Will Bollywood Come Out Of Its Closet?

Popular films appear to be rethinking their attitude while using homosexuality on screen as an object of ridicule or titillation, says Usri Basistha.

- Usri Basistha

Love is a force of nature’, thus went the tagline of Ang Lee’s 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. As a 16-year-old watching the film, I was more interested in the bit where the two male leads would kiss. When the story finally came to that, it was no more about the gender of the people kissing. Rather, it stays in my memory as one of the most lyrical films I have watched on the subject of love and therein the tagline comes in handy. Though touted as a film on homosexual love then, the movie was not the first time I was being exposed to the concept of homosexuality. Oddly enough, lesbian porn was already a topic of interest among us. This was over a decade back. Now with children as young as 10 having access to WhatsApp and internet, the avenues of finding information that might be tagged ‘adult’ are more numerous than ever.

So it is certainly perplexing to see the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) rate the official trailer of Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh an A to keep adolescents at bay. Even if the argument is steeped in the logic of homosexuality threatening the fabric of the family, how can the CBFC really keep children away from googling words like ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’? At a time when Article 377 — criminalising ‘unnatural’ sexual intercourse bringing homosexual sex under its purview — is once again in the cusp of a legal debate, the simple disclaimer about the Article at the beginning of the official trailer of the movie must have surely made the CBFC people jump in their seats.