Bollywood`s G-spot: Gays in Hindi cinema,Bollywood became so accepting of "homosexuality"

Bollywood`s G-spot: Gays in Hindi cinema,Bollywood became so accepting of "homosexuality"

Perhaps Brokeback Mountain did it. The tale of love between two men was a box-office cracker and made a splash at the Oscars in 2006. Or maybe it's our Health Minister A. Ramadoss's plea to lawmakers to rethink Article 377 that prohibits same sex relationships. Or both.

The fact is, a few years back, `gay' in Bollywood was just a word used to describe a state of being. Anything beyond that was considered sacrilegious. Now, when two muscled mainstream Bollywood heroes lock hands and tell the heroine 'hum gay hain', you wonder when Bollywood became so accepting of homosexuality.

Here's a look at the portrayal of gays in Hindi films over the recent years.

All through the years, the portrayal of homosexuals in our films has been rather childish; insensitive. Remember Kal Ho Na Ho and the audience falling off their seat watching the Kanta bai track for the nth time? That's the track where the house maid catches the two heroes (Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan) in "compromising positions".

This joke was a hit, and unfortunately for the viewer, every other film insisted on incorporating such a trick where so-and-so saw two heroes slip and fall on each other, and assumed they were in the midst of some action.

You saw this gag in Masti where Satish Shah's character suspects the heroes. After being spread thin in every other movie, you'd think the joke had lived its life.

But the recent Golmaal Returns also reprised this mistaken gay identity farce several times over. As did Hello, where the joke was the two male characters tumbling down a wall through the bathroom door and falling on one another, only to be greeted by their amused boss.

On the flipside is the bizarre and unfair portrayal of gays like in Karan Razdan's film Girlfriend. The film starred Eesha Koppikar and Amrita Arora. It showed the two women share an intimate night, after which Amrita's character moves on to finding a boyfriend, and the other woman turns the psychotic, jilted lover.

Several homosexual organisations lambasted the film for propagating wrong notions about them. In fact one organisation also sent out an open letter to the media saying that this film would undo their years of hard work of making people understand that homosexuals are as normal as them.

Madhur Bhandarkar's depiction of homosexuals has been a mixed bag. His gay protagonists in Page 3 were real, ordinary people and were both the heroes and the villains. While the heroine's boyfriend sleeps with a gay photographer to rise in his career, a rich influential businessman is a pedophile with a penchant for little boys.

But in Fashion, Bhandarkar went ballistic with his gay portrayal. Most fashion designers in the film were homosexuals, giving the audience a good laugh with their overtly effeminate mannerisms and hyperactive temperaments.

Bhandarkar has defended his representation of the community by giving the example of Sameer Soni's Rahul Arora who looked and behaved normally without any overt gay behavior. True, but this gay character was one in many over-the top caricaturish ones.

It reminded one of Mahesh Dattani's 2002 dud Mango Soufflé, where the depiction of its gay protagonists did nothing to connect the characters with the audience.

Perhaps the most convincing and respectful portrayal of a gay relationship was in Onir's My Brother Nikhil. The film portrayed an endearing love affair between the protagonist Nikhil and his lover.

Like any other heterosexual couple, they were happy, arguing, making up and standing up for each other in times of turmoil, which led to an immediate connect with the audience.

Nikhil's sister, played by Juhi Chawla, was one of the few characters in the film that gave this couple her full support.

Onir recently said in an interview that new, challenging concepts should be fed to an audience easily, like you would to a child. Which is why he made Nikhil's character impossible to dislike and managed to make his humiliation so real, viewers were genuinely moved.

Meanwhile, it has been suggested that several gay references have been made in Hindi films since decades, only very subtly. Some even say that the super hit song Ye Dosti from Sholay has gay undertones.

Dostana, up for release this week, claims to be a comedy about a gay relationship—the comedy tag makes one slightly suspicious of its interpretation of a homosexual couple. So far one gathers that the two protagonists are not actually homosexuals but pretend to be so, so they can live in a house that also has a girl roommate.

Here’s hoping that Dostana in its quest for laughs, doesn’t go down the usual path. After all the portrayal of same-sex love by two of Bolly’s hunkiest hunks is its unique selling point. And the film might as well respect that.