BY day, Sunil Ghosh, a wiry 26-year-old, works as a general duty attendant at a Calcutta hospital. Late in the afternoon, he returns to his dank one-room hovel in a grotty Bowbazar building and dozes off. When evening falls, he comes alive, putting on nail polish and lipstick,
slipping into tatty lingerie, preening himself in the mirror, swigging rum—and waiting for the clients to come in. "I am not afraid about my sexuality," says Ghosh. "I've always loved men and sold myself to them. What's wrong?"
These days, Nitai Giri, 22, has begun asking the same question. Three hours a day, six days a week, he moves around in the red light ghetto of Bowbazar distributing condoms and explaining flip charts to the ladies of the night as a volunteer for a popular HIV intervention programme. In the evening, he returns to his old calling: moving with the crowds outside the bustling Sealdah station, he picks up his clients and moves to grubby hotels or dimly-lit street corners. "At home my mother and my sister know I dance for a living," says Giri. "But I'm the sole bread earner, I always preferred men more than women, and I see nothing wrong in earning myself a living off my body."
In the shadowy world of male prostitutes, voices like Ghosh and Giri are beginning to turn vocal. In an unprecedented happening last fortnight, some 50 male prostitutes joined the Mahila Samanwaya Committee (MSC), the unique two-year-old Calcutta-based forum of some 30,000 female prostitutes who are forging solidarity and demanding a rightful place for the world's oldest profession. "It is amazing," admits Sadhana Mukherjee, MSC secretary, "that we had to take in men in our organisation of female sex workers. But they wanted to interact so desperately that we could not refuse."
It was really an anguished cry for help. Two months ago, recalls Mukherjee, six male prostitutes wrote her a letter hinting that they were keen to join the MSC. "We've heard that you do a lot for the women in the trade," they wrote. "What can you do for us?" A few weeks later, she met them at one writer's home and came away impressed. "It was an experience of a lifetime," says Mukherjee, who participated in the International Conference On Prostitution this March and interacted with male prostitutes there. "They turned out to be nice boys. They hugged me and asked me, 'Do you think we're untouchables?'"
Such angst is far removed from the popular public perception of the male prostitute as a happy gigolo consorting bored rich women. The reality is grimmer: male prostitutes are mostly homosexual, and their gloomy lives are marked by risky trysts, a looming danger of contracting AIDS, and hormone shots to make them desirable 'passive' partners to their male clients. They also come from a cross section of society, and bond closely irrespective of their class differences.
Take Tinku Sen, 22, for example. Son of a bank officer, he is doing his masters in ancient history at Calcutta University and lives with his parents, two brothers and a sister. He also earns about Rs 2,000 a month giving tuitions. Sen says he turned to selling his body three years ago to "earn a little more money and get some kicks." Says he: "I get excited by the sight of handsome men, but if I find somebody irresistible, I don't take money." He takes his HIV and venereal disease tests seriously unlike most of his friends, and, for a night of passion in a city hotel, charges up to Rs 500.
Or consider Madhu Sarkar, 28. The robust Moradabad-born son of a railway inspector majored in science from a city college and began picking up clients to sustain himself while trying to set up business. Then he began a film distribution firm from a cubby-hole in a crumbling Dharmatollah building with Rs 50,000. Seven years later, Sarkar runs the business with three partners and doesn't really need the money. "But I still take money from some fixed clients. If I'm giving him pleasure, it can't be for free, right?" he asks. "Once you've taken the plunge, you can't really get out. Why should I live a lie?"
But Sen and Sarkar's closest friends include Giri and Bishu Das, son of a fish seller and a school dropout. Both sustain their families: when they are not soliciting clients while being jostled around in the peak hour rush at Sealdah station, they are cross-dressing and turning out for marriage functions in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar where they dance to bawdy Hindi tunes. They earn anything up to Rs 12,000 for these six monthly road-shows. "When I dress like a woman and dance at functions, I even have a different name," says Giri. "I am called Nitu. I also live like a woman during that time."
Living like a woman comes easy to a male prostitute. Most of them grow nails, put rouge and lipstick at their raucous parties, and love to sashay around in lingerie with friends. Helped by quacks, they take contraceptive pills and oestrogen injections to grow breasts and make themselves more desirable. Many live alone, and keep home well, cooking warm meals for friends. Some, like Sarkar, are also qualified beauticians who dress up brides for Rs 1,000 and knit at home. Others, like 22-year-old Bunty Banerjee, are qualified dancers, having taken Bharatanatyam lessons from a renowned local school. Most of them also have lovers, who often leave them heartbroken. Ghosh, for example, is on a hard drinking binge these days after his live-in lover for 12 years—a local goldsmith—has moved in with another man. "Put us in a girl's shoes," says Sarkar, "and you will understand our predicament. When we are ditched, we feel the pain that a girl would."
Now they are networking to ease the pain, and voicing their demands. Ghosh says male prostitutes should "have a place to stand and solicit" like their female counterparts. His friends complain of police harassment, given extra force by the fact that anal sex is illegal and "against the law of nature" under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Most crib about being teased on trains and buses by people for their looks. "It gets so bad that we have to behave like eunuchs to shock them into stopping their teasing," says Das.
Joining the MSC will not only mean creating solidarity among themselves, but also forging a positive identity for the male prostitute. "We can't talk our hearts out to people out of shame. That shame has to go," says Sen, who animatedly holds forth on the "latest" dil-dos and the merits of a Tagore novel in the same breath. "I have the right to speak out and work freely as a male prostitute just like everyone else in society," declares Bishu Das before taking the night bus out of Calcutta on a cross-dressing gig in the Bengal countryside.
Sen, Das and their ilk also want to fight "flat out" for full recognition of prostitution as a profession, demand abolition of existing laws controlling the sex industry—"These laws consistently act against our interests rather than penalise those who exploit us," says Sarkar—to work towards forming a self-regulatory body comprising prostitutes on the lines of the Indian Medical Council or the Bar Association to act as the "principal arbitrator of the sex industry." In the short term, male prostitutes want to get involved as field workers and peer educators in a sexually transmitted disease (STD)/HIV intervention project which has been functioning in Calcutta's red light areas for the past five years. Giri and Sunil Das are the first ones to join as educators: they get Rs 40 a day for their efforts.
This awareness is critical to their survival—literally. Naz Foundation, a city-based NGO working with marginalised people, found low awareness levels about AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases among them. Other findings of a Naz survey: condom usage was "next to nil" and frequent recourse to hazardous methods of self-treatment. Some often use bleaching powder and acid to treat sores, thus aggravating the disease. "Male sex workers suffer from more insecurity than women," says Dr Sarajit Jana of the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, who is also an advisor to the MSC. "Since the taboo about homosexuality is strong, they are regarded as people with aberrant behaviour." Next month, however, they will join some 3,000 female counterparts at India's first national conference of sex workers in Calcutta, to flaunt their sexuality and tell the world that they are, well, normal human beings.
