'I am Onir and I am Gay': the filmmaker speaks of his candid memoir and how he got to write it

Filmmaker Onir never planned to write a memoir. “It’s too soon to write one,” would be his answer if asked. But while discussing with Kanishka Gupta for the film rights of ‘The Carpet Weaver’, which is the first LGBTQIA+ book from Afghanistan, it was Kanishka who started pestering him about writing a memoir.

After being pestered over four years, Onir finally gave in. He sat down last year to reflect on his life and tell his story. A year later ‘I am Onir & I am Gay’ is ready for release. The filmmaker says he’s written this book for everyone who’s reached out to him over the years, asking him how he navigated his way and accepted his identity.

Says he, “There are not too many people who are out and proud, especially in our industry.” He also hopes his memoir enables more people to be allies, and be better allies of the queer community.

Having grown up in Bhutan, he grew up trekking, fishing, and playing outdoorswith the most diverse bunch of people around, which he believes made him more inclusive and accept everyone around him as they are. The Buddhist culture in Bhutan, he says, put him at peace with himself.

Coming from a matrilineal society where his sister would have the final say on things at home, to Calcutta, where this same sister would be teased on the street, was a major cultural shock. “Just the other day, my sister sent me a news article about this woman who had to get 160 stitches after she was attacked by people because she resisted their advances. Not a lot has changed over the years. It’s disheartening,” he says with a sigh.

Candid, he writes of being gay as a part of his identity but not his whole personality. But it does pain him to see the attitude towards the queer community not changing much even four years after homosexuality was decriminalised in India.

He wonders why straight people have to be “taught” about and “made to understand” queerness, when heterosexuality as a norm was blatantly imposed on everybody. Those who are understanding would still want queerness to be subtle. ‘You can’t walk a certain way, talk a certain way, dress a certain way or you’ll become the object of mockery’, he says.

Although he has been making films on queers since 2005, actors still feel a certain discomfort when offered a queer role. He often is met with silence when he reaches out to actors, being told that the actor just played a gay person in a recent film and has already shown generosity towards the community, or that their manager told them not to play a queer character at this stage of their career.

“They forget we are not just characters. You might have played a gay character before, but the stories of each are different.” When he was working on a biopic of someone who lost his life to AIDS in the early 1990s, there was this unspoken presumption that desire wouldn’t be shown or talked about openly or freely, as if that’s something to be ashamed of.

“I love telling stories which I know are not being told, through which I can grow as a human being, and as an artist,” smiles the filmmaker. That’s what he wants to keep doing, making films which might one day become a part of the history of the Indian cinema. And he continues doing this, even as he realises each day that box office is neither his driving force nor his cup of tea.

Nothing compares to the experience of watching a film on the big screen - sharing the energy of seeing a story unfold with 200 other people gasping at the same instant as you. And while he does acknowledge that OTT platforms have opened up content in new genres and new languages for the audiences, he personally isn’t a fan of the “OTT revolution”.

Like you had to get box office for the studios, the platforms put a huge emphasis on eyeballs. The filmmaker says that the platforms try to dictate what the trajectory of the story should be, where the turning points of the script would be. They want a twist every five minutes, and want every filmmaker to fit into the formula of what they perceive to be a hit web series or a hit film.

The filmmaker feels that we’ve reached a point where the audiences can almost predict the events about to transpire on the screen. As an independent film-maker, the process feels too artificial to him. He also acknowledges that because he wants to make “queer films that are not tailormade for a largely heterosexual audience”, the platforms are not ready for his films. But he hastens to add that Web series like Panchayat are exceptions that are ushering in a refreshing change.

It’s difficult for him to sleep knowing that people’s houses are being demolished, they’re being thrown in lockups without access to judiciary. He says, “My sense of righteousness or ethics cannot be dependent on someone else’s.” So, while the same people he is advocating for might not speak up for LGBTQIA rights, he hopes that minorities realise that they need to stand for each other, because who else will!

Outspoken, he calls out the West for the way they treat migrants, and for their faulty sense of righteousness. He says there’s nothing more horrific than the way European countries treat refugees from the Middle East, leaving them dying on their shores, when on the other hand, they rush to welcome refugees who have “blonde hair and blue eyes”.

Onir does not shy away when he says that the superiority complex the West has is a sham, since it’s built on the ruins of the many nations colonised. “Be it human rights or climate change, they’ve always pointed fingers at the ‘third world’, ignoring their own problematic origins,” says he.

But for now, he just hopes his memoir is liked by the ones he’s dedicated it to.

(This was first published in National Herald on Sunday)