It’s become de rigueur to hashtag all political, heartfelt and solidarity tweets over the past few weeks, in the context of the Orlando shooting, with ‘Love Wins All’. But, in reality, it’s economics that gets the last laugh. In tracing my dynamics and encounters with public spaces, like clubs in the city, I’ve come to see the subtle shifts and subversions of my own public occupation over the years, but also the pontifical posts that I haven’t even been able to push.

One of the manifestations of the turning and twisting tides within oneself is the search, the desperate hunt, the lookout, for a place for communion. It can be found in the promise of blinking lights, with booze that engenders the bonding of bodies, the loosening of tongues, the transmission of gossip and news. It can be savoured in coffee shops, it can be felt in the surge of electricity bristling through cruising spaces, it can be relished in the other run-down places across the city. It can be produced in the laboratory of the support group. But all these cosy, cramped coves of community must be discovered, must be claimed. There aren’t any neon signs announcing their presence; over time, one learns to read the signs for the floor, the table, the toilet stall, the two-feet anywhere that’s already been claimed for you by others like you. Our gunman will have to be prepared to strike everywhere.

Standing on the fringes of society — that well-oiled, powerful machine — means teaching yourself to spot potential in the pitiful. It means learning to ignore the dinginess, the stench of urine, to see past the dirt and the other distasteful design choices, and to grab on to the “feelings” and “the sense of belonging” that seem to permeate these private yet public places. The truth: more often than not, just knowing that you can take off your cloak to reveal your fabulousness renders even these sorry dives into stadium-size arenas. I wonder how my many friends and I, who are otherwise so driven to control, critique and constantly talk about aesthetics in the world, are able to turn a blind eye; the answer: we revel in artifice. We’re like real estate agents determined to convince our clients that the huge, open drainage pipe running through the house will actually act as a deterrent to kids running around. We’re able to romanticise our situations. We’re able to see the windmills.

The truth: some things have changed, and nothing has changed. More than a decade ago, I went to my first queer party held in the dusty-velveteen-brocade banquet hall of a shady but glitzy hotel on the Inner Ring Road — in those days, it was considered far. Queer men dressed to the nines were taking elevator rides with sari-clad grandmas, and with safari-suited gentlemen and their families, who had trekked all the way to this establishment because it had the unique draw of serving south Indian food but also selling alcohol. In my teens, I thought it “cool” that these two sections of society were rustling each other’s silks.

Fast-forward to last Saturday (when I went to a gay party after more than a year, for research) and it’s the same situation, except the pumpkin has been transformed into an American-style diner in a hip neighbourhood. But the sharing of spaces between these various characters of a city is still taking place. I’m in my thirties, and I don’t think it is cool anymore. Because, while there is a devious delight in clashing with the opposition, it’s also tiresome to constantly be on guard, to desist from revelry, because of the stare-that-might-come. If the Western description of queer space translates to “a space to be yourself” then only the NGO-backed support spaces in the city subscribe to those formulations.

The surreptitious takeover and claiming of fragments of other public spaces happen by dint of spending. The dive bars are willing to put up with cackling queens because these queens spend money, a lot of it, at these establishments. The wink-and-nudge manner in which commercial establishments permit gay parties is simply determined by the highest bidder, and that doesn’t guarantee that the staff will not play the role of the finger-pointing, giggling and mocking jury whom we go to these places to forget. The fact that there are still a few of these operations that are marked as queer territories speaks to the persistence of the queer communities, and has nothing to do with the owners or the management. At the first sign of trouble, they are more than happy to forget that we kept their cash registers clinking when no one else would.

The largesse, the chink and spear in the armour of the queer community, is that we will always want to fiddle while everything burns, and we will always find these havens. At least now we know that the way to get in, as the hip-hoppers say, is cash-money.

Joshua Muyiwais a Bengaluru-based poet and currently writes for the city edition of online lifestyle magazine Brown Paper Bag

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