In the superbly sensitive portrayal of a homosexual relationship in Brokeback Mountain, the late Heath Ledger, playing a 1960s Wyoming cowboy tries to explain to his boyfriend Jack why they cannot live together. He recollects how his father had taken him as a nine-year-old child to witness the lynched victim of a similar partnership. The memory has scarred and scared him. So the two cowboys conform to ‘normality’. They acquire wives and children even as they long for each other. It is Ang Lee’s restrained direction that allows us to respect the relationship as it unfolds before us. Tragically, Jack is lynched too — and in many ways, Brokeback Mountain was also lynched at the Oscars: it was denied the top award.

It had to happen. While in America and in the UK homosexuality is accepted as a way of life (two weeks ago, California too allowed gay marriages), there are still inhibitions, especially among those who insist it is abhorrent to their religion or that it is an aberration. But with the public outing of Brokeback Mountain, at least Hollywood was able to come out of the closet and break the last taboo in a mainstream film. As the Indian Supreme Court and the government re-examines Section 377 that criminalises homosexuality, have we accepted homoeroticism and homosexuality in our cinema, and do we manage to show it as normal behaviour?

The good news is that Indian cinema, which largely reflects social trends, is cautiously beginning to recognise that a variant sexual desire need not be deviant. But this is still a very slow process and often the portrayal of these relationships is painfully stereotyped. Gay themes are usually mentioned as ‘insider jokes’; if they are enacted they are mostly male and effeminate figures of fun, or simply dismissed as ‘chakkas’. Or, the portrayals are completely accidental and inadvertently lead to certain actors becoming ‘gay’ icons — as happened with Sholay. To the surprise of many film aficionados, the deep friendship between Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan, has now been interpreted to be almost ‘gay’. Luckily, now we are inching towards a more deliberate depiction of gay subjects.

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