The Joy and Precariousness of Gay Life, Through the Eyes of Sunil Gupta – The New Yorker

There’s a seriality, an obvious joy in repetition, about the images of gay men he made on Christopher Street. The subjects are almost always central and walking toward the camera, as if to say simply: we exist. A decade later, in his project “Exiles,” about the life of gay Indian men, his captured subjects mostly face away. In accompanying captions, the men express some envy about the freedoms of the West, but their imagined liberation is very different from the gay identity Gupta’s generation was then constructing. “They just wanted to have their cake and eat it—to have their marriages and patriarchy all intact, and their property, and then have some boys on the side,” Gupta said. Still, his images are complex. The most ambiguous in the series shows two men in the foreground, one of them with a cigarette raised flamboyantly. Behind them, another two men sit on a bench, one with his arm around the other. But, in the middle ground, drawing the eye, is another man, older and perhaps poorer, who appears to be unattached to this more or less covert gay milieu.