Sunil Gupta
in high school, but in college me and my gay best friend had all the best-looking girls around us, and all the boys followed. We were the centre of attention,” he says. “I embraced my gayness, and there was no discussion about race. When I arrived in Canada, there were only a few Indians there, and they were all hidden in the suburbs because they were professionals, so when I later arrived in New York as a college student I was more gay than Asian. People mistook me for [being] Puerto Rican, so they thought I was going to mug them. Little old ladies would cross the streets. I didn’t realise what was going on at first.”
Gupta’s taste for everyday subjects can at least in part be credited to studying photography at New York’s New School for Social Research in the late 1970s. He had initially left Canada to study a sensible degree in New York, but his passion for photography quickly eclipsed that agenda. “I was in business school, so I was very removed from the art world. I just partook as a consumer — but photography was everywhere. Then I dropped out of my MBA and started doing classes at the New School.”
There he was taught by legendary street photographer Lisette Model, who also tutored that most iconic chronicler of outsiders, Diane Arbus. “I really took to Arbus’ work, particularly how her subjects look back at you. That can be very powerful,” says Gupta. “And [Robert] Mapplethorpe was great at the time — he was one of the ‘bad gays’ that nobody wanted to talk about. He was showing hard cocks in a gallery setting — and getting away with it. And daring you to look at it. It felt very subjective, which I really liked. He wasn’t studying them. It was very tribal. He was part of the scene. It felt like he was the one having sex with his subjects, and then taking a picture somewhere along the way.”
It was while he was at the New School that Gupta shot the Christopher Street (1976) series. It is perhaps his most recognisable work — his series of portraits of strong, unashamed gay men walking down Christopher Street perfectly captures the spirit of the times. “People were promenading,” smiles Gupta. “That’s what you did in Manhattan on the weekend — you put on your good clothes and paraded up and down the street. You wanted to see and be seen. My photography was a kind of cruising. I wasn’t doing an ethnographic study of different types — those were just the types I fancied, and I ignored the rest.
“It was something I replicated in Delhi later with my Mr Malhotra’s Party (2011) series. It’s one of the supreme advantages of being gay: you can go anywhere and find your tribe, and there’s this instant connection.”
After a brief stint back in Canada, Gupta followed a boyfriend to London and continued to study photography. What he found there was a very different scene from the swaggering peacocks of Christopher Street. “London felt really backwards in ’77,” says Gupta. “You couldn’t hold hands in the pub, and they all shut at 10.30pm. I was used to going out at 11! It all seemed so difficult. Everything was hidden away, and undercover, and at odd hours. Like opening at lunchtime, then closing at two! There was a place in Earl’s Court that didn’t have an alcohol licence. It was like a school dance. It was like gay liberation hadn’t really hit. But in ’79, [the nightclub] Heaven opened — and slowly the bars turned into more of a dance club/bar combination. That loosened things up a bit. Maybe it was the physicality of it.”
Then the Aids epidemic hit, and everything changed, provoking very different responses in the gay communities of America and England.
“My photography was a kind of cruising. I wasn’t doing an ethnographic study of different types – those were just the types I fancied”
“In the US, they closed all the bathhouses,” explains Gupta, “but here [in the UK] where they’d never had sex, all my local clubs turned into sex clubs. You turned up for a drink, and you had to drop your pants at the door. And the tabloids said nothing. London transformed into the gay sex capital of the world, and no one seemed to notice.
“You went to New York and it was suddenly all hush-hush. You could go to private parties, but nothing above board. But here [in the UK] you could go anywhere and climb on a table and fuck somebody. I have to think there were some very clever people here who decided that from a public health point of view it was safer to have all these very promiscuous gay men under one roof. That way you could get at them with safesex messaging, rather than shut these places down and let them scatter to do unsupervised, dangerous things elsewhere. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt — but it did work.”
In the ’90s, Gupta tested positive, prompting a period of intense soul-searching that he eventually channelled into some of his rawest, most moving work, including his series From Here to Eternity (1999), Imaginary Childhood (2005) and Sun City (2010).
“I’d just turned 40, and I was going all guns blazing,” he recalls. “It put a stop to everything. I knew all about HIV — and I’d done a book about it, Ecstatic Antibodies, so I’d researched it. I’m living evidence that knowledge doesn’t prevent it. Things went downhill very rapidly. I didn’t make much work. I was freelance, which meant my income dropped off. I wasn’t unwell to start with, but after a few years of this downward spiral, I became ill as well, and that led to a certain kind of social isolation. I had to stay at home for a while. And then the whole sexual thing became a problem.
“My local was the Market Tavern, and they started to have nights just for positive people. This big support network sprang up, and I began to calm down about it. This idea that everybody protects themselves was spreading around anyway. There was an active group of people around me who got more easygoing about it; I discovered that through the local sex clubs.”
Gupta’s homeland gradually re-entered his work, now viewed through the lens of his adult experience. “I returned to India in the ’80s after a long period of not visiting. I went back for photography work, and I thought, since I’m here, I’ll check out what’s happening in the gay scene. I discovered it was just as I left it — lots of activity, with no discussion. By then I was a professional gay! I discussed it constantly — and yet here was a world where it was never mentioned. It made me realise I could never live in India — there was no going back.”
But he was soon to witness a sea-change, brought about by the impact of HIV. “When HIV first came along, there was a terrible stigma attached to it in India. It was initially a ‘straight’ disease, not a ‘gay’ disease — but it forced people to discuss sex in a way they never had before; suddenly there were statefunded peer groups discussing homosexuality and using condoms for sex. It inspired a kind of gay activism in the ’90s, which in turn provoked a call for a change in the law.”
Section 377, a draconian anti-sodomy law that had been instituted by the British during the colonial era, was still in use. “Having completely missed gay liberation in the ’70s and ’80s, through academia they got the idea of ‘queer’, so by the mid 2000s, there was an abrupt U-turn by the media, who had always been vocally anti-gay. Suddenly everybody was queer, and it spread through India. ‘Queer’ even entered the vernacular languages as a word, spelled phonetically.”
Witnessing this tumultuous period of change inspired a number of photographic projects including Exiles (1987), The New Pre Raphaelites (2008) and Mr Malhotra’s Party (2011), wherein Gupta examined the changing identities of gay Indian men from a wide variety of backgrounds.
“There are some very interesting subcultures there,” says Gupta. “In Delhi, I met transvestites who sell sex on the streets. They have clients who are cops, who roll up in their squad cars and want to be fucked by a man in a dress. It’s a very specific market. So, some of those hijras are tops, and they have this butch-looking market for it. All this goes on under the radar.”
After the momentous changes he’s witnessed in gay culture over the decades, Gupta admits to feeling nostalgic for some things that we’ve lost along the way. “We now have ‘queer’ as a more holistic term. It’s managed to escape from academia and spread across the globe. It’s very normalising. I teach young kids, and now everyone is queer, or at least gender queer. It’s the fashionable thing to be. You can be straight and queer; it now just means a questioning state of mind.
“Everything’s elastic now, not fixed. The difference between straight and gay has diminished in importance — but with the straight queers, it’s a position, not a commitment.”
Gupta muses that the term reminds him of the end of the ’60s when he and his peers were radical students — some people were manning the barricades in the ’70s, but by the 80s and 90s they were working in banks.
“For them it’s an ideological, theoretical position — it’s not really putting your money where your mouth is. ‘Queer’ is positive — it’s the complete opposite of ‘gay’, which used to have all these negative connotations,” he adds. “I kind of miss that about being gay. Being an outsider. I want to go back to being just a dirty old gay man.”
“London transformed into the gay sex capital of the world, and no one seemed to notice”
From Here to Eternity: Sunil Gupta – A Retrospective
is at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, until 24 January 2021