How Bollywood Is Trying to Showcase the LGBTQ Community

Cinema is a very powerful medium to bring change to society. Projection of gender stereotypes in movies can change the perspective of people but the over-representation can also certainly misrepresent gender roles. When LGBTQ+ members are shown or featured in stereotyped or negative roles it just reflects hardships faced by them in real life. 

In most Indian movies writers choose to add humour with the representation of queerness. This leaves less impact on people and sometimes ridicules gay culture. 

Many people watch these movies, not because of their sensitive topics but just for the sake of entertainment like Student of the year, Badhai do, Chandigarh kare Aashiqui, Dishoom, and Maja ma.

Student of the year

The worst interpretation or rather misinterpretation award goes to this movie. The movie portrays the character of Rishi Kapoor as gay, who just flirts with a married PT teacher in front of his students, and is very arrogant and rude. 

Most of the time his actions were just to make the audience laugh at his foolishness. And at the very end of the movie, he was shown to die alone which stereotypes queer people. It shows despite how much they will achieve they won’t have anyone to hold onto at the end which is quite wrong to show.

Dishoom

The worst character ever played by Akshay Kumar is in this movie. So overly sexualized, acting and whatnot. The character forces the protagonist to undress and touches them without consent. This doesn’t just spread homophobia but misinterprets the queer community in real life. 

Due to this kind of character, they are bullied and laughed at. This overtness makes people think that sexuality can be converted if forced and this not only increases the hatred of them towards the community but also increases the myths about them. 

Badhai Do

The movie tried to deal with many issues like toxic masculinity, homophobia, Indian society’s pressure to marry, have children, queerness etc. Due to this, the main somewhere started to fade.

In the movie, Rao plays the role of a cop who has a very misogynistic attitude and is gay but can’t even utter that word in public. He is constantly afraid about his sexuality coming out in front of people and shows his sexual masculinity. He fails to distinguish between gender and sexuality and mostly links them which Judith Butler also explained in his work ‘critically queer’.

“It doesn’t seem fair that only gay people have to come out. Why is straight by default”

             ~Love, Simon

Bhumi’s character in the movie is also closeted in the starting but by the end, she raises her voice and proudly accepts her sexuality.

They both decide to marry because of their family pressure and live freely in the outskirts of Dehradun away from heteronormative gaze like roommates with their same-sex partners which is very problematic in itself. This ‘marriage of convenience’ can be said as a failed attempt and makes at least the first half of the movie intolerable. 

The movie somewhere still managed to break some old stereotypes created by Bollywood itself with its movies like the above two. The movie portrayed the hardships of queer people, how they are understood as perverts etc. the best part of the movie is Rimjhim. 

She portrayed a very strong northeastern queer character in the movie. She was quite bold and open about her sexuality without any shame. She even motivated Suman to open up and supported her in every possible way.

With the changing times, sexual minorities are also finding their place in Indian cinema. Directors are trying to explore and change the mindset of people through their movies but some aspects are still not addressed. We can only hope that in future, queer movies would be about less humour and more about the challenges faced by queer people. 

In our country where queer marriage and adoption are still not legal there making use of queer community just for fun is very demeaning. Bollywood is trying to create and adapt, there can be a definite change seen in the older movies to the new ones but there is a long way to go, to fight and stand by queer people. 

Written By- Kirti Garg 

Edited By- Rumela Gupta