Saattvic, a model turned actor, who was seen in Ashutosh Gowariker’s ‘Everest’ gathered some courage and went live with DNA accepting his sexual orientation. In no time, the letter took the internet by storm. The actor is not ashamed or afraid of accepting that he is gay & even chose to write a heart-wrenching open letter to all his co-workers and all the gay men in the countries where LGBT is still not widely accepted. Read the letter & share your views in the comments below.
Read it here:
Reams have already been written about Karan Johar’s coming-out-without-saying-it in his forthcoming biography, The Unsuitable Boy. While many are lauding his move as brave, several gay rights activists have taken umbrage at his refusal to explicitly say, “I am gay”.
The lines under contention are “Everybody knows what my sexual orientation is. I don’t need to scream it out. And if I need to spell it out, I won’t only because I live in a country where I could possibly be jailed for saying this.” Depending on how you look at this, it is a statement of cowardice or a comment on the sorry state of human rights in this country. Personally, I do not think it is my station at all to judge Karan – I have not lived his life, I do not have a huge business empire to lose by courting controversy, and I cannot lay claim to having done anything that has made an earth shattering difference to a large group of people. Karan is entitled to do whatever he wants, and I am no one to advise him about how to present himself to the world.
Karan’s post, however, has motivated me to say unequivocally “I AM GAY”. Let me explain.
Five years ago, in early 2012, following a postgraduate degree in Economics from the University of Oxford, I had a well paying job as an economist in London. While I loved being an economist, I had also always wanted to act, and I felt that the time was right for me to give it a shot. So, I resigned and moved to Mumbai, to chase my dreams.
In London, I was an out and proud gay man. In fact, I was an out and proud gay man when I was 20 – my first public coming out was during my third year at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. My parents have always known, and they’ve always accepted it. At home, it was always a non-issue. I’ve been lucky throughout my life to find acceptance more often than not, and as a result being gay has never really been a big part of my life. It occupied as much headspace as me being Punjabi, vegetarian, a musician, an actor, etc. – it was just another part of me.
However, almost from the moment I landed, I was told by insiders to hide my sexual orientation from the industry. I realised that society had not moved on as quickly as the law had. I was told that the audience will not accept an openly gay actor, so nothing of this should ever get to the media. Casting directors would not cast you in a lead role because how can a gay man romance a woman? This meant that any overtly gay Facebook posts had to come down. It also meant that you hid it from everyone in the industry, because you never know who might say what to the media or casting directors. Whether or not any of these concerns are real is not the point – for a young aspirant who is made to believe something like this can make or break a career, they were real enough.
And so, I took one step back into the closet. My family and my close friends always knew, but I hid it from those I worked with. I justified it to myself by saying “why must I stand on tables and shout out my sexual orientation? Straight people don’t do it!” All this came to a head once when I was travelling with a troupe to Jaipur from Delhi for a play. Our make-up artist was gay and out, and he opened up to us about his struggles. A small town boy, he is effeminate, and he regularly gets abused for it. He’d had so much that he was questioning whether there was something wrong with him. As he broke down into tears, I told him that I understood, and that he had to be strong and fight the abuse. He looked me in the eye and said “you don’t know what it feels like, you have not been through it yourself.” I wanted to tell him that I HAD been through it myself, that I understood what he was feeling, but I couldn’t. And it felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders at that point.
This, and other similar incidents, drove me up the wall. It got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore, and without a thought to the consequences, I started coming out to those colleagues who I had established a certain level of ease with, those who I was certain wouldn’t go about bad mouthing me to the media because of my orientation. Slowly, I realised that my initial misgivings were more fear than anything else, and that as long as the media never wrote anything about it, I was fine. Of course, I wasn’t a celebrity, just a struggling theatre artist, and the media didn’t really care about me at all. Gradually it came to the point where I was pretty much out to everyone in my social circle.
The SC judgement turned a fairly apolitical me into a bit of an activist. I felt wronged, personally. I wrote and directed a play with a strong homosexual component that was well received in mid 2014. I performed at gay themed events. In the midst of all this, I shot for Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Everest, and did a blink and miss role in a film that most people missed, Badmashiyaan. Everest brought a little bit of mainstream popularity with it, and god forbid any of my new ‘fans’ figured out that I am gay! It would be a PR disaster for the TV show. So, I led this strange double life – my theatre was out and proud, and my screen work was old fashioned and closeted.
I had moved back from London to a house already rented by the family, but there came a time when I needed to rent a house on my own. Oh my goodness. Bachelor! Actor! GAY! In what was probably the most brilliant acting performance of my career, I donned a business suit, pulled out my old business cards and work contract, and told the society I was an economist working for my old firm remotely. When they asked about bringing girlfriends home, etc. I told them I was single and was completely focussed on my work. I remember having to think twice before even hugging my boyfriend while in that flat, making sure that the curtains were closed, lest the neighbours catch a glimpse and I get thrown out for indulging in things ‘against Indian culture’, something I had been explicitly warned about by the society.
