Striking the wrong note...
Salacious, prurient, insensitive - that is the yellow journalism practiced by much of the media when it reports on gays.
The latest case is a good illustration, says VIKRAM JOHRI
In June, a lesbian committed suicide in Chhattisgarh. The act received only cursory coverage, perhaps because the story was from a state that does not normally hit the radar of gay rights. When I searched Google News for "lesbian suicide India", links from 2011 and earlier showed up. (Rest assured, if it is a dastardly event, the chances it happened earlier in India are high.)
There was only one link to the story, in the June 16 Raipur edition of the Times of India. A 22-year-old woman from Pakhanjur tehsil in Kanker district, who was in a relationship with an allegedly minor girl, had committed suicide. Following the news of her death, her partner also tried to kill herself by consuming poison, the report added. Apart from this news report, the only other mention of the Chhattisgarh story was in a review in Mint of a film about lesbians.
Perhaps it is no bad thing that the woman’s suicide or the many other permutations of violence that visit gay people in India do not receive much media coverage. For, when the media does deign to report on gay issues, it is marked by a regrettable lack of sensitivity, making one wonder if homosexuality, that famed “last prejudice”, is organically such a different beast that it is impossible to report or write or speak truly about it unless one is born to it.
This week brought a fresh example of this malaise. The headline of the top story of the Bangalore Mirror dated Oct 29, 2014, said: "Section 377 slapped on Infosys techie after wife catches his gay acts on spycam." The first paragraph read: "Lip gloss, foundation, innerwear in 'girlie' patterns and colours, and a passion for all things pink - these are just some of the traits that set off alarm bells in a dentist's head, almost a year after marriage, that her husband could be gay."
Examine the language. This is the same paper whose sister publication in Mumbai peeped into Deepika Padukone's cleavage and found newsworthy material. From the first sentence, there is a desire to turn the story into a narrative - the gay man with a fetish for pink - as the writer watches over the reader's shoulder to induce the appropriate gasp here, the disgusted look there.
The words, so carefully chosen to fashion the image of a man thoroughly compromised, tell us what to think before we have had the chance to learn the first detail of the case.
To be sure, there are no easy answers in these cases but we rarely see even the relevant questions being raised in the media. There is, for example, no discussion on the irony of applying a law to those who have been forced to stay in the closet because of the law itself.
All the media does is report with an eye for prurience. Details of how the marriage broke, the lack of sexual compatibility, the "queer" habits of the man, are all regurgitated in an effort not to capture a personal tragedy but to arouse the reader's base instincts.
Consider another case. The death of Chetan Bharadwaj, an advertising executive in Mumbai, last year was strikingly similar to that of Pushkin Chandra in Delhi in 2004. Both Pushkin and Chetan were affluent, upper middle class men living in metros.
They were also gay. The dead bodies of both were discovered naked. Reports indicated they were under the influence of alcohol at the time of death. They had also had sex moments before their deaths which, in both cases, were violent and brutal.
There were other similarities. The murderers in both cases were slum dwellers, or labourers. In Pushkin’s case, they were men he had come across on the street. In Chetan’s case, the murderer was a glass worker whom Chetan had met when he came to work in his housing society.
Contrast these murders with the lesbian’s suicide in Chhattisgarh. The same media which failed to report the latter went to town with Chetan’s death. (Pushkin’s occurred in a strikingly different media environment ten years ago, and so its coverage does not really count.)
The gory details of how he was killed, what his daily itinerary was, etc., were discussed threadbare by nearly all the Mumbai English dailies. There was a tendency, as has been the case with the reportage on the Infosys employee’s arrest, to rob the story of context.
The supposed liberality that the intellectual crowd reserves for alternative sexualities is exposed for its hollowness when the debate shifts to something as final and conclusive as murder.
Where are we to go from here? One place is social media, where gay men have erupted in a storm of protest about the language and style adopted in the Bangalore Mirror story. Such spaces also allow debate and discussions, whose outcomes are important to those fighting the battle against Section 377.
One commentator said: “I am really disturbed and pained by what his wife underwent and for that she should be given immediate counselling and legal help to end the marriage. That said, under no circumstances would I wish Section 377 upon the husband.”
In the fight for equality and raising awareness, activism of course plays its part. But more important than that is visibility. It is not enough to hear of HIV prevention and outreach programmes that would benefit if homosexuality were decriminalised.
We need gay men and women to speak up and draw attention to the myriad little tragedies they face. And we need the media to report such voices of sanity and provide adequate context as much as it focuses on the details of the case.
(Vikram Johri is a Bangalore-based writer. He tweets at @VohariJikram.)
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