'There is no change,' says Satish, an outreach worker at a drop-in centre for men who have sex with men in Secunderabad, Hyderabad's twin city. Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, is 1,500km and a cultural leap away from middle-class activism in Delhi, where the case was won. īut for most of the gay men I met, decriminalisation had made little obvious difference. Since then, Krishna and Avinash, his partner of seven years, have received joint invitations to family parties and an annual couples-only Puja. 'You speak about your community's problems so well,' they said, recognising for the first time that they knew he was gay.
When he got home at 10 o'clock that night, his mother and brother congratulated him. On the day of decriminalisation – 2 July 2009 – Krishna went public, spending hours on local TV and radio, talking about gay issues and rebutting religious leaders. Now the law has changed, I wanted to know whether their lives had also altered course.įor Krishna, the answer is yes. At that time, section 377 of the Indian penal code made gay sex illegal, and strong social stigma drove gay men underground. I first met Kouda in 2008 when I was reporting on how discrimination puts gay men at greater risk of HIV in Andhra Pradesh (which has one of India's highest rates of the virus) for the Guardian's international development journalism competition.
