The Rediff Special / Ashok Row Kavi

Bombay's dazzling drag parties go on, but beneath that gaiety, lurks a tragedy in the making

The advertisements appear in Bombay's newspapers like silent sentinels; the guys look young, and vibrant. But the deaths don't match. They either say it was cardiac arrest or some such sudden death only known to strike down the middle-aged. In the garrulous gay underworld though, everybody knows they are AIDS deaths.

Bombay's dazzling drag parties roll on and so does the fleet-footed set at the only gay disco in town, The Voodoo, where picks-ups still look gorgeous enough to eat. But the fear is real. The Marathi gay group, Udaan, is reporting one member falling sick every week. Yet the silence about HIV/AIDS in the gay community is a taboo that cuts across all classes and castes. Nobody wants to talk about it. The Delhi-based weekly, Outlook, published a two page article about HIV/AIDS among the hitherto unknown species called male commercial sex workers but that's about it.

In 1990, Bombay Dost, the newsletter I edit, collaborated with the Centre for AIDS Prevention and Control, set up by the Indian Council for Medical Research to find out sero-prevalence in the emerging gay community. Small panel ads were published in the two underground issues of Bombay Dost, offering anonymous testing to anybody who wanted it. A reasonably representative sample of middle class gay men took up the offer. The blood samples collected were sent to the National AIDS Research Institute. Sero-prevalence in the gay cohort was 20.67 per cent.

Frankly, that was alarming enough. We in the editorial collective of Bombay Dost were chicken and did not publish the results, which ended up buried in the academic newsletter, CARC Calling. And that was that!! But now things are getting out of hand. With the deaths of three prominent members of the gay elite on the cocktail party circuit and several stars from Bollywood and Mollywood (that's the new nickname for the Madras-based film industry) flying to London to get their HIV tests done, one wonders whether we did right by keeping quiet.

Firstly, let's have some proxy research going. Since 1990, there has been no gay cohort done for HIV prevalence by any research institute. Hence we don't have any real hard credible figures about HIV prevalence in the gay community. But there is some parallel research work that sends shivers down one's spine.

The directorate of health services, Maharashtra, which has 12 monitoring centres for HIV in the state, has figures for HIV prevalence in the commercial sex worker community. In 1990, the sero-prevalence among CSWs was just touching 19 per cent. By 1995, it had crossed 60 per cent. And this despite scores of non govermental organisations working among CSWs to affect 'behaviour change,' an euphemism coined by the World Health Organisation to indicate that they had started using condoms.

In other words, despite targeted prevention programmes to teach prostitutes to use condoms with their clients, the HIV prevalence rates had climbed up instead of plateauing or coming down. The emphasis is because most of the prevention programmes in India are targeted at the helpless women in the urban redlight areas. They neither have negotiating power with the men who come to have sex with them nor do they value their lives very much in the hellholes that go for brothels in urban India.

Even the estimates of the number of women in sex work in Bombay's Kamathipura fluctuate between 300,000 (Source: the India Health Organisation) to 18,000 (Source: Bombay municipal STD programme). There is not even a proper head count for them compared to the more accurate figures we have for such economic wealth like cattle, for example.

But what the CSWs do share with homosexuals are two major factors. They both have multi-partner sex and both have a problem with the use of condoms during sex. The major reasons for both the common factors may be different, but the fact is that they exist.

A small survey among 50 sexually active young men done by the Humsafar Trust, the gay NGO which is associated with us, showed that more than half of them had gone to an STD doctor for treatment in the last one year. A man who has had an STD, usually increases his chances of getting HIV by two to five times epidemiologically. Hence the conclusion that gay men are at risk of HIV infection.

From all the arguments offered, it becomes clear that HIV prevalence rates in the gay community at the fag end of 1996 are definitely on the higher side; one estimate by the Humsafar Trust is that they cannot be below 65 per cent. And if that's the case, the high life and high volume sex reported in Bombay's gay underworld is going to end in large scale tragedy.

What kind of numbers are we talking about. Let's say that if we took the 1991 census as the base, Bombay has an estimated population of 12.5 million. Even though the island city has a distorted female male ratio (700 females for every 1,000 males), and even if an assumption of 6.25 million males is made, 60 per cent of them being sexually active. in the population, this gives us 3.6 million sexually active men of whom five per cent are permanent practising homosexuals. Another 30 per cent are willy-nilly classified as Men-who-have-sex-with-Men. This gives a scary figure of a little over one million males at risk who nobody is willing to educate as far as changing risk behaviour is concerned.

In Bombay, Bombay Dost has been crying hoarse about what can be expected. It is not only the city's glitterati that seems impervious to the danger, even the government and civic authorities have been turning a Nelson's eye. The concentrated attack of sex with female CSWs has in fact diverted more men into paedophilia and also into situational homosexuality.

Hijras, or the alleged ritually castrated males, are also reporting more sex work with males now that their religious roles have come to an end. They are also reporting higher sero-prevalence figures (around 70 per cent), which is very near the sero-prevalence in the gay community.

A human disaster is in the making!

Ashok Row Kavi is India's best known gay activist