[Urbanstudy] Cyber Cultures/Queer Cultures in Delhi

[akhil katyal]

Cyber Cultures/Queer Cultures in Delhi

Akhil Katyal

‘Online relationships and groupings provide the most obvious structures of alternative sexuality
cyberculture [can be seen] as a revolutionary social experiment with the potential to create new identities, relationships and cultures
’

- Pramod K. Nayar, in the section ‘Cyberfeminism’ in his essay ‘Queering Cultural Studies: Notes Towards a Framework’ [1]

‘I think that the internet has definitely helped in the proliferation of queer cultures. Right now I can think of gaydelhi yahoogroup, lgbtindia yahoogroup, khush yahoogroup, gay bombay, symphony in pink, voicesagainst377, CREA and TARSHI websites
Then there’s guys4men and gaydar .coms which boys use
It lets people meet each other, have sex, develop bonds of friendship, meet people who can be potential relationship partners, that kind of a thing, and then there are all these forums where people post all sorts of things – like I think that this particular guy is cute or ridiculous things like Hindus are superior in India, all sorts
also, the internet has revolutionized cruising – given more control, mobility, steering capacity and wide range of choice to the cruiser.’

- Mario D’ Penha, gay activist, in an interview given to me on 23rd March, 2007 [2]

Seen in conjunction, Mario D’ Penha and Pramod K. Nayar’s comments seem to be registering the importance of understanding socio-cultural phenomenon without disregarding the effect of newer technologies. For the section of queer people living in the city who have continuous or intermittent access to internet, the web has revolutionized relations, information resources, identity formations or fantasies and has increased the possibilities of mapping queer people/cultures even as it provides these very same people/cultures a site to inhabit, grow in, exploit or explore, and mark an undeniable presence.

    E-mails and e-groups on internet have increased possibilities of communication between people and of mobilizing them for different purposes. For queer people, for whom these very possibilities are wrought with complexities of control and invisibility in the non-cyber world, the medium of internet assumes a unique significance and interventionist proportions. Unlike other forms of media, the internet is both strategically and dangerously public and private at the same time, allowing independences impossible to think of vis-à-vis television, cinema, radio etc.

Also, in negotiating daily habits like time spent on web, in affecting mindscapes through reading hitherto unreachable social/personal texts (like in blogs) and shaping access to and forms of knowledges, the cyberspace constantly interacts with the so-called non-cyber world. In effect, any such division between the virtual and the real is artificial and misleading. Queer cultures in Delhi contribute to and are shaped by the cyberqueer. Responding to my last posting ‘Queer Cultures and the Delhi Discotheque’, a Delhi-based journalist who would have located the posting through internet search portals, contacted me and indicated her wish to have a dialogue over Delhi’s queer spaces. Even as one writes a Sarai posting on queer cultures in Delhi (with a slightly discomfiting knowledge of its availability on the net, like for instance if my mother reads it there would be quite a scene at home), its relations and interactions in the super-abundant world of the internet make it clear that queerness is a variable which plays out its knotty games on the web, becoming a unique node for queer cultural formations in the city.

Websites like manjam, gaydar and guys4men and others provide queer men in the city with opportunities to meet up and engage socially/sexually. Signed up members can put up their profile with descriptions and pictures. One has the option of filling out details about one’s habits and hobbies, likes and dislikes, sexual favourites, waist and penis size, hair colour etc. Description of oneself becomes a way of creating a desirable persona. Putting one’s pictures on the profile is almost indispensable for a fruitful sexual career on guys4men. Several follow the ‘no pic, no reply’ rule. An extreme form and demand of visibility and descriptive excess ensures chats and meet-ups. This sits interestingly with the fact that several of the men registered in guys4men fill out ‘nobody’ in the ‘Out to’ section. Like mentioned in my last posting, being on these hook-up websites or visiting a tacitly understood queer night at a city discotheque does not automatically mean that these men are completely ‘out’ or are interested in being ‘out’ or even consciously identify themselves as queer or gay or the like. Several of these men inhabit the complex recesses where sexual behaviour has no direct or simple correspondences with sexual identities. It is not difficult to guess that several of these men are married or have sustained relationships with women. Manoj Das (profile name changed) says that he is travelling to Delhi with his girlfriend and would like to meet ‘body builders’ and ‘smart guys’ ‘with place’ for sexual enjoyment. Being on guys4men from Delhi is like being super-visible albeit within a localised system which functions on the principles of invisibility. The event of being present on such websites is like loosely networking within, not coming out. Several of the pictures on these websites have either the face smudged, (which reminds one of those news interviews where the face of the person in question is only partially outlined, remaining unidentifiable), or the focus of the photographs is the body – neck and down – specially arms, chest and abs. Sexual desirability takes over facially determined identity. On the other hand full pictures are requested by many as a pre-condition for initiating dialogue. Visibility and invisibility in fact are simultaneous and interacting processes on guys4men.

In the interview with Mario D’ Penha, I heard a curious shoe-theory of safety while cruising. D’ Penha had been told by a friend in Mumbai that while cruising one should always be alert to the possibility that the other guy might be a policeman in disguise. It is not an easy process, however, to ascertain this. This friend suggested that observing the other guy’s shoes would give the necessary and all too valuable hint. Most of these policemen under cover change their clothes but obviously do not have enough money to change into another casual-looking pair of shoes. So if the shoes resemble the formal blacks of a policeman, one could do better than approaching this guy for sex. Cruising in physical spaces of the city has always been an affair which dangles on the edge of un-safety. Arrests and blackmail by policemen loaded with the section 377, or extortion for money are often reported within queer circles. The gaybombay website has several articles and personal narratives which function as cruising guidelines and warnings. In this context, internet portals like guys4men provide forums which can be used to manoeuvre cruising in a different manner, possibly much safer than in moonlit Nehru or Central Parks in Delhi or train-station loos in Bombay. The story however, like many stories, is not simple. Recent arrests of gay men in Lucknow were made by the police by tracking their internet profiles. A note near the bottom of the webpage in www.guys4men.com reads ‘INDIAN MEMBERS PLEASE READ: Increasingly, policemen along with gangs of blackmailers work in cohort and use web spaces where gay men meet to entrap them. For more info on what's been happening, please read this’ which hyperlinks to several articles on safety and personal narratives on gaybombay website as mentioned above. The virtual world is unable to eradicate the problems and fixes of the world outside, because physical sexual contact and social relations lie at the end of the process for which internet is only a determined/determining medium. Digital penises or virtual orgasms are undiscovered yet, and should one still think (?), thankfully so.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta [3] in his beautiful prose writes in his article ‘Net nomad on a rough route: A Despatch from Cyberspace’ – ‘While it is this open transparent character of online existence that lays the Internet vulnerable to surveillance, it is also its self-inscribing character that makes it the playground of possibilities it is at its best. Cyberspace is habitat, playground, university, boulevard, refuge. In creating for ourselves a medium which brings the world streaming into our minds and out of our fingers, we have inscribed the first coordinates of a new world map.’ The new sexual map laid out by guys4men plays with new possibilities even as it duplicates several categories. One guy wants to have sex with a man from ‘good decent back ground’ which uncannily reads like a request in matrimonial columns. Another describes himself as a ‘pure bottom’, implying he only likes getting inserted. One man only wants friendship, not sex. Another betrays a typical masculinist prejudice asking for versatile or top guys, not feminine or pure bottoms. Guys4men revels in sexual categories, makes new ones or builds on regular sexual clichés. Desire is unabashed, playful, complex here.

The website format plays on the client’s desire for a ‘perfect match’. By filling an online form for finding one’s match one can prescribe age, picture availability, penis size, even eye or hair colour of the desired mate. One can fill up as many options for greater precision in the search process. A perfect sexual mate is constructed in this process even if that ideal remains unreachable (or perhaps not!). Levels of specificity and choice reach unbelievable proportions – Rakesh41 (profile name changed) travelling on AP Express on 5th June from Hyderabad to Agra who is a ‘top guy’ wanted to know if any ‘bottom guy’ is travelling on the same day in the same train – ‘we can have some fun in train’ he writes. Internet can be a playground of (im)possibilities like these. People from several classes frequent guys4men duplicating the variety of people who have internet access in the city. One can notice swanky rooms/appliances in the background of some individual profile photographs while in others the dilapidating paint on the walls is visible. Sengupta continues ‘
in the fuzzy world of Cyberspace, parallel lines of data, articulated on different planes, bump into each other all the time, creating constant collisions of meaning and new information events that transform and reconfigure the ways in which we think about being’. ‘guys4men’ is an unstable factor within this multipart process where class, sexual preference, age and looks collide and create newer definitions and desires of being.

In the recently concluded Nigah Queer Film and Arts Festival in Delhi, the performance night saw the gay activist and author Gautam Bhan doing a stand up comedy act to a jam-packed ‘Attic’ with around 150 people above ‘People Tree’ in CP. During much of the later part of his act he culled out humour by dissecting the idiosyncrasies of guys4men – the way the X-rated pictures are made to work, how Bengali profiles are invariably longer by four paragraphs than any other (he claimed he wasn’t joking), and he ended by marking out a few unlikely members of guys4men like ex-prime ministers, presidents, and police officers. The humour worked because these utterances about web hook-up joints like guys4men functioned in a grid of recognizable references. Urban queer cultures are not made by big monolithic changes or acquisitions but by a gradual sense of ownership over a cultural artefact, a television character, a cinematic moment or an internet event. Guys4men provided this space which could be both used for social/sexual affairs and could be talked about in get-togethers– in short it made itself available for cultural processes to act within it and around it. William Gibson [4] muses about cyberspace in his 1984 ‘Neuromancer’ – ‘
A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation
A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding
’ Urban sexualities and their correspondent cultures operate in these lights which make things only curiously and complicatedly visible.


Notes and References

[1] Pramod K. Nayar, in the section ‘Cyberfeminism’ in his essay ‘Queering Cultural Studies: Notes Towards a Framework’, published in Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharya ed. ‘The Phobic and the Erotic’, in 2007 by Seagull Publications. 

[2] I conducted this interview with Mario D’ Penha, gay activist and scholar, on 23rd March, 2007.

[3] Shuddhabrata Sengupta, in his article ‘Net nomad on a rough route: A Despatch from Cyberspace’ published in ‘Biblio: A Review of Books’, in 2000. 

[4] William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’, published in 1984

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