The twenty-six interviewees in Whistling in the Dark represent a cross-section of India’s LGBTQI community—poets, artists, professors, students, activists, clerks and auto-rickshaw drivers; family men, gay couples, unmarried people and divorcees. The probing and incisive questions put to the respondents tease out narratives that go beyond the conventional and provide rare insight into the private lives of queer people in urban and small town India.
Conducted at various times over more than two decades, the interviews show how little has changed despite legal victories for gay rights. Countless men remain trapped in marriages of convenience, though some, like college lecturer Sushil Patil, uphold the very heteronormative ideas, like monogamy, that oppress them. Revealing one’s identity is still a traumatic experience, when even mainstream psychiatrists make gay men and women feel like ‘exotic animals in a cage’, as K. Vaishali puts it. Hijras find it hard, as Aishwarya Pandav tells us, to even find admission in colleges. And gay-bashing and extortion continue unabated, as we see in the interview of Mustakeem Momin, whose partner, Aligarh University professor Srinivas Siras, was publicly shamed at a time when Section 377 of the IPC was not in force.
Whistling in the Dark is a landmark book in the struggle for gay rights in India. This revised and updated edition, with four new interviews, remains a powerful and unsettling reminder of injustice and inequality.
