India's Gays Tiptoe Anonymously Into the Limelight

Shrenik uses only one name to avoid being clearly identified. The young film director has chosen not to invite relatives or friends from home to attend the premiere of his film Lost and Found tonight in Delhi. He hopes his parents never see it.

This short black-and-white comedy focuses on two men on a crowded bus as they begin, covertly, to flirt, perspiring in the 42C heat, jolted about in the thick traffic.

His is one of half a dozen new films on being gay in India, which will be shown this week as part of the country's first gay arts festival, an event that marks a cautious edging towards the mainstream of a long-oppressed community.

'Such an event would have been unthinkable even five years ago,' Gautam Bhan, one of the organizers of the QueerFest, said.

But the occasion has none of the self-assurance of gay pride movements in Europe and the US. Promotional material for the festival made it clear photographers and broadcasters would not be permitted to attend, to protect the identities of those there.

Shrenik's ambivalence about the publicity for his film is revealing. 'I'd be scared to show it to my family; my parents certainly wouldn't understand it,' he said at Friday's opening night.

In the enclosed bubbles of urban India, homosexuality is no longer much of a taboo. 'The privileged in India are able to evade almost any law they want to,' Bhan said. But beyond the cities, adherence to concepts of traditional family structures makes it hard to be openly gay.

'You risk being thrown out of your home and losing your job. In a country which has no social security safety net, that's a big deal,' Sunil Gupta, curator of a photography exhibition mounted for the festival, said.

The festival's organizers hope to gather wider public support for a slow-moving campaign to persuade the government to decriminalize homosexuality, but they remain nervous about the potential risks involved in mounting such an event. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code prohibits sex between members of the same sex, bracketing it together with sex with animals and pedophilia as an 'unnatural' offense, punishable with up to 10 years' imprisonment.

The law is rarely enforced, but its presence on the statute books legitimizes discrimination, and police harassment of gay men is widespread. Theoretically the festival's organizers run the risk of prosecution for 'conspiracy to promote homosexuality'. They said the occasion had so far evaded the attentions of right-wing militant groups simply because the word 'queer' was not widely understood in India.