A still from the Oscar-winning film Milk, where Sean Penn plays gay rights activist Harvey Milk

A short titled Are We Talking Straight was screened at an Open Spaces event hosted at Oxford Bookstore on May 22. The video project aimed at throwing light on what Calcutta really thinks of homosexuality.

To mark May 17 as International Day against Homophobia, Prachi Tulshan (law student Delhi University), Aninda Shankar Das (student of FTII Pune), Anirban Ghosh (student of NID Ahmedabad), Soupayan Sinha (computer science graduate from Scottish Church) and Sana Faiyaz (student of UCLA), haunted some South Calcutta hot spots for “public opinion” on homosexuality.

The result: a number of people caught unawares by a barrage of pointed questions, such as “What do you think of homosexuals?”, “Are gays abnormal?”, “Can you identify homosexuals?”, “Is it a criminal offence?”

The answers: “It’s a psychological problem”, “It can be cured with proper medication”, “I don’t like it”, “Indians are aping foreign culture”, “It’s not normal”, “It’s not possible”...

Holding a mirror to society is a good thing and given the limitations of time and budget the film did manage to portray taboos surrounding homosexuality.

The animation at the start of the film — man+woman=child (Happy Family) and man+man=faggot/pervert — was impressive. But what was said over 32 minutes could have been said in 20 minutes. And was there anything new in it at all?

The best answer to the filmmakers’ questions: “Rabindranath and Vivekananda were not gay, then why should we be?” A section of the audience burst into laughter.