S2E2 - Aditya Finds His Tribes

This episode’s main event features Aditya who sat for an interview in October of 2019 in New York City.

Raised in Hyderabad, India, Aditya didn’t come out until his second year of college in New Delhi. Luckily his family and friends accepted him, but an awkward experience he had at a bath house in Hong Kong served as a reminder that queer people can often be as racist and socially elitist as straight people. Over the years, Aditya has learned to follow his instincts as he has navigated his journey from India to New York City. It hasn’t been easy, but he eventually found his tribe.

My name's Aditya. I am 34 and I graduated high school in 2003.

So I'm a cisgendered male. I identify as gay and nationality is Indian. I would say that I am vocal  in the queer community. Not everyone likes to be called an activist. I do like to be called an activist, and I make sure that I'm doing everything I can for having a voice and visibility. 

I do have my tribes and I think they keep changing. It started with attraction to hairy men or bears and otters, and then I started slowly owning it. So I used to call myself an otter and then, I used the word bear adjacent because people found that funny.

And if that's a tribe, then sure. Doesn't stop me from disassociating from something if I need to be in a more general setting. 

I grew up in Hyderabad, which is in South India. And then my formative years, like college, was in New Delhi. Cities in like Hyderabad and Delhi, they’re pretty much among the biggest cities in the country, and they're progressive, liberal. Liberal there means something else altogether than it does here. So you can be religious and still a much more open society. It's not restrictive at all. You can be pretty open about who you are. 

I got very lucky in terms of having a family that has for the last three generations been not just liberal, but college educated in a way that when I came out it wasn't new to them.

So that's really rare ‘cause you can be in the city and still come from a very traditional background, conservative background. My family was not, and very proudly so, we are not very orthodox about anything. We are, religious, but nothing is forced on anyone. Nuclear family dad, mom and my elder brother, who is three years older to me, the extended family was in different cities, so we were pretty much the four of us and other friends and their families. And my brother and I are pretty close now. He's one of my closest friends and we fought every day growing up. I don't know anyone else who is out in my family at least back in India among anyone we know in terms of friends and their families. I'm the only one who's out. 

Once I came out, I made friends with other gay men in New Delhi, but it was a very small group. 

India, back then, no one talked. You had the very clinical talk in school, but no one really talked about sex otherwise. We knew a lot more than what the books were telling us in a very misinformed kind of way. Just going through puberty with friends, someone had stolen magazines from their dad's closet. Very, very heterocentric. 

Weirdly enough, I got caught with a Playboy and a Penthouse magazine in ninth grade. It was a miracle that I didn't tell my parents about it. I would've been in a lot of trouble. We had a computer lab, so there was one air conditioned room in the school which had a row of computers and someone had filled one of it with porn, and this was eighth grade, seventh grade.

A few of us had access, we knew which computer it was and so we would steal in there and we had a very cool computer teacher and she knew what was there. Weirdly enough she was kind of like, “okay, you guys are being naughty, just leave,” but did not, you know, take more severe action. We literally all suddenly had computers in our homes in those two years.For the first time there was porn available. 

It was through porn, at least my generation, I don't know for sure, it was… we were the first people with the home computers and like PCs at home. And that meant access to the internet. That led us into masturbating for the first time.

There was a connection cord from the phone, like an actual wire. It was one of those telephone cords, and it had to be connected across from the living room into the study where the computer was, and you had to connect it to the modem to connect. So I had perfected a way of doing that while my parents were out. Dialing in the modem, watching porn, and then disconnecting, coiling the wire back to the living room phone.

I would start searching for some homosexual porn, gay porn. And it was very surprising to me because I think a lot of the magazines, et cetera, they were all still very stereotypical. And so having a non-model like person on the screen was very, very new to me. Now that I think of it, I'm sure that made me aware of what worked for me, which was a first, just because I still did not know. 

Yeah. I, I don't think I knew what being gay was or you know, why this was turning me on. It was just turning me on. It's almost like one day suddenly I'm like, wait, everything I'm looking at is a type. Now when someone asks what's your type? It's great to say I don't have a type, which is true, but there's a flip. There's another side to it because I'm sure if I give an answer of who it would be, I would change that answer. Once I was done for the next time. Being secretive about the porn I watched was all the way up to my third year of college before I came out. I had the public face of me not being out and then the private side of being gay.

There was one guy in my high school who I was friends with, earliest remembrance of a male crush. Well, he was smart. He had a mustache, and great hair. Let's see, what was it? Was it, this was High School Tom Selleck because he resembled gay porn actor from the seventies with a cop mustache. I grew up with Friends, watching Friends on television with my mom.I think yeah, I think I first saw him on Friends

 Access to any other queer content came after I'd come out. And after I found some role models, so to speak, or mentors. People who had come out earlier in India, which was much later. 

I did have sex in high school. We didn't think about it as sex because it wasn't straight sex. 

A couple of friends and I would watch porn and jerk off with each other. And one of them and I, we used to, we got quite regular about it. Well, we weren't just jerking off, we were blowing each other, at least the two of us were. And it was veering towards maybe more than just oral sex, but it never registered as gay sex in my mind up until much later. It was seen as just exploring going through puberty in a way back then. That's how we saw it because we still all centered it around watching straight porn.

In all fairness, those guys are straight now and have very regular straight lives wherever they are. But this was in eighth grade and it had ended by the time we were in the ninth or tenth grade, and then I did a very good job of justifying it once I got to high school. Once I got to eleventh [grade], I completely locked it up as just something everyone does.

I managed to find all the ways to, to find queer sex in India. Back then, it was a hidden side of me, so I knew the Yahoo chat rooms to go to. I knew, I don’t know if it was a chat room that was city based, but I knew how to find other queer Indians online. I made sure I did not take any real step towards ever meeting someone or actually engaging in anything that would be gay in any respect. 

It was chats, it was, I think there were webcams back then which were very blurry. But it was chatting with people in India, chatting with someone in Portland, Maine, and I did not even know where Portland, Maine was back then, who was interested in, you know, talking to me and maybe seeing me on camera and I made sure that I was not going beyond that. I was chatting about being gay but never taking it to sex, so to speak. 

I'm very sure I asked, I would see them, the other person being naked on the camera and that'd be fine, but I was absorbing what gay sex is quickly enough where I would see a category, I would see something, and then I would know that that's it. For some reason, and this might be a precursor to how I see fetishism now, nothing seemed unnatural, which is naive. But if it was in porn, it seemed like it was doable, normal gay sex.

Anything beyond oral sex was seen as just something that was, it was shocking. It was not shocking, it just seemed like, “oh, I'm, that's never gonna be how far I go, or that's never gonna be something I'm into.” I was flirting, I was in a way, a tease where I wanted to know things, but I did not want to give away any part of me just yet.

The only thing was that I was balancing it with a very straight acting sexual side, so to speak. So I was still being the very regular, interested in porn guy the cis straight guy who talks with his friends and about girls and about boobs. And this is, you know, in the school bus when you're in tenth grade and stuff like that. So, I made sure that that part of me was very, very explicit because I was talkative, I was outgoing, I had a group of friends, and I did everything to make sure that I was part of a clique in high school. [That I] was one of the guys.

My college was in New Delhi, literally the first month of college where I'm away from home for the first time, I'm out in the world, I'm living in a dorm for the first time. The first thing I did when I got into college was, I was terrified of being seen as gay. I came out to someone I trusted and that did not go well. 

Well, it's a person that I was close to, someone that I knew, and someone that I thought would be a lot more understanding to being gay, what me being gay was. I ended up kind of cutting off ties with this person for a while. The fact that the first person I came out to did not take it well, made me for some reason, convince myself that I wasn't. I didn't have to be gay.

And so, they saw me coming out, or at least me acknowledging it as, for some reason, a threat to their life in a way. You know, that's my speculation. There's no way of telling if that was it, but I decided to keep away. What I immediately did is go into a shell in a way that I repressed, I completely blocked out any notion of being gay and was the first guy in my college class to have a girlfriend.

And we were very publicly a couple, so we were like boyfriend and girlfriend. Her parents knew, my parents knew. When my mom sensed that we were having sex, she said, it's your responsibility to make sure that you respect each other and you. And I wonder if she had said, “don't get someone in trouble,” but she must have said that at some point.

But it meant that, and this is the liberal part of it, it meant that I was allowed to have a girlfriend and I was allowed to explore having sex which is not the norm, at least not the norm of the India that I knew back then. Weirdly enough, I managed to form a bond with, now my ex-girlfriend, with someone pretty amazing.

The sexual side, as part aside, being a boyfriend or girlfriend in my college did not mean necessarily having sex, and we enjoyed each other's company, it wasn't so much of an act, at least on the outside. We were a couple and we were having a good time. We were together for two years.

All that time kind of suppressing this whole other side of me, which weirdly enough made me come off as just again, to be part of the clique of the kids in college. That made me quite an asshole. I was a bully to someone online this was someone who was in my college who was gay, who was not out, and I was the worst person to that person because that person did not know who he was talking to and I knew who I was talking to because I had formed my mechanisms of hiding what I do of aliases and not using my name on a chat room because I'd done that for many years. And I guess that person wasn't that careful about it and I was angry enough inside where I was really not a good person to that person.

And it was a very elaborate cover. So I still had my chat rooms, I had my porn, I had stories for when someone accidentally found something … Because now we had our own computers in our dorm rooms. My friends found some gay porn once and I had a very believable [story], I don't even know what I said, but they were convinced it wasn't mine.

I blamed it on someone or blamed it on… said it might have been someone else, or you know, it wasn't locked rooms. I had a roommate and all of that. I had a girlfriend, and having that strong straight exterior in terms of like, oh, there's no way he can be gay, he's, he has a girlfriend and they are obviously very PDA and, you know, stick together and glue and all of that. That was my cover for a couple of years.

So I came out at the end of my second year of college. I had a girlfriend for my first two years of college, so she was the first person I came out to. And she was, and is, one of my greatest allies, even now. And then I came out to my brother who was already in the US doing his masters, so he, over that long distance call, offered to fly back to India if I needed him there when I was telling my parents over  fall break, I said I can manage. When I went home, I told my mom and dad and my mom said, as long as you are happy. Like some of the things that they just thought what being gay was back then. And I'm saying back then, this is 2006, but they slowly got more accepting of [me] because I didn't just come out, I kind came out with not just being out, but being part of a group of people who were very into activism in Delhi. I changed my subject in college to queer theory, which did not exist in my college. So my mom, I remember, said, “So you are coming out out,” like it's not just coming out, it's wearing it on my sleeve. So they had all those different degrees to get adjusted to, which I think they did pretty well. And that involved coming out and getting to date in Delhi.It also meant actually hooking up for the first time.

There was no gay bar in Delhi. There was one bar which used to have a gay night on Thursday nights. And how they would have a gay night is they would say that it's a private party and they would have a sign outside, which said private party for, and it would have a white person's name on it like, Peter or John. And it would be very hard to question who, like, you know, to say, well, we should want to go in. It meant that the bar was reserved. I would depend on these guys who were out as well to invite me, and I would, they would pick me up and we would all go out to the bar and I learned from them on how to visibly signify being gay.

So there would be a guard saying “sorry, sir, private party,” and then you would just, to perpetuate the stereotype, “femme” it up. You would go like, oh, honey, like, you know, do the, do the wrist, the limp wrist. And for some reason those signifiers were, are so prevalent anyway being that no one was visibly out in Delhi. So then they would know that you know what's going on inside. 

Another thing I should mention is the whole social life part of it in a way for me all happened, it was like one big, um… All my repressed years coming back to me where I came out. I started smoking. I had my first drink because my family doesn't drink, nor did my girlfriend, none of us drank. So I started drinking after coming out. So all of that happened in my third year of college. So suddenly I was like yeah, I want to go out dancing and drinking. Lots of firsts. 

So I was a college kid in a dorm, I would find someone on a hookup website. After I'd come out there was a person I was on a second date with who I brought back to my dorm room, and I was very keenly aware of what I'd done. Because we have rather lax security, so I could bring a man back to my room in college, but it was sex in a way that we got naked and we played around, but we ended up jerking off together.

It didn't seem, like, any different from when I was jerking off with my friends in school. So, there was a first there Now suddenly I was putting to test everything that I had been seeing for the last, for years and years before. So a bunch of us who were out in Delhi, so we had a meet up at a coffee shop once a month to just discuss being queer and some of us are now well known activists in Delhi and they had been out for a while. They had access to a queer history in a way, and I was very new to this, I was a college kid. Someone I saw at one of those, I texted afterwards and met up for a date. He became my first boyfriend where we tried a lot more, uh, we had oral sex. Pretty soon we started blowing each other. We were showering together and it's the first time I tried entering him and that worked, so that was fun. It was, it was good. It was weird in a way because we were dating, but he was busy, I was in college. We would see each other maybe once every two or three months.

So he had a best friend who was also gay. He had his own place, he was already working, he had his own company, so he had means to travel. And I depended on all of them to kind of take me through my exploration of being gay. So being comfortable, being naked, around each other was a first, because like I said, I was still in a dorm, so it's not like I had ever been with someone. There was a lot that I realized about just male bodies, about the fact that he and his roommate, who was his friend, who was also gay, he would be naked in the apartment and I would be trying to pull the covers up when his roommate would walk in. But they were very close friends and they had seen each other naked before. There were minor things like that.

The idea of…suddenly was different because I came out to my friends in college, a lot of them said we would never have guessed, which I was supposed to take as a compliment. They were like, “oh, least of all you, because you were the kid who got caught with Playboy in school as you told us, and you had your girl. You were the first person to have a girlfriend.” And I was suddenly free in many ways. I was suddenly not just the only out kid in my college, which I still might be. In all these years, I haven't heard. I haven't even asked, but there was no one else out in my whole college. So I was allowed to have this whole other side. I was allowed to have these parties and film festivals. I was allowed to suddenly have a whole life outside of the dorm, which I don't think a lot of us had back then. Everyone was in the college kid clique. 

Just coming from a very middle class conformist-ish society where everyone went through college, got a job, had kids, and suddenly the people I knew were the age of my parents and had never gotten married. They were the age of my elder brother or older cousins and were doing non-traditional things with their lives. 

I was still getting a degree, I was still on the course set by my upbringing. But I was getting to experience, like, this whole side of Delhi, which was, it was still very, very novel.

It was still very, very cool for my friends when they would hear that I'm going to a Christmas party at a queer photographer's house. I got to call these people familiar. I got to be someone in their presence which was very, very, liberating. Well, it was scary and liberating.

y social plans were not limited to my friends in college anymore. And it was not family, it was a whole other group, a group of people who identified as queer, so what they were looking at, what they were reading, I'd been searching for my whole life in a way. 

Things drastically changed as soon as I came out. I was pretty much a mediocre student in college. I remember having the young, you know, teachers of mine, the ones who kind of were a lot more friendly or like, [said] “You look like you're going through some shit and if you want to take some time.”

And then once I came out, it was a weight lifted and so suddenly I was interested in queer theory as a subject, which we had no books for. And so I wrote to my brother asking for him to send me some books for my dissertation. And I got very lucky with having one of my mentors, one of the professors in my college, be a champion where he said that he doesn't know anything about the subject, but it'll be something we both discover.

So I was out to him, I was out to the other faculty. Now I was out to all my friends. The photographer friend of mine who I knew had books because he had lived in London and he had lived in New York, and he had books that I was looking at for the first time. He showed me my first Butt Magazine from the nineties, and I was like, whoa.

And one of my ex-girlfriend’s close friends was a senior of ours. She was at Cornell University. It was such an out of the blue thing where she was visiting India, and she came to the college and we were sitting with her and my ex-girlfriend and me, and I told her what I'm looking at and I said, I'm looking at queer theory and queer space as an architect. And she said, “I have a professor, I think he's gay. I've seen a Queer Space book on a shelf, so let me get you in touch with him. So she got me in touch with her professor, and he coincidentally was coming to India for the first time in a month or two after I reached out to him. And he came to India, I met up with him.

He'd asked me, “Why are you interested in the subject?” And I said because I'm gay. And so it was his first time there and he wanted me to take him and show him the scene in Delhi, and I took him to the Tuesday Night, which by then I knew very well. And funnily enough, within a week we had gone on dinner and we had gone dancing, and he had asked me out.

By the time he was back in the US when I was in Delhi we were dating. I had my bear, my professor. I'd certainly been with the person that I would look at back in school, like the hairy older guy with the French beard. We call it a French beard, it's a goatee. And by the time he came back to India again,, we were boyfriends.

And I remember telling my friends, they knew of me dating this American professor. He was never my professor. One of my friends, and I should remember her for saying it, and I I told her “Well, yeah, he's my boyfriend.” She was like, “Oh please, he's not your boyfriend.”

And I was like, “Well, we'll see.”

 And we were together for five years. after that. He's my ex now, but we were together for a long time. Long distance, monogamous, me being in India and him being here in the U.S., the first person I said I loved. 

I was getting to know some new things about sex through him because he was older and a lot more experienced.It was me playing out my fantasy in a way. Bottoming, topping more often, but bottoming. I found out what rimming is when he did it to me the first time. And he is one of my best friends now. We are in touch. I look to him for a lot of advice, and he was 30 years older than me. Is 30 years older than me.

Whatever he's learned has come through from San Francisco in the seventies and from New York in the nineties. Like there's a lot that he suddenly was teaching me about and I was there for it. So that went a whole other direction as soon as I came out. As a professor, he had summer off and he had enough holidays where he would come over and we would move in for that brief two months where he was in Delhi.We would live in the same apartment. 

And he talked about bringing me here and I was very firm that when the first time I come here, I'm coming on my own merit. I'd never gone outside the country, I'd never left India before then. So the story changed pretty fast. Suddenly I was the person who was the most into queer culture.

He was very impressed that I knew what Short Bus was. I had gone to the OUT Film Festivals in Delhi with my friends. I knew about the Christopher Street piers, I'd studied it for my dissertation in my fourth year. I designed an LGBT Center as my architectural thesis in my fifth year which included the Transcom, the Hijra community in India, which I got a lot of help from people who were involved with the communities in Delhi.

So suddenly I knew what we see as gay history, queer history of the last century. I was researching Queer Indian histories, so I was not just out, like my mom said, she was like, “well, they'll be going after you with a torch,” and I said, “yeah, that'll happen.” It was mom's humorous way, but she definitely believed that I would get into trouble for my dissertation, which was not allowed to be called Queer Space. It had to be called Gender, Sexual Orientation, and Architecture. But I was researching cruising parks and bath houses, so that's what I mean by the whole trajectory. And that got me into grad school, in a way. At least, I think, so. 

One of the reasons I'm that close to my family is that they took their time to get around it. But my brother knew I was dating, and although he freaked out at the age difference earlier, he was okay with it after. My dad knew, he never explicitly said anything, but he understood when I told him about us living together. And my mom freaked out and then she was okay with it too. She's gone all out now that my boyfriend is my age, and welcomed him . But like I said, I think they're pretty cool for a family that's from India. And with my coming out story, I have been very lucky. 

My most embarrassing story, I don't even know how to describe it. So, I was studying about bathhouses and I'd never been to one. And I had documented them from Greek times, and cruising parks in Delhi. 

And through my ex, I had Grindr before anyone knew what it was in India. It was the first iPhone, so it wasn't even there in India. He had brought one and I had unlocked it because he had brought a new version himself and I had Grindr and there were like four people on Grindr in Delhi at that time, among 32 million people. 

But I knew about how to find someone. I had read about cruising. I knew the last bathroom in the interstate bus terminal in New Delhi is where guys look for other guys. Very seventies cruising. Al Pacino-ish, which I romanticized, and the Chelsea Piers and everything. So, when my family, when we went on our first international vacation to Hong Kong [in] 2010, I had graduated and I was working in Delhi, and I told my ex that I promised not to do anything, but I do want to see what a bathhouse is. And he said “of course, honey” given that he, you know, used to tell me all the stories of when he would go to bath houses in San Francisco. 

So we went to Hong Kong, it was a family thing, so we we were going everywhere together. I was trying to get one evening off. My dad suddenly was tired after working all day once, and we went home and we went back to the hotel and I told him I wanna step out and go check out the flea market. My dad had a way of saying, and very annoying, like, “sure, make sure you come back by 10 o'clock,” but this was me, for my first time in a foreign country, and the second day there trying to find a door under an elevated walkway, which is supposed to be one of the three bath houses in that city. 

I found the door. It's a door, a nondescript door. I go in and there's a counter and like a locked door. And this guy looks at me and I'm green. I've never done something like this. I ask for an entry and he gives me this card, which is pretty cool, it’s like a black, shiny credit card with the statue of David inscribed on it. And he lets me in. 

It's a bathhouse in the way that there's lockers, there’s a row of, you know, vestibules with curtains. There's a room with a massage table and porn playing on the screen. It's windy, and I was very scared. I undressed, put on my towel, and there were a few people, there were a lot of Asian men. There were some European guys. And it was my first time not knowing what I'm doing because first time, even in a towel among strangers. I felt unwelcome. I definitely felt people staring at me. I was awkward, and I was trying to make conversation, but was largely being ignored.

And there were these two guys who were, you know, chiseled guys with beards and they looked like they were from either the US or Europe. And there were these two white guys and they were talking to these two Asian guys. And I was keenly aware, suddenly, my race and it was interesting because I went up to them, and this is subjective, but it, there was the idea of like, the fact that I had the audacity to talk to them. 

So they were waiting for me to, you know, they were almost wondering if I would say something, but it felt very unfriendly. And I said, thickly accented, “where are you guys from?” 

And one of them just smoked and laughed. And the other person said “Spain.” And, I very honestly said “Where in Spain?” And he misheard it. But he thought I asked, “where is Spain?” They laughed out loud. He repeated, “where is Spain?” and the two of them and the two Asian guys they were with, they were laughing their heads off and I slunk away.

The four of them went into one of those cubicles and I felt for the first time, like something had changed. Like, suddenly I was keenly aware of my brownness. Or my being an amateur or something of that kind. I just had the laughter seared in my brain and I still have it. It's an experience I'll remember because it started off a whole other side of my life. 

I was suddenly aware of it not being enough that I was gay and out. That and a series of other things have slowly shaped my physical appearance today. It shaped how I act and how I dress in a way that suddenly I was embarrassed at what I was wearing. I was embarrassed at how I looked. I was embarrassed with what my hair was like. I didn't have a beard. I'd never been to a gym. 

Let me put it this way. Being there for the first time was being in the real gay world, in my opinion, where everyone comes in with their badge, but also you are suddenly with people from other countries or people who have an image of what gay life is.

And what I experienced in that bathhouse has been reinforced again and again in many ways. I've been to bars, I've had friends say “that person will look at you, it doesn't matter if you're interesting to talk to, if that person's looking to hook up with you, so those jeans will have to go.” 

But I've been that person, I have been the brown person in a way turning it around since then, because I have, in success, I've been in a bathhouse in Pittsburgh, I've been in one in Berlin. And I've always tried to see if it has changed since the Hong Kong one, my presence in that place. And I've relished it in a way. Like, I fuck guys with a vengeance in Berlin because I was going to prove that I'm desirable.

And when Berlin had happened by then, we had already opened our relationship and he wanted me to see what it's like. And I had gone to Laboratory, it was naked night, so I had to put all my clothes in a bag. It looked like a lot of those guys had never seen an Indian guy at least come for a naked orgy night in Laboratory.

And I made use of that. I capitalized on it. And I've been very, very vocal about it. I've been to Bear Week three years in a row in Provincetown. I am mostly one of the only brown guys on that dock, or on that deck at The Boatslip. And I, I've learned to thrive on it. So that's what's come out of that first time in Hong Kong a decade ago.

This is a self-perception thing. There's the black and white of it where if I were to shave now, I would be hooking up with fewer guys than I like. I'm going to  The Eagle, if I'm clean shaven, it's gonna be a very different night for me compared to a trimmed beard which, you know, I love, which I have, but I'm, I'm aware of all those signifiers now. I'm aware of what my haircut is like in my passport photo from 10 years ago. And I, very sadly, I'm laughing at the naivety of that person. Like, what was I thinking? Going to a bathhouse and expecting it to be a great experience. I don't know, something changed that night, like there was a certain innocence that I think was gone. Suddenly it was real being gay and brown. 

It's an advantage to be different anyway, but I'm not saying that people are more attracted to me because I'm brown. I'm saying that I have become more image-conscious in Berlin, funnily enough, because it was something I was used to in Delhi where you would get let into a venue based on how you looked, and Berlin has a notorious club for it, and I couldn't get in. 

I went with a friend who was from New York and we were both gay and we were in grad school together. We waited in line, we got to the door and we were turned away. And I look back at who I was then, and I remember two years ago, we are at a circuit party in Brooklyn, the DJ is from the club in Berlin. 

I'm standing behind the DJ booth with my friend who runs the party. I'm wearing my harness, I'm very obviously one of the crowd in terms of like having the tattoo and having the harness and it's 5:00 AM and the DJs finishes set and he's saying thank you to everyone and I start talking to him and he's like, “you must come,” and I was like, I know it's different now, but I've taken years to learn what to be, to learn what to wear at Bear Week, to learn what to wear on Fire Island, which wouldn't work in Bear Week and what in Bear Week wouldn't work in Fire Island. It's so superficial in a way, but it gets me to have sex. [Laughs]

I just realized how that came off. It's, it's a thing. It's  a learned experience. 

The Bear Week outfit is usually, make sure the beard is there, you're showing your chest. But I add something like a necklace because being Indian, they think I can wear one. I wear a dhoti, I have pictures of my Bear Week. it's gotten more me.

That's what my Instagram is. It's like my ethnic signifiers, which in India no one would be wearing. No cis male will be wearing anywhere. But I get to kind of queer it here and I love doing that. 

Best move? In bed? Well, there's a sexual and a non-sexual. The non-sexual thing I do, which is, I nuzzle. I do that when I meet someone, like within our second date my face is buried in there, right here in their neck. So, I, I'm a nuzzler and I like when someone does that to me as well, I think it works. 

Sexually, I like surprising the other person. If they have a perception of me being a top or a bottom or versatile, I like going with it in a way. Like I've had someone say “oh, I knew you…” It was the third date and he was like, we figured out that he's the bottom and I'm the top, and he said he knew that from the day he met me, and I was like, okay. 

I've hooked up with someone who did not expect to be bottoming that night or did not expect to be topping that night and I'm saying I surprise them just because they say they got surprised, so I don't know what they were seeing.

Yeah, yeah, and it's exciting. My gay friends love, they love hearing my stories of what seems to be outrageous situations of where I end up having sex. And I love that I get to do all of that. Just in terms of the fact that I dated the first professor I had a crush on, the fact that I made out with a doctor in his office and he took me to a leather party, all of that.

Yeah, but then I get to be, I'm honest about all of that to my boyfriend and then he is like, “well, more power to you.” I'm like, “yeah.”

That was a whole shock to understanding what open relationships are, and that happened much later. It happened when I came here and saw my ex’s friends who were open couples and I went from, being completely, like, stuck up person about it to wanting it, to trying it out and my boyfriend and I have been together for a year and a half nowAnd that was something I was very honest about from the very beginning. I said I won't hide anything from him, but I like being open and I don't like when someone mentions open relationships as a way out, or when people are bored, or to spice things up. That just, for me, reduces it. And I don't see it that way at all. Or they say that, “oh, they opened it, it's too early to open,” you know, I don't want, like, the fact that it's a refuge or it's a release is not what I believe. 

I'm in a city where it's really easy to meet someone. It's really easy to go somewhere. I'm still very open to what the situation is, so being part of, like, a new home party or I have friends who do like a nudist bar night. I've had a few years of very easily knowing what I want, so hooking up now means, in a way, it's still fun, but I'm a little more used to it.

I own being the slut in many ways, and my friends know that. And so any new avenues that I find, things that are seen as wild, like, orgies or threesomes, everything's okay. Nothing's surprising in a good way, so I'm not unsure about anything anymore. I'm more sure. Yeah, it's very different from where I started.

My ex used to say that I'm most vigorously against something the day before I actually do it. And I like that so I, hopefully I'm quick on the uptake. 

There isn't a race or a color or an identity specific to anything sexual. I still hear a lot about races that are more passionate, or races that are less shy, or races that go to the bathhouses. I think that's false. There's no reason for me to be less, more shy, or more conservative just because I'm from India.

Don't say no to something the first time. You can say it the second time, but be open to every experience. 

Own where you're from rather than assimilate into any kind of group or thinking. Because I think that was the only way to exist when I first came out was to ascribe to what your peers believed in and like that's changed a lot since then in the queer community.