How Stonewall came to India via Coffee Home in Connaught Place

As the world marks the 50th anniversary of Stonewall on June 28, Vikram Doctor looks back at India’s long march for pride
Sunil Gupta was 14-15 years old, and in the most notorious place in Delhi in the late 1960s when he first saw other gay people. This was The Cellar, the capital’s first standalone nightclub, and Gupta was there as his sister’s chaperone.“I’d be given a Coke and told to sit in a corner seat,” he recalls.
It was there that he heard people talking. “They said, did you know that guy there is gay,’’ says Gupta. He had heard about gays from magazines brought by Berkeley students staying as paying guests with his family. “They had gay personals ads, and while the students weren’t gay, I could talk to them about it.’’ And now, at The Cellar, he realised there were gays living in Delhi, just as he could be too.
June is the month for Pride marches. It isn’t imperative — Mumbai, for example, has its Pride in January partly because marching in the monsoon isn’t a great idea, and Sydney’s Mardi Gras parade is in February during Australia’s summer. But most marches happen this month in a tradition that started with New York city’s Stonewall riots which began in the early hours of June 28, 1969.
That is when the NYC police raided the Stonewall Inn, a hangout for some of the city’s queer community. It was routine harassment, but this time people fought back by trapping the police in the Inn. This was followed with three nights and days of riots and protest. Stonewall got considerable publicity and gave queer activists greater confidence. The first anniversary in 1970 was celebrated in NYC, Chicago and Los Angeles; in 1971 more cities in the US, and Europe too, joined in and this was the genesis of Pride as an affirmation for queer rights. The 50th anniversary this year will be marked by WorldPride in New York, a global commemoration of the gains made and challenges still facing queer rights.
Back in 1969, India would have seemed very far from Stonewall. And yet as experiences like Gupta’s show, queer people were living their lives here too, and it was their sheer existence at that time that would provide the soil from which today’s movement would spring.
As is shown by sources as diverse as the Khajuraho carvings, Urdu love poetry and literary works like Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf, same-sex love has a history in India as long as anywhere in the world. The criminalisation of such practices by the British through Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code stifled any open growth of the community and yet it continued to exist.
Police reports hint at the persecutions queer people faced, and yet they managed to meet and create clandestine communities. These surface occasionally in literary references as diverse as the sensational stories of Ugra (Pandey Bechan Sharma), Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, and a wonderfully badly written, yet campily fun novel called The Dew-Drop Inn by Leslie de Noronha, who was for years the theatre critic of Mumbai’s Catholic newsletter The Examiner.
That novel paints a picture of a freewheeling gay scene in Bombay in the 1960s, but always in private and mostly at parties. “It was vital to have a place of your own,’’ says Saleem Kidwai, the writer and historian who came to Delhi in his teens. Indians living with large families were at a disadvantage which is why so much of the scene revolved around foreigners who had the houses and relative freedom from scrutiny.
Many expatriates had stayed on after the Raj, usually as agents of foreign firms, enjoying the freedom their status gave them to lead a gay life they couldn’t back home. They also enjoyed the many Indian men who preferred sleeping with foreigners, because they saw it as safer than sleeping with other Indians. By the late ‘60s though, another younger type of foreigner was being seen — Peace Corps workers or the first hippies.
The 1960s also allowed a few young Indians to experience gay culture in the West. This was courtesy Air India, which was one of the leading, most stylish airlines in the world then. Run by worldly bosses like Bobby Kooka, it attracted many gay and bisexual men (and a few lesbians as well) to work as aircrew. Going abroad was still hard for Indians, so for the aircrew it was a rare chance to experience gay life abroad.
N., who was one of them, remembers how, on one of his first trips to the US, two other gay crew members took him to a Manhattan bathhouse where gay men met. “They went off to have fun and left me alone. I was so embarrassed it took me about three to four visits before I picked up the courage to approach someone!’’ In the years after Stonewall, N. noticed a greater openness in New York: “Before you’d take the cab to the head of the road the bathhouse was in, but later on they had no problem dropping you to the door!’’ But no change seemed forthcoming in India. Many of his gay colleagues got married, arguing that an open gay life in India was impossible, while others emigrated.
In Delhi too, Kidwai saw gay IAS officers he knew getting married; there seemed no other option, and the sex they could always get on the side. And yet even then there were a few who resisted. The economist Pulapre Balakrishnan cites the example of two older friends — a historian and a businessman — who never formally came out, but never tried to marry and conceal their sexuality either and always remained friendly and supportive, but not exploitative, of younger gay men. “They were mentors to me,’’ he says.
In 1990, journalist Ashok Row Kavi started Bombay Dost, India’s first gay magazine. In Delhi, Balakrishnan was part of a group of gays and lesbians who started meeting at Coffee Home, the coffee shop run by Delhi Tourism near Connaught Place, to discuss how to start fighting for their rights. They called themselves the Red Rose group because a flower was always kept on the table to identify it for newcomers.
In 1994, the Aids Bedbhav Virodhi Andolan filed the first petition in the Delhi High Court challenging Section 377. It was an early indication of how activism around the HIV epidemic would force the Indian government to tacitly acknowledge groups representing sexual minorities, even as it stopped short of granting them rights. In 1996, the controversy around Deepa Mehta’s film Fire provided a rallying point for activism. Kolkata led the way with the first Pride march in 1999, and other cities followed.
And finally in July last year, the Supreme Court commenced hearing arguments against Section 377 in an 18-year-long process that ultimately resulted in the Navtej Singh Johar decision that decriminalised same sex love between consenting adults. It was a huge change, yet it would not have been possible, here as in New York 50 years ago, without the gays and lesbians who lived their lives then.