Artist, Sunil Gupta: I'm Sunil Gupta and this work is from my series Exiles.
In 1980, I began going back to India to make photography projects. I would travel through my hometown, Delhi, and then I would try and educate myself about what was happening on the local gay scene and what could be photographed.
This image is called Humayun's Tomb, which is the tomb of this medieval emperor. But also in 1857, when the Indians mutinied against the British, the last Indian emperor was hiding in this garden and was found there by the British. That's when the British established complete authority over the place.
A lot of monuments in Delhi have parks around them. Those parks were perfect for cruising because they were full of nooks and crannies. In the foreground are our subjects. One of them is an Indian man with his back to us. Approaching him is a white man carrying a satchel. The caption is saying, “Americans—talking about AIDS and distributing condoms. Nobody believes them. They're always telling us what to do.”
Those of us who live in the shadow of the United States have often this double edged feeling towards it, because it's both a beacon of gay liberation. At the same time, it's also got a very bad reputation for trying to do all kinds of nefarious things in the world. So there's a certain cynicism when Americans start telling you what to do.
It's a common feature across the world when you're queer or LGBT that you grow up thinking, “I must be the only one.” In Delhi, at the time, a lot of the people I spoke to who were lower middle class thought of gay as being aspirational. It was something Western. They felt by comparison their lives were very isolated and frankly they couldn't really even see a future.
It became my ambition to introduce Indian gay men into art history, because I hadn't come across any and I thought people coming after me shouldn't have to endure that.