Twenty years ago, Delhi was a different place if you were a gay man. It was a well-guarded secret that gay men existed. This silence had the backing of the law. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code forbade consensual homosexual sex between adult men, amongst other things. Although this law had no place in Indian culture, being a British import, it lingered on and became enshrined as part of our national culture.

These photographs were made in 1987, the fortieth year of Indian independence, marking the continuing suppression of gay men. Sexual orientation was still not on the development agenda. Nationalists, communists, World Bank technocrats had all joined in the conspiracy of silence surrounding homosexuality within the sub-continent.

A handful of gay men felt unable to return to live in the country. The rest continued to live a marginalized existence, giving in to family and social pressures to maintain a “normal” front. A few at the top and bottom of the social and political ladder were privileged enough to side step these pressures. Very few who identified with the secret “dirty habit”, even those who labeled themselves gay, felt able to come out from this self-imposed internal exile.

News of constitutional gains made by gay activists in the West to foster a positive gay identity and culture filtered in but obviously their tactics could not be exactly duplicated in India. On the other hand, HIV/AIDS arrived to reinforce all the worst stereotypes; the most common of which is that homosexuality is some terrible Western disease. That this was not the case was obvious to anyone even with a rudimentary contact with the gay scene in India.