Of Marlowe and Christian sculpture

When in college I was introduced to that troublesome figure from the English Renaissance - Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) - one of the first things that I was told about him was that he was - cough, cough, gulp, gulp - a homosexual. That late sixteenth-century manscript (prepared from the information provided by Richard Baines) was quoted from where Marlowe is attributed the statement - among other newsworthy soundbytes - that "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest...That St. John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosome, that he used him as the sinners of Sodom." I have often wondered where Marlowe got that extraordinary notion of St. John resting his head on Christ's chest from, but have never bothered to search too assiduously for the source of that notion. In fact I had forgotten all about it till yesterday when I bought a book simply called "Sculpture" (2007). In that book I was stunned to find a couple of images that brought back to my mind with lightening speed that remark attributed to Marlowe about Christ and St. John. I found myself staring open-mouthed at photos of two wooden sculptures from 1300 A.D., depicting Christ and St. John in exactly the same posture as described, allegedly, by Marlowe. What was even more fascinating was that these two sculptures dated from 1300, a mere seven years before Edward II ascended the throne of England and started living a life which would interest Marlowe enough less than three hundred years hence to write a play on the king! So, not only would Edward II have been aware of these sculptures, but Marlowe would have known about these artefacts too. Which is why, he doesn't talk much about David and Jonathan (Edward II and his supposed boyfriend Gaveston were apparently spoken of in their time as "David and Jonathan") but he speaks of Christ and St. John. Now we know where Marlowe got that notion of St. John leaning on Christ's bosom from! I wonder if there are other statues from that time - the 14th century - where Christ and St. John are depicted in this rather odd manner. I mean, just look at the two. These are not two friends indulging in a bit of bromance! The posture of St. John speaks of a coyness which hints at an emotional relationship between the two which appears not have been restricted to the Platonic. I mean, if instead of St. John the sculpture had shown a woman would Joe Public still consider the posture purely Platonic? I don't know enough about the two sculptures, but will now try to find out more. I understand that in the Gospel According to St. John the disciple is shown leaning on Christ during the Last Supper, but the manner in which the sculptures depict St.John and Jesus gives one the impression that the two men are a loving couple in a cosy posture and not two of several people attending a dinner. And it seems Marlowe was not the first to suggest that Christ and St. John were more than guru and disciple. In 1550, fourteen years before Marlowe's birth, a libertine being tried in Venice had confessed to believing in the heresy that St.John was Christ's catamite! By the way, the sculptures can currently be checked out at Bayerisches National Museum, Munich (this is the statue depicting St. John in a green tunic) and the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Both, as I have mentioned, are made of painted and gilded wood. I shall post here if I find anything interesting about the two sculptures in the future.

3 Homophobic Petitions, 2 Homophiliac Films and 1 Court of Law

What a day 17th August 2009 turned out to be! The day before, queer-identified and queer-supporting Mumbaikars were out in the streets celebrating their queer azaadi. On the 17th news broke of the fashion designer Manish Malhotra designing the costumes for a short film for free! Of course, this was no ordinary short film. It was the Bengali film-maker Onir's latest venture called Omar. The film centres on the way Rahul Bose's character - a gay man - is blackmailed by a rent boy (played by Arjun Mathur) in connivance with a cop (played by Abhimanyu Singh). The pictures of the three actors appear in this post in the order in which I have mentioned them. On the 17th, shooting began on a Bengali film named Arekti Premer Golpo (Another Love Story). This feature film stars the campier-than-a-row-of-tents real-life film-maker Rituporno Ghosh as a gay film-maker (that must be a difficult character for him to get into!) in love with a bisexual married man. On that very same day the Supreme Court refused again - for a second time - to stay the 2nd July Delhi High Court order reading down Section 377, resisting considerable provocation from two new petitions against the Section 377 verdict. This brought the number of homophobic petitions to three! Bring 'em on! How many more rabid homophobes are out there who are certain that two men or two women loving each other will precipitate the end of civilisation as we know it?

Counter-energize it!

Thinking about a paper I heard yesterday it occured to me that perhaps the time has come for me to coin another word, a compound word. This time the word is 'counter-energy'. I checked the internet and did not find any use of the word, so I guess if there was no such word before, there needs to be one now. To counter-energize a word is to evacuate the othering, derogatory, demeaning energy that animates the word and to replace that energy with one that is self-constituting, self-affirming and valorising in order to counter the energy that the word was phallogocentrically imbued with before. The earliest example of counter-energizing may be the 'black is beautiful' slogan raised in the 1960's, the counter-energizing of the word 'queer' by Teresa de Lauretis in 1991 is, to me, its best instance so far. It is also being used as an empowering strategy by practitioners of fat studies, as I discovered yesterday, 14 August 2009, at a seminar here in the city at the American Centre. There may be, if one jogs one's memory a bit, quite a few other such instances of 'counter-energizing' but I'm sure no one word or no one verb existed to express the act of appropriating a word in such a way that the nature of the word's energy changes completely. It is not the mere act of appropriation, but the nature of the change in the usage of the word which I wish to indicate through the word 'counter-energizing'. I guess in India if queer men started calling themselves 'chhakka' and with pride that would be a counter-energizing act and it would be an act, because we have been taught by J.L. Austin and by Judith Butler how to do things with words! So, it would be an act, even a political one.

Delhi, the New Pink City!!

Thursday, 2nd July 2009. Delhi High Court, Court One, Item One on the cause list. 10.30 am. Justice Ajit Prakash Shah started to speak, reading from the 105-page order, as Justice S. Muralidhar looked on. Justice Shah began by quoting from one of Nehru's speeches, made at the Constituent Assembly in 1946, laying stress on the word 'inclusiveness'. A few minutes later, he pronounced the words that were as calm as they were momentous. "We declare that Section 377 of the IPC, insofar as it criminalises consensual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles 21, 14 and 15 of the Constitution." To cut a 149-year-long story short, soon queer activists were out under the overcast sky of monsoon-happy Delhi, weeping tears of joy. Section 377 of the IPC, put there by the lovely Macaulay in 1860, had been finally read down. I cannot remember the last time I saw news presenters and correspondents smile so much, no matter which channel I switched to. Be it NDTV or TIMES NOW or CNN IBN or NEWSX, it was same story everywhere. Beaming news casters, cheery correspondents! Most English news channels stayed with the story uninterruptedly till half past noon. By the evening, hapless religious leaders were wheeled into TV studios across the nation to be grilled live on prime time. Among the most amusing TV moments of last evening were Pranoy Roy's rhetorical questions to an unfortunate representative of the Christian community. "Why are you sitting on the fence?" he was asked where the poor cleric tried to play non-committal. This was followed by "Are you living in the 21st century?" I had to laugh at Roy's theatricality inspite of myself. But it was all in a good cause, of course. By the end of the evening, one couldn't help feeling more than a little sorry for the representatives of various religions that had been hauled up for my entertainment. It was so cruel, so bad, so delicious! Pro-gay guests were all but hugged by the newscasters! I'm not complaining. Not yet.

But a troubling trend is beginning to appear in the way TV discussion shows on homosexuality are put together. There seems to be underway the construction of a binary. Gay/Religious. One excluding the other. This may not help the Indian queer movement in the long run. Religion is important to countless Indians, and many of this countless section are queer. Homosexuality and atheism are not synonymous. TV channels seem to be implying that they are. I'd like to see this trend of simplifying homosexuality and religion into each other's enemy spend itself out soon. Very soon.

But in the meantime, let 'mithais' be distributed, let jubilant gay men wear cardboard signs saying, "Just had my first legal sex", let the bigots be grilled on prime time tv. This battle was won hard and won well. We will think about the challenges to be thrown at the verdict by bigots another day.

Micheal Jackson: The Unbearable Light of Fame?

Three magazine covers. One from 1971, one from 1987, one which was scheduled to appear a few months later this year. The beginning, the middle, the end. A life lived under incessant media glare. Today's The Daily Telegraph's headline is "Jackson, death by show business." If show business were such a brutal killer, there'd be a lot more fatalities. I don't think show business should be declared solely guilty of Jackson's death. His death was caused by an overdetermined set of circumstances over which he had tried to but had lost all control. At the heart of the Jackson tragedy was his foolhardy desperation to buy the childhood he never had. Perhaps nobody told him that while his childhood may not have been the one of any breakfast cereal commercial, but there were people in this world with childhoods infinitely more traumatic than his. While these people with damaged childhoods carry the scars inside them all their life, they learn to accept whatever has happened and they move on. Luckily for them, they are not cursed with wealth enough that they can think money can buy a redesigned, air-brushed past. MJ was cursed with wealth. He was cursed with "friends" who weren't perhaps firm with him when he decided to have a childhood at thirty! In a way, MJ is an intensification, a lurid caricature of the infantilism which marks the culture of his country. Disneyland was MJ's reality. Paul McCartney's referring to MJ as "boy-man" is appropriate. He was more boy than man. His dangling of his child from a hotel window could very well be a child dangling a toy. It is to this child, this boy in MJ that the world fell. He was that odd pop star. The word "sexy" could never be applied to him. He was asexual, like a child. He was that in the beginning, that in the middle, that in the end. Nobody ever took any of his marriages seriously. They expected them to end soon. They did. And now he is gone too.

Dear Micheal, if you are reading this somewhere, I'm happy that your painful, unhappy, lonely life has finally ended. Now you can be the child that you always wanted to be. Nobody will call you Wacko anymore. You will not be 'weird' anymore. God's sympathetic, kind eyes will cast a gentle light on your new childhood. May you be a child for as long as you want to be. But thanks for the songs. Thanks for "Ben", "She's Out of My Life", "Gone Too Soon" and the absolutely incomparable "Human Nature". You'll be the thriller as long as any human being has any ability to thrill to great music.

A Second Chance!

The Election Results were announced on the 16th. Six days later, on the 22nd, the first of the swearings-in took place at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. In the audience, among hundreds of bejewelled women and sherwani-wrapped men, were Youth Congress President and (fingers crossed) future Prime Minister of India, Rahul Gandhi, his brother-in-law and sister Priyanka. The ceremony started at 6:33 pm and lasted till 7:15 pm. Dr. Manmohan Singh was the first to take oath. Since I had never before watched a swearing-in ceremony with such attention, I discovered that there were two different kinds of oaths from which one could choose; one which required you to "swear in the name of God" and another which required you to "solemnly affirm". Both the oaths came in Hindi or English. Apart from the Prime Minister, 19 Ministers too oath. Their portfolios had yet been declared but there was talk that P. Chidambaram would be shifted to Home, Pranab Mukherjee given Finance, Sharad Pawar Agriculture and most exciting of all for the people of Bengal Mamata Banerjee would be given Railways. She was! I used to think life never gave you a second chance. Apparently life can be astonishingly generous sometimes. This was the Ministry which she had only a few years ago as Minister in the-then BJP-led Govt. Barely a year into her term, she had stunned and dismayed the nation by suddenly resigning. The image of her being a little touched in the head got stuck to her. Now is her chance to prove that she is not the madwoman in the static. If she simply does her job well, that will in itself be her 2011 state election campaign. Like most people in this state I wish her a cool head.

Didi Dum Dum Didi Dum Dum

On the day that results were to be announced I didn't bother to wake up early and station myself in front of the television because I had no great hopes. It was only when I went downstairs and found a Bengali channel in the sitting room announcing a spectacular lead for the Trinamul-Congress combine that I realized something major was happening. As the day wore on the extent of people's anger against the Left started becoming delightfully clear. Then at 4:10 pm or so, our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (how can I not be proud of this self-effacing, soft-spoken, extremely well-behaved man?) and Congress President Sonia Gandhi (who for me personifies quiet dignity and good taste) appeared in front of live television cameras to acknowledge the fact that the nation had given a clear verdict in their favour. I had to take a picture of that moment, not only for the image but also for the extraordinary ticker under it: "Mamata, Congress Beat Left in West Bengal"! Didi had not only taken Kolkata North (my Constituency), but Kolkata South, Jadavpur, DumDum, Barrackpore and fourteen other constituencies! Congress had taken some too, bringing the total to a spectacular 26! So how far were these figures from the ones bandied about my various exit polls? According to the CPI(M)-funded channel Chobbish Ghonta the Left was to win 28 seats and the Trinamul-Congress combine an unthreatening 13. (Their figures were the almost exact reverse of the actual results!!) NDTV gave the Left 22 and Trinamul-Congress, 19. Some other channels had given TMC-Congress between 19 and 20 seats and the Left between 22 to 23. Nobody had foreseen the Left being cut down to size with a victory in a measly 15 constituencies. This only means that most people surveyed had lied about who they would vote for. Good for them!! I always believed lying is underrated!:-)

The next morning when I went out to buy the papers, not ONE Bengali paper was available. Thank God my father had bought an Anandabazar Patrika, or I would have NO Bengali paper to save as souvenir of that historic morning.

Dum Dum Didi Dum Dum

What a General Election this has been! Exciting and historic enough to force me out of my stupor and get me blogging again! As I write this, just outside my window I can see the terrace of a nighbour's house from where three small Trinamul flags are flying and I still can't believe my eyes! Used as these 42-year-old eyes are to the ubiquitous white-on-red hammer-and-sickle, somehow the astonishing upset in the fortunes of the party that has ruled this state simply through corruption and nepotism for the last 32 years, still hasn't sunk in. But perhaps, I somewhere had hopes that this time things may change. Which is why I had decided to take a picture or two of Sudip Bandopadhyay when he passed by our house on 7th April. The man he was up against, Md. Salim, was so smugly confident of his victory that he didn't bother to drive through our low profile lane. As I leaned from my balcony, Mr. Bandopadhyay looked up from his open-top white jeep (with his name written under the windscreen) and flashed me a victory sign. I smiled.

On Election Day in Kolkata, 13th May, I cast my vote along with my father and sister at around 9:30 am. My politically-disinterested mom was forced out of the house by Dad late in the afternoon to cast her vote! She did!

CM Gets It Right, Reporter Doesn't

The excitement of the night of 7 September 2008 was such that I thought I wouldn't be able to go to sleep! Mamata Banerjee, inspite of the Left Front and the right-wing Bengal media's attempt to present her as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" (to use a phrase from another era used for another person in another country!) managed to pull off a spectacular triumph by forcing the ludicrously arrogant Left Front Govt. to capitulate and bow down to most of her demands. This whole Singur-Nandigram controversy has been fascinating for the clarity with which the CPI(M) kept consolidating its newfound position as the bosom friend of the capitalist and the sworn enemy of the farmer! Not surprisingly, a section of the media is very pleased with the Communist Party's newfound love of capitalism and have happily decided to vilify anyone who gets in the way of no-holds-barred money-making. Mamata Banerjee is such an easy target! Lacking as she is in English, in sophistication, in "class" she ready material for snobbish ridicule! Recently she was compared to the Roman Emperor Nero!! Her painting was declared equivalent to Nero's fiddling! So far so acceptable, because this comparison did not pretend to be a report, but merely a childish comparison! What stunned me was a report in Monday's press, of Sunday night's press conference at Raj Bhavan. In one newspaper, the reporter describes the scene thus: "A little after 10:30, when the talks ended, [Chief Minister] Bhattacharjee was a picture of chivalry as he and Mamata followed governor Gopalkrisha Gandhi to Raj Bhavan's Marble Hall to face the media."
""You get on the dias first," the chief minister said, and she did." Well, as the first image in this blog will tell you, it was the CM who was first up on the dias (he can be seen standing to the left of the Governor). Even after he has taken his position beside the Governor, Mamata Banerjee is still climbing the steps. I saw this bit of the drama over and over again so I know what happened. The CM did indeed ask Mamata B. to get on the dias first, but she firmly asked him to do so, repeating the "request" once! He sheepishly climbed up, followed by Partho Chatterjee in the green kurta and then the lady herself! CM got it right. He knew who was really wearing the dhoti last night. He did as Mamata B asked him to do. Our reporter probably had his eye play a trick on him. He blissfully reversed the order in which the CM and the "Mad Lady" got on the dias! Our reporter also does not realize that "chivalry" is a deeply patriarchal, patronising code of conduct towards the female and not really something to applaud anyone for, even if that anyone is a Capitalist-Communist Chief Minister of a Capitalist-Communist state so beloved of the capitalist media!

How courageous!

I'm back to blogging after a long time, because I have once again found a few things to write about. This extraordinary interview came to my notice recently. Published in The Times of India, Calcutta edition on 3 September 2008, this is an interview with starlet Anuj Swahney. It is fantastic how homophobic we can be even when we try to be gloriously liberated! Of all the things that Swahney talks about in the admittedly otherwise-insipid interview the newspaper thought it best to headline the story with a throw-away comment by our two-bit actor that he is open (mind, meet gutter!) to playing a gay character. Like that is the final frontier! The ultimate taboo! Child-molester? No problem! Drug-dealer? No big deal! Terrorist? Why not? Serial killer? Sure! Gay? Ermmmmm..... Let me get back to you about it!! Anuj may not be aware that at the last count at least ten two-bit actors like him have already played gay characters and the list is set to grow with Bobby Deol playing one in the film Dostana whose music will be released at the end of this month and which itself will (ahem!) open nationwide on 14th November! Soon to be released in the latest Madhur Bhandarkar film Fashion where homosexuality features more prominently than it has hitherto done in his previous homo-friendly movies such as Page 3 and other movies such as Rules - Love ka Superhit Formula, Life in a Metro, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd to name just three. While actors in other countries, even other Asian ones, don't think twice before signing on for a gay part, in India our actors have to take a deep breath, weigh seriously the enormous damage their (often-non-existent) careers will suffer, before signing on the pink dotted line! Anuj, - forget about Western films - I suggest you watch an Indonesian film called Arisan, or a Taiwanese film calld Formula 17 or a Filipino film called Duda (Doubt) and realize that it really shouldn't be a big deal even for an Asian guy to play gay! What is even more surprising about Anuj's line is that it is coming from someone who has been trained at the Barry John Acting Studio. Barry John, in one of his productions of Shakespeare, had turned a pair of heterosexual lovers into homosexual ones (Othello: A Play in Black and White). So, good luck with your career, Anuj and I look forward to seeing you play a gay character! You would be so brave!!

Don Bachardy, 1997

Last Wednesday (9th July) Fresh Air (NPR) broadcast an interview with Don Bachardy. I was unable to hear that programme but was fortunate enough to accidentally catch it in full on Sunday the 13th on the weekend edition of Fresh Air. Listening to the interview not only reminded me that I had to post pictures on my blog of the two portraits of myself done by Don but also of my meeting him in 1997. It was interesting to hear Don describe himself as an "unconscious mimic" when Terry Gross asked him about the uncanny similarity between his voice and that of Isherwood's. I remember the first time I called Don's number and was greeted by what I thought was Isherwood's voice on the answering machine! "Oh my God!" I thought, "he has still got Isherwood's voice on the answering machine!!" I subsequently realised that it wasn't Isherwood's but Don's own voice! In his interview with Gross Don says that he was beginning to sound "a bit like [Isherwood]" within a year of their relationship! Don also has the habit of saying, "Very good, very good" apparently exactly the way Isherwood used to. Edmund White writes in one of his essays that he once caught himself saying "very good, very good" during a conversation with someone on the 'phone and then realized that he was saying that phrase because he was missing Isherwood and wanted to hear his voice.
I was also struck by what Don had to say to Gross about mimicry being an important aspect of his drawing people. So when Don drew me was he mimicking me too? If so, how? We were from two fantastically different worlds: him, from sunny California; I, from hot and dusty Calcutta. By strange coincidence, I believe that Don has only drawn two Indians in his life and both are Bengalis from Calcutta: the other Indian and indeed Calcuttan Bengali was Swami Prabhavananda - Isherwood's Vedantist guru. So, I'm in very good company!
Don's 18-minute interview on Fresh Air made me realize how fresh the memories of that April in Santa Monica are still in my mind.

Portrait of Artists as Companions

On Friday, 20 June 2008 a documentary opened in one New York cinema house. Called "Chris and Don: A Love Story" the documentary charts the relationship between the novelist Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) and Don Bachardy (1934 - ) from the time they met in early 1953 to Isherwood's death on 4 January 1986. (In a sense the relationship continues to this day.) The documentary also sketches in Isherwood's life in England before he came to America to permanently settle there in January 1939. As I am in Calcutta, India, I do not when I will get to see this documentary, but seeing the two trailers now available on youtube it felt weird. As the camera followed Don Bachardy around the Santa Monica house where he and Isherwood lived from 30 September 1959 and where Bachardy continues to live I found myself revisiting my memories of interviewing Bachardy there in April 1997. I remembered being shown around the house by Don, being struck by the amount of light that bathes the house and, next day, sitting for two portraits by him. I shall soon upload images of those two portraits on this blog.

Also in the trailers, it is fascinating to see artistes like Tennessee Williams (third picture from the top in this post) and Igor Stravinsky in living colour. So far I had only seen black and white still images of the playwright. I had only seen Don in person in 1997, but it gives one a strange feeling to see him as a teenager, posing on the Santa Monica beach for Isherwood's movie camera . Seeing the moving images (moving both in the sense that they are mobile and that they are touching) one begins to understand the helpless love Isherwood must have felt for this teenager.

As of the 17th of this month, gays and lesbians in California have been able to marry. Don told me that because there was no such provision in the days when Isherwood was alive, the writer had to adopt Don as his son so that everything could be left to him when Isherwood died. I haven't been in touch with Don for almost nine years now. I hope he is healthy.

I subsequently published my interview with Don in a book and titled it "Portrait of the Artist as Companion". What the makers of this documentary gives us is a movie version of David Hockney's iconic double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy: a portrait of two artists as each other's companion.

The Male Body in Bengal Art

Ever since the new building of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations opened in Calcutta on 1 June I've been waiting for an opportunity to go there and check out the five inaugural exhibitions they have organised in different floors of the same building. Today I finally got the time to check out the exhibitions. Plenty of goodies to feast your eyes on, but my attention was monopolised to a large extent by an oil that I found in one of exhibitions. Since I am always intrigued by the lack of male bodies in Indian art (boobies, boobies wherever you look!) I was struck my Rathin Moitra's undated "Nulia" (the first two pictures in this post). This painting reminded me of the pictures of Bruce Weber, somehow. Weber's subjects are mostly well-built young men, mostly on the beach, mostly in swimwear. By strange coincidence, Weber appeared on BBC World hours after I returned home. He was being interviewed by Stephen Sackur on Hardtalk. During the interview Sackur tried to out Weber but the photographer was defensive. He thought what he did in his bedroom was irrelevant. The fact that his images are often described as homoerotic does not, apparently, put him under any pressure to come out. I know nothing about Rathin Moitra apart from the fact that he was part of the Calcutta Group formed in 1942, a group which emphasized colour over form. But what can see in the painting is an awareness of the young male form like it is seldom seen in Indian art.

Asian Identity Formation in a Western Hothouse

In the Mandarin-English film The Map of Sex and Love (blogged about earlier) the long-haired Hong Kong dancer - who has never set foot outside Hong Kong - asks the bespectacled Chinese American man he is looking to pick up, "Do you go to Christopher Street often?" Behind them, across the waters, glow signs of multinational companies such as Hitachi and Siemens. It is interesting that two Chinese individuals are establishing contact with each other in Chinese-administered Hong Kong and the event is framed by the presence of globalisation, be it in the form of glow signs declaring the omnipresence of Japanese and German companies or be it in the mention of Christopher Street, an address of mythical significance to American gay identity formation. That a Chinese gay man is aware of the presence of Christopher Street is an indication of the fact that Western - especially American - gay culture, as has been shown by Dennis Altman in his work, can and often does serve as a template on which Asian, non-Western gay identities are formed. In the Israeli film The Bubble (blogged about earlier) there is a scene in which a group of gay Israeli men discuss gay male British pop stars. Names such as George Michael, Morrissey and Stephen Gately (of Boyzone fame) are mentioned. The camera also focusses on a wall covered with pictures of gay British singers cut out of magazines.

In the Indonesian film Arisan! (2003), similar influences are seen in the identity formation of gay Indonesians. The two gay men in the film, Sakti (Tora Sudiro) and Nino (Surya Saputra) first meet and greet each other (although they had earlier discreetly eyed each other up at the gym) in a restaurant that can only be described as a square mile of intensified America in Jakarta. As the middle image shows, when Nino (in a white shirt) and Sakti (in black) leave the restaurant, the camera follows them, taking in an arrangement of small American flags and a Coca Cola sign on the wall. When the two men leave the place, the camera stays inside but turns its gaze on a huge poster of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. This is what Gerard Genette in Narrative Discourse (1980) calls an "advance mention". The significance of the Marilyn Monroe poster would become clear at the end of the film when one of the lady friends of Sakti declares that not diamonds, but "a gay man is a girl's best friend" referring to Monroe's song in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). The fact the film seems bracketed by the Monroe motif is yet another example of the hothouse Western environment in which global gay identities take shape in Asian countries.

When we first see Sakti he is just finishing his daily workout. He stands in front of the mirror and beams, joyfully, at his reflection in the mirror. Here is the joyful acceptance of one's identity as theorised by Lacan when he speaks of the "mirror stage". What has to be remembered is that the beam on Sakti's face is an affirmation of the fact that he has been able to conform to the imaginary of the global, ergo Western, gay man - toned body, flawless skin, perfect teeth, straight-acting.

It is not my job to judge this teleology of Asian gay self-fashioning, but merely to say that such processes of identity-formation are being cinematically represented with greater and greater frequency. And in a way this is rather appropriate, isn't it? What better medium than cinema to exemplify a kind of identity formation which depends on the visual? After all it is called the imaginary!

The Republic of Nepal

I am a monarchist. I believe that constitutional monarchy is the best form of government. On 28th May 2008, Nepal ceased to be a monarchy. I watched Nepali television, thrilled to be watching history being made before my eyes. Yes, thrilled. Thrilled because I believe, like most Nepalis do, that it is better to be a Republic than to be under a king as universally unpopular as Gyanendra. I could not help being struck by the irony of the fact that the brand new National Assembly had gathered yesterday evening at the Birendra International Convention Centre to formally abolish the monarchy. The event took place inside a building named after the king who will, I firmly believe, always reign in the hearts of the Nepali people - King Birendra. I share with many Nepalis grave doubts about the official version of what happened in the Narayanhiti Palace in June 2001. My posting of an official portrait of King Birendra and his family here is meant to convey to my Nepali brothers and sisters that I feel their pain (which I'm sure seven years have done nothing to dull) at the loss of their beloved King Birendra and his family, but I also congratulate them warmly for getting rid of King Gyanendra and constituting themselves as a Republic. I wish the Republic of Nepal a happy and prosperous future.

The Berlin Memorial

As if to mark the opening of the Berlin memorial to gay and lesbian victims of the Nazi regime, on Monday, the day before the opening, the French TV channel TV5 telecast Un Amour a Taire (top picture). The next picture is a TV grab on the night of the 27th. This is a still from a looped video installation inside the grey concrete memorial. One can watch the video by peering into the window on the concrete structure. The next image (thanks to the newspaper Berliner Morgenpost) shows German politicians gathered at the Tiergarten for the opening ceremony. The most poignant presence is that of the Mayor of Berlin. Klaus Wowereit, in a blue tie, is openly gay. The fourth and last image (from the newspaper Berliner Zeitung) is that of the memorial.

Nazi persecution of homosexuals (by the way there is only one recorded instance of a lesbian being persecuted but she was persecuted because of her race - Jewish) began in 1933 with the destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science founded by Magnus Hirschfield. Hirschfield is written about at great length by the novelist Christopher Isherwood in his 1970's autobiography Christopher and His Kind.

In the Shadow of the Pink Triangle

It was entirely by coincidence that yesterday evening, of the two movies I rented for my weekend film festival, one was The Bubble (Israel, 2006). When I was watching the movie I was unaware that on Tuesday, 27th May 2008, in Berlin would be opened a memorial dedicated to all the homosexuals who perished in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. So what does a film made in 21st century Israel have to do with the Berlin memorial? Just this: in the film the two lovers (one Israeli, the other a Palestinian Arab) go to watch a play in Tel Aviv one evening. The play? Martin Sherman's play Bent (1979). As you may well know the play deals with the persecution of homosexuals in concentration camps. From the play Ashraf learns the gesture of tracing a line along the left eyebrow with one's index finger to express love. In The Bubble we see him do it twice, both times out of the sight of Noam, the man he loves. The film belongs not only in an intertexual web with Martin Sherman's play but also with the French made-for-TV movie Un Amour a Taire (A Love to Hide) which also deals with the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. When the Berlin memorial is opened on Tuesday it won't be the first such memorial. There is one in Amsterdam which was inaugurated on 5 September 1987 and there's another one in Sydney, Australia. But this most recent memorial's location in Berlin is especially significant because it is the first one on German soil.

It's a democracy yet!

Here are Thursday's front pages. I'll let the front pages of 22 May 2008 speak for themselves!:-)

Singrrrrrrrr!

Even a few hours ago I was planning to write a blog about a French musical that I saw yesterday evening (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) and speak of my amusement at the way in many scenes the wallpaper matched the frock of Catherine Deneuve, but breaking news from Nandigram and Singur has swept all that aside. Nothing captures the thrill of unfolding history better than newspaper front pages and live images on TV. While I have to wait another six hours for the newspapers to come thudding down on my living room floor I can atleast give you some TV grabs that will, hopefully, bring home to you the thrill of this historic moment when the people of Nandigram and Singur roared against state terror! All you who gave your lives to protect your land, you have not died in vain! All you who have voted against state terror, my congratulations! I have no words tonight that can adequately express my joy. Bravo, Nandigram! Bravo, Singur! If only the people in the cities were as brave as you are. Thanks to the brave people of those two villages, I'm proud to be a Bengali again!