For over five decades, Indian-born photographer Sunil Gupta has taken pictures of male muses to mark important moments in the history of international gay rights. Since the 1970s, he’s photographed American men cruising Manhattan’s Christopher Street, shot intimate portraits of queer couples at home in Canada, and documented political demonstrations in London, where he currently lives.
However, in 1999 Gupta turned the camera directly, and exclusively, on himself. In his colour photograph Shroud, the artist lies completely still on a bed, wrapped in a heavy white cloth which covers most of his body, with the exception of his feet and head; his eyes are closed. Contrasting with Gupta’s celebratory and impassioned images of gay liberation, it’s a sombre scene. Why, when he had eventually taken himself as his own muse, was he playing dead?
Born in Delhi in 1953, Gupta grew up in a country in which homosexuality was illegal – it was only recently decriminalised in 2018. The artist knew early on that he was gay, ‘although I didn’t have a word for it’. Stigmatised and criminalised, men like Gupta were expected to surrender to social pressure and marry a woman so as not to dishonour their family – a practice which still exists today.
However, aged fifteen, Gupta moved with his family to Montréal in Canada which he describes as ‘fortunate’ since ‘gay liberation arrived at the same time as me’. As an eighteen-year-old student at college in Montréal, Gupta used photography to explore and capture his new surroundings, including an increasingly sexually liberated community of gay men in the city’s bars, saunas and art-house cinemas.
Gupta’s early black-and-white series, titled ‘Friends and Lovers’ (1970–75), documents Canada’s emerging gay liberation movement and Gupta’s assimilation into it: friends embrace at the beach in Toronto, fellow artists clutch their cameras, couples meet at gay bars and fellow students join marches, holding high homemade cardboard banners with ‘Solidarité’ scrawled upon them. The artist’s photographs from this time read as a personal album of meaningful places and people, whom he refers to as his ‘extended gay family’.
From the very start of his career, Gupta has carefully selected his subjects: ‘I don’t like to shoot people I don’t know at all.’ Instead, he describes the ‘cooperative effort always involved in making the picture’. This exchange, built upon trust, is particularly evident in his intimate, close-up shots of gay couples in their homes. In one image two men, seated on the crumpled duvet of their bed, kiss; there is a frankness to Gupta’s shot, which frames and affirms the ordinariness of this Canadian couple’s love.
Throughout the 1970s in Canada, the growing LGBTQ movement encouraged people to ‘come out’ – the term was coined following the first Gay Liberation March in New York City in June 1970. One of the organisers had declared, ‘We’ll never have the freedom and civil rights we deserve as human beings unless we stop hiding in closets and in the shelter of anonymity.’ Coming out of hiding became an important rite of passage for queer people, and Gupta joined many in sharing the truth of his own sexuality with his family.
However, given the artist’s Indian heritage, ‘coming out’ was never going to be as straightforward for Gupta as it was for his white, Canadian-born friends. He recalls telling his father, who ‘thought it was a cry for help, a problem or a phase’. He also took a pragmatic approach, advising Gupta that, regardless of who he had sex with, he would ‘need to get married and have a son’. As the artist has accounted, ‘In India, honour is a really big thing – marriage is brokered and even if you’re gay, the idea is that you serve the family.’ Gupta never broached the subject of sex with his father again, coming to an unspoken agreement – that he ‘just wouldn’t put sex in front of’ his family.
Nevertheless, Gupta did defiantly ‘come out’, embracing and broadcasting his sexuality through photography. Studying at Canada’s Concordia University, he took photos of gay rights demonstrations for the student newspaper. Then, in 1976, he relocated to New York City to study at The New School under the direction of the legendary street photographer Lisette Model. It was an important move, on both an artistic and personal level, as Gupta found the city alive with the gay revolution – ‘being gay became seriously cool’, he recalls, joining the ranks.
Gupta spent his weekends photographing the non-stop parade of men cruising the ‘Main Street’ of gay New York, Christopher Street in the West Village. The artist would approach subjects to ask if he could take their picture; and they usually welcomed it, having invited the attention in the first place: ‘They were dressed up and showing off, they wanted to be looked at and seen in this way,’ the artist remembers.
In his black-and-white series ‘Christopher Street’ (1976), Gupta can be seen acknowledging, and broadcasting, his homoerotic desire by turning his gaze on men strutting their openly ‘out’ selves in short, cut-off denim shorts, shades and tight leather jackets. As he has reflected, ‘I photographed men instead of sleeping with them,’ using the camera as a substitute for sex since there were ‘too many people, not enough time’. Gupta also subscribed to a more political approach to promiscuity, joining a growing ‘rebellion against the capitalist ideal of the nuclear family’ – this was particularly significant for the photographer, given his upbringing in a marriage-centred culture.
In New York, Gupta established his identity and place within a wilfully reckless liberation movement. However, his experience back in Delhi was diametrically opposed; returning to his home town in the early 1980s, when homosexuality was still illegal, he found the complete ‘absence of gay culture’. Feeling compelled to tell the stories of members of the LGBTQ community, who were still very much in hiding, Gupta embarked on his series ‘Exiles’ (1986–87). Across twelve large-scale colour images, Gupta portrayed gay male couples in front of Delhi’s famous tourist sites and ancient monuments. As he has said: ‘It had always seemed to me that art history seemed to stop at Greece and never properly dealt with gay issues from another place. Therefore, it became imperative to create some images of gay Indian men; they didn’t seem to exist.’
Through ‘Exiles’, the artist was proving the existence of gay people in India to both himself and the world. Nevertheless, Gupta had to be careful. In contrast to shooting ‘Christopher Street’, a series focused on passing male muses who were ‘out and proud’, Gupta had to recruit a number of volunteers who were willing to pose for ‘Exiles’. Although the artist secured a selection of models, many wanted their identity kept secret, and so Gupta either cropped his subjects’ faces from the image or pictured these men from behind.
One of the ‘Exile’ photographs shows the torso of a young man – his head has been cropped from view – standing alone in a white T-shirt and shorts in front of a building, which is in the process of being decorated with lights and banners for a wedding. The word ‘Welcome’ glitters in gold, incongruous with the lack of acceptance of gay marriage, and a quote from Gupta’s model printed onto the photograph’s bottom white border further highlights the subject’s plight: ‘Everyone is married. Mother wants me to get married. I probably will, there is the family name and respect to consider.’
More than twenty years later, Gupta staged another series of photographs, ‘The New Pre-Raphaelites’ (2008), in order to explore once again the lives of queer Indian men in his home town of Delhi. Although homosexuality was still illegal in India, this time Gupta was excited to discover ‘a new generation of young queer men and women’; educated and in their twenties, these individuals were ‘confident and articulate and not in the mood to wait, they wanted change now’. They would hold discussions in the evenings and watch films, ‘using culture as a tool with which to discuss sexuality’.
This engaged LGBTQ community reminded Gupta of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose vividly coloured narrative paintings he had seen in galleries such as Tate Britain in London, where he lived in between periods of residence in India. Gupta perceived parallels between the nineteenth-century British artists – who welcomed debate and challenged the stifling double standards of sexual morality for men and women in Victorian society – with India’s community of queer men who were critiquing their own culture’s double standards: ‘The quality of colours and the vibrancy of it all and the mood of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – it really reminded me of the mood in India.’
Moreover, Gupta has pointed out that the problematic Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code – the law criminalising homosexuality– was actually instituted by the British during their rule of India in the nineteenth century. To protest what became widely known as ‘the Anti-Sodomy Law’ Gupta turned pointedly to the Pre-Raphaelites for inspiration; he shot ten photographs, each re-imagining a painting by one of the British artists, but with South Asian gay, lesbian and transgender individuals posing in the place of the original models.
A particularly striking image from ‘The New Pre-Raphaelites’ series depicts a young Indian man wearing white silk pantaloons and sprawled topless on a bed; one arm rests upon his chest, the other falls to the floor – he is obviously dead. Gupta had revised Henry Wallis’s iconic painting The Death of Chatterton (1856), which portrays the English Romantic poet lying lifeless on his bed, his red hair falling in ringlets away from his pale face in an almost Christ-like pose, with torn sheets of poetry on the floor.
For many, Thomas Chatterton’s legendary suicide by poison, at the age of just seventeen, turned him into a symbolic martyr for art. During the nineteenth century he was commemorated by painters, photographers and poets; Keats dedicated his celebrated work Endymion to Chatterton’s memory, and Wordsworth, in one of his most famous poems, ‘Resolution and Independence’, paid homage to the ‘thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy / The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride.’
Re-staging The Death of Chatterton, Gupta posed a slim and beautiful young Indian man, with thick dark hair and full lips, also called Sunil, on a bed. The artist had met his muse through the online chat room, ‘Gay Delhi’, which he was moderating at the time; Sunil, soon taking an interest in the artist’s photography, willingly modelled for this photograph. With his eyes closed, and reclining pose echoing that of Chatterton in the original work, he is illuminated by rays of sunlight which fall through the window blinds behind him; his exquisite corpse glimmers, almost seductively, drawing out the homoerotic undertones which some perceive in Wallis’s painting.
‘The New Pre-Raphaelites’ series marks a shift in Gupta’s practice; constructing narratives such as Chatterton’s suicide, the artist had begun to deploy metaphor and theatre with which to hold up queer individuals as icons of art: his gay Indian model Sunil, dressed in a brilliant costume, has been elevated to the status of tragic muse, gothic hero and ‘marvellous Boy’, with the power to inspire artists, as the young poet had done for writers of his day.
At the same time, Sunil, like each of Gupta’s muses in the series, is clearly a real person rather than a fictional character. The bedroom, within which he has been discovered dead, is modern and mundane; the window’s blinds look worn, tinged with yellow. Throughout ‘The New Pre-Raphaelites’ series Gupta makes it clear that his models exist as brave protagonists in the struggle to remove Section 377. Moreover, Sunil-as-Chatterton echoes Gupta’s own solemn self-portraits, including Shroud, which he had shot back in London in 1999.
While in Delhi Gupta had discovered an active band of queer men allied in their cause, in Britain he witnessed one big hurdle to the creation of a united community: racism. As soon as he graduated from London’s Royal College of Art in 1983, he realised that in the city, ‘race was a big issue’. By the 1980s, when he was residing in South London, the artist found little had changed. He was living ‘in a very gay but mainly white world’ in which Asian men felt isolated and fearful: ‘These men were afraid to go alone into a gay bar in the West End.’
Wanting to create a safe space, Gupta co-founded a South Asian group for the gay community in London, meeting on Sunday afternoons, often in secret from their families. Gupta wanted to shoot pictures of this community but he recalls that the men were too scared: ‘They couldn’t take a chance to be photographed.’ With no willing models, Gupta decided to turn the camera on himself. He felt it was crucial that he forefront the experience of an openly gay Indian man: ‘In the media, gay Asian men are not seen as an object of sexual desire; they are invisible, there is just no representation.’ Gupta has pointed out the difference in their depiction to the hyper-sexualised racial stereotypes of Black men, whose bodies are frequently fetishised.
By this time Gupta also had another reality, and taboo, to confront: in 1995, he was diagnosed with HIV. Faced with the virus, Gupta was afraid, for both his physical well-being and his place in the gay community. Suddenly, the artist – whose identity was wrapped up in his sexuality – felt alienated: ‘I was living in South London at the time, surrounded by gay bars, which have increasingly transformed into sex clubs. When you arrive, you’re asked to take off your clothes – these spaces are set up for sexual activity.’ But now, as an HIV positive man, Gupta questioned whether these places were ‘shutting me in or out?’.
In response to this question, and personal anxiety, Gupta shot ‘From Here to Eternity’ (1999), a series of six diptychs featuring pairs of sharply contrasting images. In each set Gupta has framed himself in various poses alone at home, in a doctor’s surgery, and receiving medical treatment for the virus. These images of the self are adjoined to shots of public gay spaces, such as sex clubs, but during the daytime when they are closed, and from which the artist now faced exclusion.
Belonging to this poignant series are the paired photographs, Shroud and Pleasuredrome: in the left-hand image, the artist lies motionless on his bed, covered in a white shroud – it marks a period during which Gupta was suffering from a particularly bad bout of illness brought on by the virus. This personal view is juxtaposed with that of a gay sex club: ‘PLEASUREDROME’ hangs above the closed door, portraying the ‘barricade’ represented by these places.
Despite the personal subject matter, this series offered Gupta a public platform: ‘I feel very fortunate, photography’s a tool with which to express myself and speak about some of the issues stigmatised – being gay and HIV positive.’ Since its first outbreak in the 1980s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has only fuelled homophobia, with many perceiving the virus as ‘punishment’ for homosexuality. As Gupta has explained, ‘Gay liberation was based on promiscuity, so there was zero sympathy for AIDS.’ He is far from the first gay male artist to have used self-portraiture to confront the silencing of discussions around homosexuality and AIDS, joining the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, Derek Harman, Peter Hujar and his mutual muse David Wojnarowicz.
However, Gupta also represents the intersection of race with gender and sexuality in his work. If we return to Shroud and Pleasuredrome, he has covered his body with a white shroud, pointing to his heritage: ‘I’m playing dead… and that’s an Indian custom – to clean the dead body and wrap it in a white cloth.’ Gupta presents the viewer with layers of his complex identity, the shroud echoing the experiences of all gay Asian men who have had to cloak their sexuality and AIDS diagnosis in secrecy: ‘Being gay in India has become easier, but being HIV positive has not – I speak publicly about both.’
Turning the camera on himself was not painless for Gupta: ‘I found it daunting to put up a picture of myself.’ It’s easy to appreciate artists who frame themselves as muses in powerful terms – just think of Artemisia Gentileschi’s self-portrait in which she appears as an emboldened allegory of ‘Painting’. However, in Gupta’s series ‘From Here to Eternity’, he has deliberately positioned himself as a tragic muse, recalling Wallis’s Pre-Raphaelite painting of Thomas Chatterton to highlight his own painful experience – both physical and mental – at the hands of the virus.
Nevertheless, Gupta has acknowledged that in many ways he has found photography to be an important form of therapy: ‘I find using the camera incredibly therapeutic and empowering.’ Alongside his own practice, Gupta has run workshops for HIV-positive people in which participants are given the opportunity to tell their own stories through various art forms. As he has explained, ‘It’s empowering to tell your truth, your story,’ which is exactly what he does in his own work – for himself and others.
Throughout his career, Gupta has elevated gay men from America, Canada and India to the status of muse, telling their stories, and ensuring their valued visibility in art. He has always asked permission and respected the needs and privacy of his models, explaining that ‘the friendship and relationship with the muse is built on trust’. Recently, one couple who had been photographed for ‘Friends and Lovers’ demanded that the image be destroyed as they no longer wanted to be exhibited; Gupta agreed, despite it having been acquired by the prestigious Tate gallery.
Gupta has also, usually in the absence of willing models, turned inwards. These photographs, in which the artist takes himself as his own muse, are the most moving. Here, the photographer proves to us that it’s courageous, and affirming, to show yourself as vulnerable; he also reveals that there is far more to being gay than being ‘out and proud’, carefree and liberated, in cultures as far apart as Britain and India. Negotiating an intersection of race, migration and homosexuality, and embracing the therapeutic potential of the camera, Gupta fully explores and honestly expresses his multifaceted identity.
Although Gupta’s father died relatively young, his mother came to accept his sexuality, attending exhibitions of his work and even becoming friendly with several of his boyfriends, ‘usually after we broke up!’ the artist has since joked, adding that ‘older women and gay men get on’. Today Gupta continues to use photography to investigate and reflect on his founding question, which he’s still not answered entirely, since it keeps shifting: ‘What does it mean to be a gay Indian man?’