One Night in Mumbai--post by Lon

My contribution to our weekend itinerary was a Saturday night trip to Mumbai's one (and only) gay bar, Voodoo, located in the relatively swank area of Colaba near the Taj Mahal Hotel and the Gateway of India. For those of you making a trip to Mumbai anytime in the future, this is an experience not to be missed, which is not to say that you'll have a good time the whole time.

At first, Robin, Alex, and I were kind of freaked out, and we're not exactly as pure as the driven snow. There was no marquee (well, there was no accurate marquee) so it was first off a little hard to find. Then after deciding that, if there's a gay bar on this street, it's this one, we paid the Rs.300/head admission charge (with Robin getting in free, cuz she's hot like that) and made our way into the club. One enters the club and is immediately on the dance floor - deafening music, strobe lights, dancers - there's no transition.

Likes deer in the headlights, we froze. Then we wondered if we were in the right place. Some things in our favor: men dancing together, disco soundtrack, relatively run-down and seedy decor. Things against: men dancing together (not unheard of here at all) but also with women, gaydar on the fritz after watching men routinely holding hands or with arms around each other every day (very common), and painted Shrek-inspired tableau on the wall (I shit you not). After we caught our breath, though, we agreed that this is the place, if for no other reason than the sensory onslaught perfectly matched descriptions of the place we had read on line. We also realized that a fair number of the women were "women" and that the other recognizable expats would have all looked very comfortable at the Badlands back home.

Voodoo is billed as having two levels, but what that means is that there's a dancefloor with a bar on the main floor, a precarious stairway up to a mezzanine for onlookers, and then a little area off of the dancefloor with some couches. It's small, dark, and mildly sinister - all things in its favor. After each getting our beverages of choice, we made our way to a cubbyhole with some couches to (a) gain some much needed relief from the strobe lights, which were nearly seizure inducing, (b) validate each other's initial freakout over how we just didn't have the tools to read this place upon entry, and (c), wait for some Bollywood music to come on so we could shake it.

Little did we know that there was (d), which is where we got to see men sit with women or "women" as they arranged the details for other, more intimate transactions to be conducted elsewhere. Near our couch were two others, and the only folks who sat there were men led over by women or "women," where they seemed to flirt/negotiate and then leave the bar together. We wish all those young lovers nothing but long and happy futures together!

And then the Bollywood music came on and we hit the floor, where we were warmly embraced by the locals (sometimes more literally than we would have liked). Robin can chime in with some of the hits she recognized, but she wanted me to shout out to Jeanette that they played the "sha-ka-lak-lak-lak-a-BOOM-BOOM" song. The others dancing were happy to have us join in, and several of them poked us to see if it was okay to dance with us (or at least that's why we think they were poking us - the cross-cultural nuances of dancefloor etiquette are still beyond us). But the dancing was a true highlight and we were a sweaty mess by the end of it. Along the way, I saw the first kiss I've been witness to in India, and it was two men. Nice.

We closed out the club (at 1:30) and took a predictably loud and smoky non A/C cabride back home. On the way back, I wondered what the other million or so gay Mumbaiers were up to... It was the second to last night of Navratri, so I hope they were out dancing under the moonlit sky with the rest of the city.

One of the "interesting" things about India is that homosexual acts are still criminalized, although prosecutions are very uncommon (much as in most of the U.S. prior to Lawrence v. Texas (2003)). This does, however, create a climate in which people are afraid to be out lest they suffer violence or extortion, the threats of which are both very real, and so there are very few places to congregate as gays and lesbians as such. All the more reason to appreciate Mumbai's lone weekly gay bar, Voodoo! -L