Decked up in a white net-top, a white tutu, a pair of orange high heels, rainbow bracelets, golden sunglasses and a pearly headband, Diniz Sanchez was dubbed as the showstopper this year at the ninth annual Delhi Pride Parade. The tutu or ballerina skirt is Sanchez aka Spicy Tutuboy’s signature garment.
“Spicy Tutuboy, by his simple existence and manifestation, questions people’s pre-established ideas about identity, gender and sexuality. What is masculine and feminine; why can a man not wear a tutu or high heels; why are certain colours apportioned to male and female?, so forth. I keep a beard and have hairy legs and choosing to wear what I want is my way of expressing my identity,” Sanchez tells Guardian 20.
The character, Spicy Tutuboy, has been developed since 2006 by the Lisbon-born contemporary dancer and theatre exponent. Now a famed pseudonym, Sanchez believes Tutuboy is essentially a performer and the stories this persona performantica tells are the stories that have shaped Sanchez personally. Bullied by neighbourhood kids, spat on by male friends at school, Sanchez has grown up as a lonesome child, sensitive and imaginative. He isn’t surprised that later on in life, he would go on to develop a keen interest in performance arts.
Sanchez has been travelling with his choreographic explorations globally and first came to India in 2010. “I fell in love with this country the first time I came here. I wish to find a permanent settlement here but first, racist tendencies among most Indians will have to change. I am looked upon as a ‘dumb white tourist’ by most and in the gay community treated as a ‘white’ who is very ‘easy’ to go to sleep with and who will have a hotel room to host.” This was his first pride march in the country and he says, “LGBTQ is mostly legally accepted or tolerated in the West. But it is so recent that the risk of losing it is even more visible. But in a country like India, where being a homosexual or a bi or a trans or embracing any other form of love and identity is still a stigma, pride marches are important because visibility is the most important step towards changing mindsets.”
The focus of Pride for many years has been the repeal of Section 377 that criminalises same-sex lives, a colonial-era provision in the country’s penal code which has in the recent past been the subject of mighty debate among upholders of constitutional values. On the last Sunday of November, hundreds of people take to the streets in the national capital every year to celebrate identities which have criminalised them in their own country. It was only in 2015, that the parade in Delhi extended solidarity and support towards not just the LGBTQ community but also Dalits, adivasis, Kashmiris, women, disabled people and all minority groups who are made to remain invisible until atrocities befall them.
This year the Delhi Queer Pride committee, in their official press release, placed the following political demands: “No discrimination on the basis of age, sex, class, caste, religion, tribe, ability, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation, effective implementation of the Supreme Court’s NALSA judgment and withdrawing of the current Transgender Rights Bill, strong action against anti-minority violence and the silencing of the freedom of expression and dissent, repeal of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, anti-beggary, anti-Hijra laws, the exception of marital rape from rape law, sedition laws, UAPA and AFSPA.”
“I, personally, had also asked for inclusion of seeking justice for Najeeb besides these,” says Gourab Ghosh, a member of the Delhi Queer Pride Committee and who has also been the first homosexual candidate from JNU to contest elections in 2013. An SFI activist, Ghosh now works as a research consultant with Sahapedia. For several years, he has been instrumental in fighting for queer rights in JNU. From struggling to get hostel accomodation to making GSCASH (the University’s instrument for addressing issues of sexual harassment and recommending their redressal) queer-sensitive, Ghosh alongwith several others have been the founders of queer collective Dhanak in JNU. On 27 November, he marched too under a colourful rainbow of balloons as the parade kicked off from Barakhamba Road to Jantar Mantar. “I have attended Delhi Pride since 2008, almost since its beginning. Delhi pride witnessed good response initially, particularly 2009 was a huge turnout. I guess because of the Delhi High Court judgment of decriminalizing Section 377 of the IPC. However, the turn-outs were not that great in some years thereafter. But last year it was a good crowd, and this year it was more organised in terms of representations and solidarities,” says Ghosh.
“For me, Pride reminds me of a historical/ political moment in the history of LGBT struggles across the globe. Pride also prepares me to fight 364 days of my life in a city, in a country that does not recognise my choice, my rights. Pride Walk in Delhi definitely follows a political line. We do not ask for corporate funding precisely because we do not accept their ideologies or exploitation of Adivasis, women and children, in rural areas in the name of CSR,” adds Ghosh.
“In a country like India, where being a homosexual or a bi or a trans or embracing any other form of love and identity is still a stigma, pride marches are important because visibility is the most important step towards changing mindsets.”
Several banners with slogans like, “Love is never wrong”, “You abolished 500 and 1000 notes, now abolish 377,” “If some of us are not free, then none of us are”, were seen going up on the day in the national capital. Former JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar was heard sloganeering “Homophobia se azaadi”—azaadi, a clarion call that has grossly been used and over used recently when the state cracked down on the university’s freedom to dissent and which ironically came under sharp criticism from Kashmir when Kumar interpreted Kashmiri azaadi as demand for freedom within India and not from India.
2016 is an important year in the history of Pride parade in the country as Nagpur’s LGBT community came out for the first time to organise ‘Orange City LGBT Pride March’. It is significant because RSS headquarters are based out of Nagpur and the organisation has more than often been criticised by liberals for spewing communal hatred and targeting minorities.
“While it is good that Dalits have asserted themselves in these marches, it does not really mean that queerness has engaged with the Dalit question. Even in Delhi march last year, Dalits were heckled. It is not just about adding a laundry list of marginalised identities. Real engagement is necessary. Pride marches in India mean nothing to me. Pride, we must remember, comes out of anger and political struggle and these marches are just commercial, mindless celebrations. Many end in bashes at 5-star hotels. It is just pathetic. Never been part of any of the stupid Indian so-called Pride marches and never will be,” says Ashley Tellis, an academic and a leading gay rights activist.
In an article titled, On Being a Gay activist in India in 2013, Tellis had dealt with precisely these issues. He had written, “How does one endure the stares, the barely tolerant gaze of the Dalit, the Kashmiri, the Muslim, the Christian, the feminist, the Adivasi, the displaced, the submerged, the marginalized, the disenfranchised who find it in themselves through all their own suffering to hate you for your sexual orientation? What do you make of the Dalit magazine which refuses to publish your article where you speak of being Dalit as well as gay? … What do you say to the CPM lesbian but closeted academic who tells you officially that lesbians can’t march in the March 8, International Women’s Day, march because LGBT issues are ‘Western’ and disconnected and will derail the real issues at hand which include industrial labour and slum demolition… Never mind that one of the women in the slums is the most fierce lesbian activist you’ve met in Delhi. Never mind that your life as a same-sex loving subject also has a political economy to it. Never mind that your research is on the sexual component of caste-based and class-based violence.”
Of course, every political community needs to have its own fight which cannot be fought by any other community. But one must understand that marginalisation do not come in isolated packages and making the Pride march in Delhi more inclusive in recent years has been a milestone moment. Dhrubo Jyoti, a queer-Dalit journalist and who also happens to be part of the Delhi Pride Parade committee sums it up succinctly: “In the past, the LGBT movement has often avoided the question of caste, which is why other Dalits and I have been actively talking about caste and Dalit assertion because without abolishing caste, we cannot imagine queer freedom. There are many LGBT people who are Dalits too and while the crux of Dalit movement is a fight against Brahmanical authority, this fight against oppressive power is at the heart of queer movement too. So any articulation of pro-queer statement has to be anti-caste.”