Is dad at the coming out gig?

It was in 2009 that the Delhi high court decriminalized gay sex. And this was the fifth year that India's capital city saw the pride parade. But how much have things changed for the LGBT community where it matters the most — at home?
It can be a long, lonely, and frightening process. To understand that you're gay, then to come to terms with your sexuality, which can take years, and then finally, perhaps with counselling, to come out to your parents.
After which, very often, the more difficult journey begins. That of the parents. For they now have to deal with disappointment — "My son will never get married" — perhaps anger before finally finding the courage to "come out" with the truth themselves.
In 2009, the Delhi high court read down section 377 of the IPC, decriminalising gay sex between two consenting adults. The judgement was called a landmark, and newspaper reports said gay men and women in the courtroom at the time hugged each other in joy. Importantly, it meant gay men and women could no longer be harassed with the threat of persecution , something that they always faced and feared.
But in the three years since then, has the high court verdict made the lives of gays and their families any easier? "In some ways," says Rishi Raj, 30, an image consultant. The fact that he was gay, he says, had always been known. He had come out to his parents a decade earlier. But it was only in 2009 that his mother finally decided it was safe to tell close family . "My parents are extremely lawabiding and there can be quite a lot of politicking in a joint family. My mother was worried that somebody might use the information about me being gay to harass us."
The gay pride parade — Delhi held its fifth installment last Sunday — and the progressive stories that come from it seem to help too. That more and more families have been attending in support of their gay children, and that participants are becoming increasingly comfortable without their masks. Kanta Advani, whose son Aditya lives with his partner Michael, they now have seven-month-old twins through a surrogate, says, "We take courage from watching other people do something that we might think is radical."
But for every Kanta Advani — who says when her son told her he was gay, she hugged him and then "broadcast" the news to all and sundry — there also continues to be a Melvin. He's 20, and was recently thrown out of his home after his elder sister found explicit pictures of him and his older French boyfriend. The Humsafar Trust which works with MSM (men who have sex with men) in Mumbai has intervened and now put Melvin up with a social worker. Then there is a Mayank, who jokes about his "recurring coming out to his parents" . Every year, he says, he tells his parents that he is gay and every year they say: "That's alright, but you can still get married."
Pallav Patankar of The Humsafar Trust and Anjali Gopalan of the Naz Foundation — the latter organisation filed the original PIL on which the Delhi high court ruled in 2009 — say it is still too early to quantify how much of an increase in acceptance we might be seeing.
Occupying the divide between the two extreme reactions from the two sets of parents is Rear Admiral (retd) VN Kumar. "My daughter," he says, "did not have to tell me she was a gay person. I knew it." But neither have the two tackled that realisation head-on . Kumar says they discuss the issue of homosexuality — "If we're watching Brokeback Mountain, for example" — but they've never discussed the issue of his daughter's alternative sexuality.
That part, though, is not strange to imagine in a country where it is still not the norm to talk with children — whether heterosexual or homosexual and even when they come of age — about sex.
"I have," says Kumar, "been just a parent. Not a parent who's hidden the fact, nor a gay activist parent." He adds that he is not completely open about his daughter's sexuality because he worries that his wife's family, which he says is conservative, might not be able to understand the notion. "But finally," he adds, "we have dealt with what is a personal matter with grace and dignity."
So does Neena Chatterjee. "We do not talk about your sexuality or mine," she says. "That's personal. So why talk about my daughter's ?"