MUMBAI, INDIA — "We are gay -- this is my boyfriend." The shock in this statement comes not so much from what is being said but who is saying it. The speaker in question is John Abraham, an A-list Bollywood hero, known for his chiseled chest and sexy smirk. The "boyfriend" is being played by Abhishek Bachchan, another well-known actor who is considered Bollywood royalty (he is the son of superstar Amitabh Bachchan and the husband of leading actress Aishwarya Rai).
Abraham and Bachchan, both strapping matinee idols, have built their careers playing sensitive lovers and good sons, but in their upcoming film "Dostana" (Friendship) they are breaking with tradition, risking their carefully cultivated screen images and testing the sensibilities of Bollywood audiences.
"Dostana," which will have its worldwide theatrical release Friday, is the first big-budget mainstream Bollywood film to feature gay protagonists. But the movie has more in common with "Three's Company" than "Brokeback Mountain" or "Milk." That's because the characters aren't actually gay. They are heterosexual men pretending to be homosexuals so they can save on rent and share an apartment with a curvaceous and conspicuously single magazine editor, played by popular actress Priyanka Chopra.
Predictably, both fall in love with her but are forced to keep up the charade of being lovers themselves. The film, set in Miami, is a breezy romantic comedy, with what producer Karan Johar calls "a candy-floss take on homosexuality." But in a country where homosexuality is a criminal offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison, candy floss is cutting edge.
While police in India don't usually arrest people simply for being gay, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a law dating back to 1860, criminalizes even private, consensual sex between adults of the same sex. Subsequently, the law has pushed homosexuality underground and there are no reliable numbers on the gay population in India. In 2004, the National AIDS Control Organization pegged the number at a minimum of 2.5 million, but some media estimates suggest a much higher number, as many as 50 million out of India's total population of 1.13 billion.
Despite the numbers, the Indian gay story has rarely become fodder for film. Popular Hindi cinema has largely reduced gay characters to comic sidekicks or, on occasion, villains. India's first bona fide gay film was a 12-minute adaptation of a poem by R. Raja Rao, who is one of the best-known gay fiction writers in the country. The film, titled "BOMgAY," made in 1996, circulated at festivals and private screenings. It generated media buzz but was never commercially released.
In 2005, "My Brother . . . Nikhil," a low-budget drama about a gay man's struggle with AIDS, found distributors and critical acclaim but failed to connect with mainstream audiences at the box office. The film's director, who goes by the single name Onir, says: "After 'My Brother . . . Nikhil,' I met several producers who said they loved it but nobody wanted to make another film that went near the subject." In comparison, television has been quicker to feature gay characters and themes, in news shows and on the occasional soap opera, but is still a long way from airing a show like "Will & Grace."
With the $10-million "Dostana," Johar and his stars are entering uncharted waters. Which is why even a faux-gay angle is couched in glittering, mainstream trappings -- stars, sun-kissed Miami beaches, trendy styling and several set-piece songs. But within these commercial parameters, Johar and writer-director Tarun Mansukhani are attempting to push the envelope.
To convince their landlady, the heroes invent a romantic back story about how they met and several scenes show them flirting with each other, holding hands and even doing a simmering tango. Another leading Bollywood actor, Boman Irani, plays a gay magazine editor who visits the girl on pretext of work but is more interested in checking out her two roommates. Most critically, the film features the stock, smothering northern Indian mother who becomes hysterical when she first finds out that her son is gay (she isn't in on the lie) but eventually she blesses the union telling her son's boyfriend: "I'm not sure whether you're my son-in-law or daughter-in-law!"
