Why Badhaai Do spoke to a jaded gay man like me

The jaded 40-year-old gay man in me dreaded that idea though. Nothing puts us off more than freshly-minted gay men who are enthusiastic about every queer coffee meet, every pride walk and every celebrity who comes out. Their eyes twinkle when they spot a rainbow flag. They want to scream from rooftops that they are gay. But we, the jaded ones, just want to curl up in our Nicobar-upholstered beds, in our monstera-dotted rooms and watch Schitt’s Creek on loop.

Yet, a few weeks ago, when he messaged me to ask if I was game for an afternoon show of Badhaai Do (with that puppy face emoji), I couldn’t say no. “We must support an LGBTQI film,” he said.

Sure.

Except, as a few queer Instagram pages I follow pointed out, none of the people associated with the film, at least at the forefront, identify as queer. That was a deterrent, I admit. Mainly because since I came out as a queer man decades ago, I have predictably become some sort of acknowledged, if peripheral, expert on queer issues at most social (and work) circles. The exception is hardcore queer circles like a pride meeting. There, I shut up and listen.

But really, I’m surprised at how often I find myself saying: well, that’s homophobic.

And I wanted to watch this film and say exactly that.

The trailer of the film depicted a lavender marriage or a marriage of convenience between two queer protagonists (played by Rajkummar Rao and Bhumi Pednekar). From the looks of it, it seemed like the makers had chosen to use the lavender marriage as a trope to make a situational comedy. Almost a decade back, I wrote an article about gay men who choose to get married. And believe you me, there is nothing comical about the sense of helplessness that can afflict queer people who are given little or no choice. They firmly believe that a life spent maintaining a lie, a deception, is not necessarily a trivial life. It’s very difficult to understand for an outside observer, but when you are pushed to the fringes, even a semblance of domesticity, for a queer person living it, is a major achievement. It’s their middle finger to society.

And so I found myself at the standalone theatre in my locality which I have frequented for the past 30 years, with my friend who was brimming with just-came-out enthusiasm. It was almost as if I was reliving my coming out days again.

Badhaai Do, though, was a hard nut to crack. It’s almost as if director/writer Harshavardhan Kulkarni baited us hardened gays with the trailer. We walk into the theatres with our claws out, what we get instead is a surprisingly sensitive film depicting the specific heartbreaks of being queer in India. My friend was teared up a number of times during the course of the film. He said he liked how adeptly Rajkummar Rao’s character had programmed himself to lead a double life as a closeted gay man. The way he wears his perceived masculinity like a badge (don’t be fooled, most gay men love it when you tell them that you didn’t think they were gay). He cried at the embarrassment of being a catfishing victim that Bhumi Pednekar’s character has to endure.

I was, despite all my misgivings, moved to tears when Rao’s character talked about youth being the currency of negotiation in the queer dating world. Trust me, there is nothing more lonely than being a 40-year-old man in a gay dating app. I liked the fact that though Rao’s first love interest is a young, ‘straight-acting’ college student, he is drawn to a more flamboyant and comfortable-in-his-skin older man later. It somehow redeems his character in my eyes.

That’s not to say that the film was not without its flaws. It almost glosses over the darker sides of these experiences. Badhaai Do’s greatest flaw is that it doesn’t make any of the heartbreaks and setbacks seem insurmountable. Families are won over, toxic bosses are silenced and society, in general, is expected to behave. Our lived experiences say otherwise.

“But that’s a different film,” my friend says.

That’s indeed a different film.