That’s about casting a man as a woman and a woman as a man. They don’t even try to cast someone from the trans community for a trans role. However, some people tend to confuse gender with sexuality. A straight man should be able to play a gay man and vice versa. Where do you stand on the debate about whether queer characters in movies should be played by LGBTQIA+ actors? I feel that, for one, sexuality should not decide the role you are able to play. We were discovering ourselves with happiness. (laughs) But despite it (homosexuality) being criminalised then and despite the possibility of blackmail or assault, we were not scared. What was dating in the era of internet chatrooms like? We had to log in through the landline and usually, after 45 minutes, it would disconnect in the middle of a conversation. Berlin gave me discipline and Mumbai combined all the three elements for me. Kolkata, especially Jadavpur University, nurtured my intellectual abilities. It is the people who make you feel loved and cared for. Over the years, home isn’t one place or a flat. As someone whose family left Bhutan in 1992, what’s your idea of home? The traditional image of home, for me, would be our family home in Bhutan. Even my friends presume that I’d feel embarrassed. At one point, while reading about my early years in Bombay, when I got into the journey of discovering my sexuality, my sister said, “I never asked you about your life at that point.” Generally, very few people feel comfortable asking me about my personal life. It is important that in 2022, I, without shame, claim my identity. You are much more.” Yes, but the book is not just about my journey as a filmmaker but about my journey as a person who was gay in a country where it was criminalised by law and is no longer criminalised. Were you apprehensive about the title? If you really look at the film industry, and the number of people who would be probably from the queer community, tell me how many people would say “I am gay” publicly? Tell me how many books are there of public figures who say that “I am gay”? Also, while debating the title, some people said: “But you are not just gay. And that’s how in 2021, during the lockdown, the writing process started. My sister Irene also thought it was a good idea.
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I thought about the number of messages I get on social media from young people wanting to know about how it was. What prompted you to write a memoir titled ‘I am Onir, I am Gay’? For five to six years now, my agent Kanishka Gupta has been telling me that it is important for me to tell my story because there are not too many out-and-proud people talking about their lives and their experience.
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But surprisingly, more than my father, my mother regrets the fact that I don’t use my surname. Even today, a woman will add the surname of her husband but a man does not add the name of the wife. Dropping my surname made me aware of patriarchy. How did Antigonus become Onir? I actually decided to name myself.
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Whenever I approach a studio or platform with a film, they say “oh, but we are taking baby steps.” I feel, somewhere, there is still resistance and people say: “oh, this is too much.” How can my life be “too much”? Speaking of baby steps, you’ve had a long history of names. And they are told from a very heteronormative perspective. There are hardly two or three mainstream films with queer narratives every year. Ahead of his soon-to-release memoir ‘I am Onir And I am Gay’, the 53-year-old filmmaker talks to Sharmila Ganesan Ram about why he wanted to claim his identity without shame Has anything changed in terms of representation for the LGBTQIA+ community post decriminalisation of section 377 in 2018? In certain sectors yes, but not in films. In 2022, the defence ministry rejected his film ‘We Are’ which was based on the life of a gay army major. In 2005, many men walked out of theatres screening Onir’s film ‘My Brother Nikhil ’ on finding out that the lead character is gay.