Frustrated, Gupta made some staged photographs that imagined anonymous men purportedly cruising in various locations around Delhi. “No one wanted to be in a picture.” Gupta was staggered by how men had accommodated themselves to this situation, where it was not polite “in a Delhi drawing room” to discuss living an out gay life. He quickly realized through a friend, the historian Saleem Kidwai, that a gay underground did exist and that to connect with it all that was needed was “one telephone number.” It was “all word of mouth,” Gupta told me last year. While transiting through Delhi, Gupta, who had come out by the age of seventeen in Montreal, was curious about urban gay life there and wanted to take some pictures.
![indian gay sex art indian gay sex art](https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1057%2Fpalcomms.2016.9/MediaObjects/41599_2016_Article_BFpalcomms20169_Fig1_HTML.jpg)
Eugene Smith, he traveled back to India in 1980, receiving a student award from Thames Television to document poverty in the rural Ajmer district of Rajasthan. Having aspirations of being a social-justice photographer in the mode of W.
![indian gay sex art indian gay sex art](https://i.etsystatic.com/23326792/r/il/5681b4/2605922170/il_fullxfull.2605922170_9ntf.jpg)
Gupta, who was born in New Delhi, immigrated with his family to Canada in 1969, at the age of fifteen. “One of the best kept secrets in India is the practice of homosexuality, although there is no lack of practitioners from all social classes,” Gupta writes, noting the constant “fear of discovery” and that Indian society “requires the individual to dedicate his/her life to presenting a conventional puritanical public image.” Accompanying the concise text is a single black-and-white image taken by Gupta, picturing a lone man in a kurta, his face cropped from the frame and his body angled away from the camera toward the gardens of the grand Mughal mausoleum Humayun’s Tomb. On November 26, 1982, the Guardian, in its Third World Review section, ran a piece with the startling headline “They Dare Not Speak Its Name in Delhi: Sunil Gupta on the Secret Suffering of India’s Homosexual Community.” At the time, being gay in India was still illegal, as decreed by Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, instituted in 1861 during the British rule of India.