#Gay sex art work images series
The Exiles series is made up of these photographs, placed alongside selected quotations from his interview tapes, each image captioned in bold text with the name of the location pictured. On Gupta’s return in 19, he photographed some of these men in front of monuments and in noted cruising spaces in Delhi, alone or in pairs, often hiding their faces to preserve anonymity.
His friend Saleem Kidwai started to cultivate an underground social circle of gay men as part of a widespread but secret and ephemeral network across the city. Lingering around cruising sites in Delhi, Gupta began to take audio recordings of interviews with the men he met there. In documenting these men, Gupta also aimed to challenge other colonial legacies: the historic silence of art history on sexual dissidence outside the West, and the tradition of Western photographers speaking for Indian culture and people in the work they made. The men were often married, leading secret sexual lives under the punitive force of Section 377 that criminalised homosexuality, a law introduced during British rule in 1861 and only repealed by the Indian Supreme Court in 2018.
This was a subject not meant to be seen or spoken about. Gupta wanted to address gay life in his former home town, but “nobody wanted to talk about it, nobody wanted to be in any pictures”. In 1981, while studying photography at the Royal College of Art in London, he returned to India for the first time. Years earlier, in 1969, Gupta’s family had left Delhi for Montreal, where the teenager found himself in the midst of new outspoken Western conceptions of sexuality in Canada, he says, “I discovered that what I like to do was called “gay””.