A theatrical response to queer lives under the law

How does a person live freely after being told for most of their life that their very identity is criminal?

This is just one of the questions that North Melbourne playwright Danish Sheikh poses in his upcoming book, Love & Reparation, which grapples with the before and after of India’s decriminalisation of homosexuality.

When the decision was passed in 2018, for Mr Sheikh who identifies as gay, “It was completely uncharted terrain. You’ve lived a life of criminality under the law and all of a sudden you’re told – ‘alright, you’re free’.”

Love & Reparation will be composed of two interlinked plays: Contempt and Pride.

Contempt was written in 2017 as a way of dissenting against Section 377 – the section of the Indian penal code that criminalised sexual activities “against the order of nature”.

Mr Sheikh was frustrated and angry with the legal indifference towards the poor health, indignity and violence suffered by queer Indians.

But Mr Sheikh said that Pride, “is more confusing” because “you’re living in this time, you’ve got the things that you want, but you’re not completely free.”

“At one point in Pride, it returned to a conversation that actually starts Contempt which is about how we think about love. In Pride the object of love becomes a slightly twistier thing.”

Mr Sheikh’s own personal experiences and his work history as a human rights lawyer in India informs the focus of the book.

A persona in Pride is a man who regularly sees a therapist – a character Mr Sheik said was not a memoir but was certainly shaped by his own conversations with his therapist about “what does it mean to live and love with law?”

Undergoing a PhD thesis at the University of Melbourne, Mr Sheikh is researching law and theatre and asking different questions about creative, queer practices in dissent against the law.

The preface to Love & Reparation uses those new concerns to link the two plays together.

Now living in North Melbourne, Mr Sheikh is also interested in queer lives locally after same-sex marriage was passed in Australia.

“Does that mean there’s an absolute sense of freedom now?” Mr Sheikh said “Or are there different ways in which people are still actually marked by the law?”

Love & Reparation will be launched at 7pm on August 12 with a rehearsed reading performance and Q&A at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies 78-80 Curzon St, North Melbourne •