home for having sex with a man, I wasn’t tortured, maimed, raped in police stations when I pleaded for help.
Fear of the law, of the rule of law deeply affects the most marginalised. By saying that, doing away with 377 is nothing or that its the tip of the iceberg, in our shiny sarees and loud writings, we are but snatching away the claims this verdicts vociferously tries to establish, we are but complicit in our own privilege.
Dignity, privacy, autonomy – three of these words resonate quite frequently in the September 6, 2018 judgment, these words constitute not just the articles of constitution, but the fine fabric of living-ness, in that flux of many such laws in the state’s arsenal, lying bare, ready to wound.
By living-ness, I do not mean the horizon where precarity perishes, I mean that high one feels when the quivering desire to dissent, in the barrenness of an already un-democratic un-freed lands of the nation.
As we celebrate in our homes, with our bottles of wine, creamy cakes, in streets ladened with slogans, in campuses with friends; we must not slur over the lives, each heartbeat, each pulse, where the verdict swims so gracefully in.
As I pen this, let solidarities be of love, of forgiveness, of the law no more.
Neel Sengupta
A postgraduate in Performance Studies and a former convenor of the AUD Queer Collective. She identifies as trans queer femme, and loves to masculinities moan, either on page or on bed.
