THE MANY FAILED ATTEMPTS TO FILM THE BOYFRIEND – 2

In the year 2007, Professor Sujata Patel, who was then the Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Pune, invited me to host a conference on queer literature in the university under the auspices of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Studies Programme. It was courageous on the part of Professor Patel to ask me to organize such a conference. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the draconian 1861 British law that criminalized what it called unnatural sex, was still in place. It would be another two years before Justice A. P. Shah of the Delhi High Court read the section down. The key takeaway of Justice Shah’s revolutionary judgement would be that Constitutional morality was different from public morality, and that denying India’s LGBTQIA community the right to love people of their own sex amounted to violating a fundamental right.

Since the conference was to be an international conference, I decided to hold it jointly with my friend Professor Thomas Waugh, Film Studies Professor at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Tom and I had acquired a joint property in Lonavla two years ago, and now we would be holding a joint conference.

Tom readily accepted my invitation to co-host the gig. Since his area of expertise was Film Studies and mine was Literature, we called the conference “Queer Literature and Cinema: The Canadian and Indian Experience.” As it turned out, getting Tom on board was one of the wisest things to do, for the goodwill he enjoyed with practitioners and scholars, both in Canada and India, ensured that we had a large number of distinguished people who agreed to come to the three-day conference at their own expense to screen their films and read insightful papers.

The list of celebs who participated in the conference read like a veritable hall of fame. On the Canadian side there was Thomas Waugh himself; writer Shani Mootoo; filmmakers John Palmer, Etienne Desrosiers and Richard Fung; academic James Miller; as well as Sarah Stanley, Tim McCaskell and Margot Francis. On the Indian side, there was Ashok Row Kavi, founder of the gay support group Humsafar Trust;  Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita, authors of the seminal work Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History; poet Hoshang Merchant, editor of India’s first gay anthology, Yaraana: Gay Writing from India; feature filmmaker Onir; documentary filmmakers Sridhar Rangayan, Sachin Kundalkar and Shohini Ghosh;  architect Christopher Benninger; dramatist Zameer Kamble; and Parmesh Shahani, author of the book Gay Bombay, based on his doctoral dissertation submitted to MIT in Boston.

My friend Dibyajyoti Sarma, former student of the English Department, with whom I would co-edit the book Whistling in the Dark: Twenty-One Queer Interviews two years later, was devotedly there behind the scenes, assisting with every little thing from food and accommodation to handling of power outages to transportation of delegates. I remember him heaving a sigh of relief when the conference was finally over without any major glitches.

 The irony of course was that although we had assembled such an illustrious group of speakers, student participation at the conference was minimal. It seemed to me that students did not want to be seen attending the event for fear of being perceived as belonging to the LGBTQ community. They cannot be blamed. There is so much general homophobia even now, long after Section 377 is gone and the Supreme Court is hearing arguments for legalizing same-sex marriage that one can only imagine how bad it must have been in 2007.

Evidently, the most distinguished of all the filmmakers who attended the conference was John Palmer, director of the fiction film Sugar, which was screened and discussed at the event. Tom introduced me to John the moment he arrived at Lonavla a day before the conference, and one of the first things that John said to me in his soft-spoken voice was that he had read my novel The Boyfriend.

On the second day of the conference, John had a major altercation with Ashok Row Kavi, who made a point about something that a speaker on the dais had said, which John did not like. John publicly snubbed a stunned Ashok, asking him to shut up and sit down. All of us were witness to poor Ashok’s discomfiture, though none dared to come to his rescue, as that would probably infuriate John further. It took more than a couple of minutes for things to return to normal and for the deliberations to resume. For the rest of the conference, Ashok and John did not speak to each other or cross each other’s paths.

My interaction with John, however, was extremely cordial. The distinguished filmmaker unexpectedly came up to me and pleasantly surprised me by saying that he wanted to film The Boyfriend. At first, I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly; but then I was sure. I was speechless. My heart pounded. In my nervousness, I must have mumbled inchoate nothings. It was a genuinely awkward moment, both for John and for me.

Later in the evening, as we had cups of coffee in our hands, John came up to me again. This time round I was prepared for anything he might say. And what he said to me was, “The Boyfriend is better than Brokeback Mountain (the 2005 Hollywood film based on a short story by Annie Proulx, directed by Ang Lee).

Then the conference was over and John Palmer flew back to Canada along with the others. For a while, we kept in touch through Tom, but there was no serious follow-up to his plans to film The Boyfriend. Tom and I hoped in vain that he had meant what he said and would act on it sooner or later; sooner rather than later.

Years passed. Nothing happened.

Then one day, soon after the 2020 Covid lockdown, came the tragic news of John Palmer’s death--and that signalled the death of my dream to have my book filmed by the great director.