Why gay marriage is way out of India's reach

One of the unintended consequences of something as ground-shifting as the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruling on nationwide gay marriage in the US is the question of how this will alter gayness itself. Yes, other countries have had gay marriage for some time now and the US itself has had it in some states, but last week's ruling is certain to dramatically change the conversation on the subject within America and outside, because well, this is America and anything that happens there makes global news, and second, because of the sweeping nature of the judgment itself, reiterating the right of every gay and lesbian American, in any state, to marry the person of their choice.

And so, the question of how this will change gay identity is moot. For gay men like myself, our baptism by fire took place on the altar of a politics that looks upon everything queer as special and happily beyond the pale of normal society. How do we then square off that reality with the growing submersion of our distinct identities into the mainstream?

Make no mistake, I am ecstatic about the SCOTUS ruling, which is the outcome of so obvious and long-cherished a demand that it should have come to fruition a long time ago. As has been said elsewhere, the right to marry whoever one wishes to is deeply bound with questions of humanity and dignity. There is no question that this is a victory worth celebrating.

That said, and in spite of the lyrical words of Justice Kennedy, there is no gainsaying that a certain section among us will look upon the ruling as another of those hand-downs that the breeders have tossed our way intermittently since the struggle for gay rights began in earnest at Stonewall, 1969. Denied equality and dignity from others, we have striven to mitigate our collective hurt by seeking to become like them, placing a premium on marriage and family and monogamy and the entire shebang. In seeking respectability under the same institutions that were closed to us for long, we have - a faultless point of criticism - been unable to devise workable ways of living that could speak to the specific demands of our community. We have thus opened ourselves to waiting for the straights to grant us entry into their world, and every time we have been granted such an entry we have rejoiced, as we do now. But we must stop and ponder if we have also not lost some of our individuality, some of our raw, queer power, in doing so.

Specifically for India, what could gay marriage mean? Might we, as a recent case has shown, adopt the same tired attitudes towards caste and religion that straight marriages are hobbled by? As someone joked on Twitter, how would gay marriage resolve that all-important barometre of an Indian wedding's success: dowry? Which of the grooms (or brides) will shift house, and how will the dynamics of property and succession work? These questions are, of course, laughably premature since gay marriage is not even a pipe dream in a country where homosexuality is illegal. But looking at what marriage in this country can be, should it even be something that gays aspire to? Trying to imagine marriage for gays is to forcefully fit an institution crying for reform onto one that can only emerge from reform.

But let's return to the question of marriage subsuming the larger narrative for gay rights. Much commentary has focused on how the struggle for LGBT rights needs to continue beyond this immediate goal, and that our obsession with marriage should not blind us to the many indignities that gay men and women, not to mention the transgender, continue to face from one day to the next. It is also true that marriage will benefit the upper crust of the LGBT crowd more than those lower down the rung, who must fight not merely for visibility but bare survival.

I repeat: all power to those who want to settle down and make babies. But the evolution of gay rights so far has not enforced a hierarchy on any one way of being. The sex-fuelled aftermath of a young man's coming out gives way to more gravid concerns of middle age, and all of this, the sex and the not-sex, is celebrated, in the gay imagination, as the delightful, bittersweet continuum of gay life. This has been our common truth. With marriage entering the sanctum, the worry is we all now have a goal to look forward to, a destination to reach before we have even begun to figure out who the hell we are, and this destination, with its respectability and its aspirational cachet, will take away the thrill and the spontaneity and the creativity with which we have so far defined our gayness.