When Will Tamil Cinema Give Us A Happy Queer Romance?

Like many queer people, I had my first brush with homophobia/transphobia even before self-realization about my queerness hit. Looking back, it is sad that such a traumatic experience had to come from cinema – my escape from the mostly queerphobic society as a young boy. 

This happened in 1991, during one of our family weekend movie outings at a popular theatre in Madras. The film was Eeramana Rojave—a heterosexual love story that became a blockbuster. Every movie I watched then was a thoroughly immersive experience for me. However, on this specific day, I came out of the hall with shame, guilt and confusion. I struggled to comprehend a sense of humiliation I felt during one particular scene. In that specific scene, the protagonist, along with his friends, is seated (in a movie theatre) next to a group of transwomen, whom they mistake for being the gang of cis women they were stalking. The scene then unfolds with cruel jokes about the appearance and voice of trans women until they realise they aren’t who they thought they were. The joke finally hits a horrific crescendo through a Tamil folk song playing in the background, with the men running out hurriedly to escape the clutches of transwomen. Not to mention in the years to come, this folk song would quickly become the go-to weapon for bullies to taunt transwomen and femme-presenting queer people. Even a decade after its release, I used to be shamed by bullies in school with this song. For a boy who hadn’t realised his queerness, this was one of the early traumatic experiences that Tamil cinema created for its non-conforming children.  

Tamil cinema has still not been able to break this mould even when it comes to OTT platforms. We recently saw the release of Modern Love Chennai — an anthology of short films based on a series of New York Times articles customised to Chennai’s milieu. The Thiagarajan Kumararaja creation has quite conveniently ignored anything that is beyond the purview of cisheterosexual romance. Chennai, which is celebrating its 15th Annual Rainbow Pride March as I write this piece,  has a sizable, vibrant queer community who are also lovers of Tamil cinema. What is so modern about an anthology that completely ignores a section of stories that have been an integral part of Chennai’s romantic life?

Eeramana Rojave is not an isolated case for Tamil cinema. Apart from odd exceptions such as Onir’s films and Mahesh Dattani’s Mango Soufflé (a 2002 English film set in Bangalore), the mainstream representation of queer identity, over the course of these years have mostly catered to the larger gaze of homophobic and transphobic Indian societies. 

While recent years have come to witness some levels of realism in queer representation in Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada films, mainstream movies with a queer protagonist still remain a rarity. Even films that feature queer people as protagonists, focus only on our agony and trauma. Filmmakers and storytellers seemed to have forgotten that despite our struggles, we also lead a rebelliously joyous life. 

Where are stories with due recognition of our vibrant romance with life? Where is an Alaipayuthey (2000) for queer people, or a Premam (2015) with a queer woman in the lead? Why not a Kolamavu Kokila (2018) with a trans woman beating all odds? Instead, all we have are stories that depict our lives ending in tragedy, submerged in sorrow and sacrifice. Why is it that even those storytellers attempting to show a meaningful representation of our lives, obsessed with our trauma? And depicting us as people desperately seeking acceptance from the cishet world around us?

Despite hurdles, many of us lead lives with resilience, romance and a joy that seems to be incomprehensible for the cishet world. 

One such example is Vijay Sethupathi’s portrayal of Shilpa, a transwoman in Super Deluxe (2019). We get to see much of her story unfolding through guilt and struggle to gain acceptance. While it does have an entirely new dimension of a parent-son relationship in the context of the trans person identity, her story is told from a cishet gaze. There is a voyeuristic sexual assault scene, a confession of crime and a general longingness for acceptance. Why has suffering become the most defining part of our identity? Not to mention the fact that the film starred a cishet man in a transwoman's role. 

Also, the way in which the movie shows the sexual assault on a transwoman is quite unsettling. In a scene, Shilpa sarcastically jokes to a father of a child at her son's school about her sexual assault. She refers to the perpetrator as her husband and that they had just consummated the marriage (referring to it as "first night"). In the theatre I watched this movie in, the audience burst out laughing during this scene. The film, however, takes a different tone when it later shows the sexual assault on a ciswoman (Vaembu playedby Samantha). Rightfully so, the movie portrays the cis woman's experience as a violation and a crime. But, why is there such an apathy towards a trans woman's harrowing experience alone?  This disturbing normalisation of the sexual abuse faced by transwomen as sexual pleasure is a completely undignified portrayal of the already marginalised community.

And then there is Ram's Peranbu (2019), which makes a refreshing addition to this discourse. Not only did the movie have Anjali Ameer, a trans woman playing a trans character, it also had a dignified representation of the romance between a straight trans woman and a straight cisman. Even if the movie resorted to depicting the character’s arc through incidents of sexual violence and a sense of longing for a man’s acceptance, Peranbu had a happy ending, with Meera and Amudhavan finding peace and love in each other.

In Sudha Kongara’s Paava Kathaigal (2020), the trans woman (Sathar played by Kalidas Jayaram) is depicted only through the lens of heartbreak and violence. The man she loves is also shown to be constantly invalidating her desires towards him. In a way, a relationship between a transwoman and a cishet man is shown to be an inconceivable one in the movie. Sathar eventually sacrifices all her savings and safety for the cishet man she loves, uniting him with his lover. Tamil cinema has historically been using sympathy as a plot device to demand acceptance of the marginalised. The portrayal of queer people has been no exception. 

This is also what makes a movie like Geeli Puchi an important milestone in queer history. The movie delves into the layered complexities of multiple identities – Dalit, queer and ciswoman. It manages to bring out the nuances of conflicts between a Bengali Dalit woman (Bharti Mondal played by Konkona Sen Sharma) and an upper caste woman (played by Aditi Rao Hydari) through their romantic involvement. In fact, the movie also showcases how pervasive caste can be, even within the already marginalized queer community.

While Bharti is shown to be experiencing discrimination from her upper caste girlfriend (and family), it does not attempt to evoke sympathy or focus on seeking acceptance. Instead, the film shows Bharti as being an assertive woman who gets the justice she deserves by grabbing the opportunity right in front of her. It is refreshing to see that Neeraj Ghaywan (a Dalit cishet man) has taken the efforts to carefully create the character with an understanding of Dalit-queer intersectionality.  

Given the history of Tamil cinema’s vocal stories against casteism, a movie like Geeli Pucchi with a Dalit queer woman in the lead would have been a dream come true. However, it should be noted that Tamil cinema has rarely had such a story. 

Despite Pa. Ranjith and Mari Selvaraj pushing the boundaries of modern Tamil cinema to give us stories from the focal point of Dalit people’s experiences and assertion, we have somehow still fallen short. I have always trusted Pa Ranjith to be one of the few Tamil directors who could give us a sensitive story with a queer lead. So, I was naturally exhilarated when he announced Natchathiram Nagargirathu in 2022. Unlike other Tamil films, it featured queer characters with the dignity we deserve. And of course, the movie’s major success was choosing to tell a modern, coming-of-age story from a strong Dalit woman’s point of view (Ranjith had earlier faced strong criticism for the absence of meaningful Dalit women characters). But sadly, these queer characters were present in the story just to trigger debates, coming across as tokenistic representation of modern times. Everything about these characters was boxed into their romantic interests and who they were attracted to. Is it an unfair expectation to see queer characters with well-rounded identities?

Malayalam and Kannada films have had some surprisingly ambiguous queer stories in the past. In 2017, Shuddhi, a Kannada film, released with a bit of mainstream success. While the film never spells out its leading women to be queer, there are several hints thrown along the way. Maybe because the story makes their identities ambiguous, the characters also had multiple dimensions to them. Similarly, we had Rani Padmini (directed by Aashiq Abu) in Malayalam. Here too, the characters aren’t openly queer, but, from their intimacy, one could interpret their characters to be. To be fair, Tamil cinema did give us Goa, back in 2010. The film featured a gay couple, in an arc that was way ahead of its time. Even if Sampath’s character may come off as caricatured, director Venkat Prabhu consciously steered away from any form of discussion about this gay romance. He instead placed them around other characters who did not see the gay men as any different from themselves. 

A few of them have even gone a step ahead and given us movies that explored queer identities among children. Railway Children (2016) is one such joyous Kannada film that assertively gives the right to gender self-determination to a child. The film paints such a wonderful character arc to the child that it gives the kid an identity beyond their gender queerness. In Malayalam, we had Moothon (2019) exploring the identity of a child in search of their elder brother. While it is debatable if the movie had succeeded for having an accurate representation, it needs to be credited for featuring one of the most beautiful on-screen romances written between two men. Played by Nivin Pauly and Roshan Mathew, the romance sequences in Moothon are dreamy and fresh in an Indian movie with two mainstream leads. I wish they had made a full-blown feature film with just their romance. 

Now, how wonderful it would be to make such a film in Tamil against the backdrop of the scenic Rameshwaram islands? Imagine Karthi (in Nivin Pauly’s role) and Manikandan (in Roshan Andrew’s role) romancing along the shores of a vast melancholic ocean. Will our Tamil actors be as bold as their Malayalam counterparts?

As a Tamil queer person, I am not asking for a layered story like Rituparno Ghosh’s Arekti Premer Golpo (2010) or Chitraganda: The Crowning Wish (2012). But is it too much to ask for a Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal (2022) in which Nayanthara and Samantha fall in love? Or a Tamil version of Badhai Do (2022) with Kalaiarasan – Ashok Selvan and Aishwarya Rajesh – Radhika Apte, set in Coimbatore? 

I dream of stories that not only represent us in a dignified way, but also something that gives us the right to enjoy our romance and joy. A story like that would be a fitting justice for all the violence that Tamil cinema has traditionally been meting out to us. A story like this would also perhaps heal that humiliated boy, several decades after he walked out of that Madras theatre with shame. I hope the wait isn’t going to be too long for that queer boy.