In gay abandon...

Filmmaker Onir's 'I am Onir, & I am Gay' speaks about the unspeakable horrors that someone as 'privileged' as him had to endure due to him claiming his identity

Sometimes it feels uncanny how my films have shown things that I have experienced later. I shot Omar’s story as a part of I Am in 2009. The story is about how the gay character Jai, played by Rahul Bose, was humiliated by a cop because of his sexual identity. I experienced something similar when I visited the police station to file a case against the guy who falsely accused me. It was only because my associate Amar Kaushik was there by my side, giving me strength and support, that I did not crumble.

The police understood that the allegations were fake and joked about the fact that someone so much physically stronger than me had made these allegations, but that didn’t stop them from humiliating me verbally for being gay. I realised then that if I faced this in spite of belonging to the privileged class, gay men and women from less privileged backgrounds and the trans community must be dealing with unspeakable horrors. There must be so many untold stories of violence and humiliation. That is why I write this now, even though it is extremely painful to relive those days. Of how a publication made front-page headlines of an allegation that was not proven and drove me to the verge of ending my life. I did not, as death would have meant accepting defeat and perhaps even guilt. I could not let my family and friends down. I had to stand up for the truth.

Once My Brother Nikhil was ready, it suddenly struck us that the film had to be certified by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). Those were the days when Section 377 was still a part of the Indian Penal Code, and the film was dealing with gay characters.

I was nervous — what if we got an ‘A’ certificate? That would mean not being able to sell satellite rights of the film. What if the film did not get cleared? The day of the censor board screening was another smoke-filled afternoon. I had no idea who the five people watching our film were, the people who would judge if the film was to be allowed for public consumption. Sanjay and I were waiting anxiously at the door when we were told that one person had to go in and face the members. My knees were shaking and I was feeling queasy as I stood in the centre of the room looking at those five faces.

They were cold and silent, and when one of them said, ‘We liked your film, but there’s a problem,’ I was ready to collapse. They then proceeded to explain that all of them loved everything and would give us a ‘U’ certificate, provided I added a disclaimer in the beginning that everything was fictitious and not based on any real story. They were worried that the government of Goa might not like that Goa was shown as the home of patient zero.

This was one of the reasons why we didn’t put a card saying that the film was inspired by late AIDS activist Dominic D'Souza’s life story but we acknowledged it in every press talk we had. One of the things I kept stressing is that the docu-feature structure of the film was to help reinforce that this was not a fictitious story but a real one. I wonder if My Brother Nikhil would still get a U certificate with the current guidelines. And with I Am, an FIR would probably be filed against me today!

For our marketing campaign, we shot with Rahul Dravid, Sania Mirza, Mahesh Bhupathi, Karan Johar, Saif Ali Khan and Abhishek Bachchan. On March 24, 2005, we had the premiere of our film at the Fun Republic in the Bombay suburb of Andheri. It was a magical night and truly overwhelming. The YRF marketing team had organised the media coverage in the best possible way that I could have imagined, and we had a great turnout in terms of people. All the screens at the venue were packed. I do regret that I couldn’t be inside the theatre when the screenings started, as Juhi, Sanjay, Purab and I were outside giving interviews till nearly two-thirds of the film was over. Post that, I slipped in once but felt too nervous to stay. Sanjay slipped in once too and came back smiling. ‘People are sobbing,’ he told me. Then the show finished and as people started to come out, we watched them nervously from a distance as we didn’t want people to feel obliged to like our film. But they were seeking us out to just hug and tell us how much they loved the film, loved Nikhil, Anu and Nigel. Some related to the film as a father-son story, some as a mother-son story, some with the sister, some with the lover and some were just reminded of love and loss.

I don’t have any clear memory of what we did that night, but for me, it was like the end of a phase of my life. Ever since I was in Class 6, I had unknowingly wanted to be a filmmaker; consciously, since I was in Class 10. Having lived with the dream for so many years, working for this one day . . . I had finally transitioned from dreaming to becoming a part of that dream. I know I had already been working in the film industry for about ten years, but this was a huge moment. I had always told myself that I wanted to have the opportunity, at least once, of seeing my work as a filmmaker, and if I didn’t like what I saw, I would quit filmmaking and do something else, But I needed to do this at least once. The box office matters, but the fact that my films haven’t fared well commercially hasn’t broken me either. This is primarily because — and I don’t know if I should call it a strength or a weakness — money was not the driving force for me, the need to tell the story was. That is the force that made a film like I Am possible. The need to keep making memories... for what is cinema but a reservoir of the memories of society, time and culture?

The next few days were full of excitement and some heartbreak. The film got very good press overall, apart from one really stupid review where the critic said I had copied it from some documentary that I hadn’t even heard of! Even though I was welcomed as a filmmaker with a difference, the heartbreak was that not enough people went to the theatres to watch our film. The minute the reviews were out, people knew that the protagonist was gay. Men were largely reluctant to go into the theatre or show interest in the film because they were scared to be perceived as gay. Those who watched were mostly overwhelmed, and I was flooded with emails and calls from unknown people about how much the film meant to them.

That is the most difficult thing to deal with — you navigate various challenges to make a good film and it wins accolades, but releasing it seems to become tougher over the years. This aspect of filmmaking has been so disheartening and stressful that we have now become sceptical about producing what is termed as ‘unsafe’ films. The other day I was having a friendly debate with a well-known filmmaker on Twitter where he was going on and on about how times are much better now, and I was telling him I didn’t feel that way. I found it a little strange that he should refuse to acknowledge that it might be better for him, but that does not mean it’s the same for someone primarily known as a queer filmmaker. Stories set in ‘B’ towns have now become viable and entertaining enough as ‘A’ cities have suddenly woken up to the ‘other’ India, but the fact is that they have still not woken up to show as much interest in queer lives, nor are they involved enough to find queer stories ‘entertaining’.

Yes, my shortcoming is that I could not make a comedy like Dostana out of My Brother Nikhil, nor have I managed to do a Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan out of I Am or Chauranga. Maybe my shortcoming as a filmmaker is that I am drawn to the grey side within us, to loving smiles and tears a little more than loud laughter.

(Excerpted with permission from I Am Onir, & I Am Gay published by Penguin Random House India)