I read Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage for the first time from the Bengal Club Library in Calcutta. It was an austerely bound and heavily marked volume. Nicolson’s unforgettable book about the romantic relationship between his mother, Vita Sackville-West, and the writer, Virginia Woolf, rubbed shoulders in what used to be Lord Macaulay’s home with old issues of Punch and Kipling’s Collected Works. This had struck me as delightfully ironic. Vita and Virginia would have baffled, rather than horrified, his lordship with their Sapphic passions, which would take him well beyond the limits of his Victorian imagination. Their wild caprices, conducted with the loving support of their husbands, would perhaps have escaped Macaulay’s eye completely. In the penal code that he framed with his peers for the colonies, men can offend against nature by committing sodomy with other men, women or animals. But women? What on earth could women do with each other? So lesbian sex slips out of the law’s net into a silence and an invisibility that some would find merciful and amusing.

But I have always been struck by how lesbianism, though absent in the law, naturally informs that other fruit of the heterosexual male imagination — pornography. And because pornography, particularly on the internet, exists in a grey zone between fantasy and reality, private and public, near and far, what it manages to accommodate quite effortlessly, though going against the grain of official mores, forms a fascinating counterpoint to the limits of the legal imagination. At least one lesbian episode is mandatory in every conventional blue film, sordid or classy, and go to any straight porn site on the net and there is always plenty of choice in lesbian material. From bat-tala and sharadiya vernacular fiction to Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon, or in Bollywood, Tollywood and south Indian commercial cinema, as well as in off-beat Indian cinema, lesbianism has always sold better and more easily than male homosexuality. It actually creates much less of a stir, provided what is rehearsed are the typical lesbian stories, involving beautiful, but heterosexually frustrated, women.

By a curious paradox, sex between women is allowed to titillate heterosexual viewers quite unproblematically, but is seldom shown as a happy, spontaneous and uncomplicatedly pleasurable thing for the women themselves. There is always something vaguely dark and sad and twisted about these women. The naïveté of masti — the Dostana sort of fun — is only for men. In the typical lesbian episode of a blue film, it is crucial for the man to intervene after a while and put an end to the exclusively female wantonness, for if he leaves this for too late, then he runs the risk of being left out altogether. In any gay chatroom, there are always a few straight, married men looking for lesbians to take home to their wives. They strike up long, and slightly ingratiating, conversations with the gay men, hoping to induct some of the latter’s lesbian friends into the staidness of their conjugal lives.

You realize, of course, that this mainstream Sapphic carnival is kept up almost entirely for, and by, the straight male viewer. This explains why it can be found in any conservative society, and remains a lucrative and relatively less censored part of the media and entertainment world. So the Material Girl is being thoroughly material every time she reaches out for the lips of another woman on stage. Madonna and Macaulay make strange bedfellows inside the Pleasure Machine.