Editor’s Note: Straight to Normal: My Life as a Gay Man by Sharif D Rangnekar is one of the first autobiographies written from an LGBTQ perspective. The book describes the struggle homosexuals face in urban India. It’s a story of self-discovery and courage in the face of societal stigma and even unimaginable violence, as the excerpt below reveals.
An excerpt from Straight to Normal: My Life as a Gay Man
When I freed myself a bit, I also started throwing parties. I would cook, arrange cheap alcohol and soft drinks. I would compose dance music and allow my friends to bring others, not knowing that the “others” could be a guy someone just picked up from Nehru Park or a hulk I first connected with on a gay chat site. The open house and the conversations gave me a kind of recognition among the small group I had come to know. A few such new acquaintances even started following my work as a researcher cum reporter at Venu on the dotcom.
It was around that time that I broke a report regarding a major Indian company and its financing structure. Although the report appeared on our website, I believe it has also been used or referenced by other media. The story caused an unexpected furore in political circles.
What happened a few days later was as unexpected as the controversy the story sparked. One evening, while I was on my way home, around 8 pm, I was attacked by a group of three men, who beat me for 30 or 40 minutes. Not that I remember every detail, but I can relate some parts of this event that shook me out of my sense of security.
When I regained consciousness, my files of papers, including those related to the report I had written, were strewn everywhere. Many of the confidential documents were missing. I tried to grab my phone and saw it near the right front tire of my car on the inside, under the engine. My body ached and at that moment I had no idea where the pain was coming from because it seemed to be all over.
I suddenly felt something wet, it was my blood. My pants were partly down, my underwear too, not from the front. I turned to the right and found a wooden stick with traces of blood on one side and a cloth wrapped around the other. It was only then that I realized that the stick had entered me in the course of the attack.
The first stroke was aimed at my diaphragm, the second at my right knee. I remembered one of the men who said, ‘Humko patta hain aap kya passand karte ho, to maza aayega apko.’ Apparently the idea of maza or fun pushing that stick up was in me. They knew about my sexuality, I concluded.
I finally managed to get up, I had tears but couldn’t cry. I think it was a shock. I took tissues from the car, wet them with drinking water I had in my car, and wiped my arms and then my behind. Other than a few bruises and a rip in my pants, I didn’t look like someone who had suffered a sexual assault that I just had. This was the only saving grace because I didn’t have to tell Adi what had happened when I went to his house at the last minute for a late dinner that night. I told him that the scratches and dirt marks on my clothes were the result of a fall.
As the night wore on, my body ached and it seemed like I was seeing images—mainly shadows of the three men. I even imagined handling the stick. That image continues to haunt me to this day as I attempt to be a bottom or experiment with my sexual role as “versatile.” Any access to that area always leads me to tense my muscles and expect pain.
It took me years to talk about this event, and forgot about it for a while. I did not make a complaint as I thought silence was the best way to deal with it. If I’d told Mom, she would have been paranoid, probably assuming I was always in danger. I doubted that the police could have done much and that the case would have kept the incident alive, making a closure of any kind impossible. And if the media got a hold of it, it would have been front page news, exposing my family and the gay community too!
So far I’m not sure if it was a hate crime in the truest sense of the word or a retaliation by a company with a strong intelligence system, aiming to hit me where it hurt the most. What I do know, however, is that it denied me years of mental and emotional peace and fuller sexual intimacy with partners who could very well have been my lovers, had I been able to end up with me as the bottom, my exploring sexual versatility.
(The following excerpt is published with permission from Rupa Publications India Pvt Ltd. Written by Sharif D Rangnekar, the paperback of the book Straight to Normal: My Life as a Gay Man costs Rs 295.00)
