It is difficult to just let it happen. First, to be absolutely secure, it would have to happen in Delhi. Everywhere else is still risky. Then, while it is happening and afterwards, some sort of gratitude would have to be felt for a bench of judges and the Constitution. The framers of the Constitution, together with their august vision of a free and democratic nation, should be remembered too. It would also be prudent to bear in mind that for a great many people (and quite powerful people), what has happened goes against their notion of such diverse entities as nature, religion, Indian culture, India and god (in his various guises). Finally, was what happened “consensual penile non-vaginal”? Through all this, love, as a gloomy English poet had put it, would have to be made. And that love, together with the making of it, better be queer.

Tall order, one would think. But try bringing together the languages of law and love, of democracy and desire, of the penal and the penile, and the result could be at once exhilarating and absurd. To govern the ungovernable has always been a difficult, yet compelling, challenge for forgers of the State, from imperialists to republicans. Human life, because it can only be lived in a mortal body, is grounded in sexuality and power — the pursuit of pleasure, the fear of pain and the deferral of death. So power and sexuality are the two most daunting realities to be confronted and contained when human beings decide to make a go at being civilized. Hence, the Indian Penal Code’s peculiar fear of sexual pleasure. Male or female homosexuality is intellectually irrelevant to Section 377. This is why Indian homophobia had to interpret this law in a certain way before using it in a specifically homosexual context. What Section 377 fears is sex shorn of its reproductive function, sex driven purely by pleasure and desire. And this is precisely what is ‘queer’ about this sex and about the larger choices that can be made around it, irrespective of sexual orientation.

This is also the reason why Delhi High Court’s reading down of Section 377 implicates everybody, all sexual persons, and not just the cutely pigeonholed ‘LGBT community’. The judgment not only vindicates a long and active politics of identity, but it also paves the way for going beyond that politics and its potentially reductive categorization of people according to sexual orientation. But for that to happen, a certain kind of space has to be cleared, once and for all, in people’s minds and in the actual spheres of their private and public lives. One of the privileges of heterosexuality is the possibility of doing it unthinkingly. Sometimes, it is lovely to be able to get on with the business of being oneself without having to be vocal or colourful about it.