Counter Culture | Prathyush Parasuraman writes: The two sides of attention

Published : Apr 18, 2024 11:00 IST - 6 MINS READ In the summer of 1996, the 27-year-old Riyad Wadia, a filmmaker dubbed “The Young Turk” in a newspaper profile and the scion of Wadia Movietone Studios, which produced the “Fearless Nadia” Hunterwali films of the 1930s, was drifting. Soon, the closet crumbled, and as he hopscotched from film festival to film festival—LA, SF, Cannes, Toronto, Hong Kong, Tokyo—he “found and lost love, became a fixture at gay bars and discovered Lycra”. That project did not pan out, but Rao came back with poetry he had written, which Wadia found “so explosive, so in-your-face gay, and so incisive of the urban gay milieu” that he urgently wanted to make a film of it. Eventually, he caught on and screamed: “You are making a perverted porno!” Sethna used Wadia’s family name and reputation to calm him down, telling him that they were making a film on ragging in college. I reached out via email to Rao, and he responded to my worries: “I’d rather be an outlaw than be co-opted by false notions of respectability, for the queer can never aspire to true respectability; we will forever be stigmatised, seen as deviant; our orientation will always be regarded as taboo.