Another Karan Johar movie, and another flaccid representation of gay men. In Humpty Sharma ki Dulhania (HSKD), the latest from the Dharma stable, Humpty, played by Varun Dhawan must find a reason to convince the father of Kavya, his lady love, that Angad Bedi whom she is betrothed to is not good enough for her. The trouble is the America-returned Angad is so perfect he might as well walk on water. A doctor, he is polite, good-looking and can cook up a mean meal.

How then is Humpty to locate that chink in Angad’s armour? Let’s make him gay, or at least, let’s have a plot point that explores his sexuality. Of course, this being a Johar film, Angad is not gay. How can he be? Real gayness is too complicated to handle within the confines of the big fat Punjabi wedding. What we can do, though, is spend a good fifteen minutes dreaming up stupid situations at the end of which Angad will comprehensively be proved, thank God, straight.

Why does Johar do it? For someone who has actively spoken about gay rights — he recently wrote to Narendra Modi on Section 377 — Johar is surprisingly chary in his treatment of gay subjects. Worse, he caricaturises them. Some would say it is no bad thing in a country where gay people have little visibility in the arts. After all, even in HSKD, the buff Angad becomes all gooey the moment he discovers that the boy in front of him is, praise the Lord, making a pass at him. He launches into this Martin Lutheresque spiel about the absolute rightness of someone being gay, how sorry he is that he cannot reciprocate blah blah blah. Where is that gun when one needs it?

It makes one wonder what propels Johar to design these characters. Is he aiming for tolerance? Perhaps. The plot points always revolve around acceptance. But didn’t we get enough of that in Dostana, when Priyanka Chopra tells Kirron Kher how wrong it is of her to not let her son choose? Is Johar gunning for visibility? Well, that he achieved even before Dostana, with the character of Kantaben in Kal Ho Na Ho, who cringes in horror every time SRK and Saif get close? Is he looking to show how normal it is to have gay men around?

Maybe, but the real reason (one suspects) Johar has gay men in his films is for the laughs. Remember the mock-horror tune that played every time Kantaben appeared on screen? Or, Kirron Kher preparing the pooja thaal for John in Dostana? Or even here, in HSKD, the man deputed to uncover Angad’s sexuality beginning to doubt his own (so delectable is Angad, you see)? Ha ha ha. It is funny, Mr Johar, no denying that. But it is also stale and shockingly insensitive.

I am not suggesting that gay men (or some of them, at least) are not how they are portrayed by Johar. But caricaturisation takes away from the breath of vision that a director must, of artistic necessity, bestow on his creations. Consider, for example, another of Johar’s films, Student of the Year. From the pink ties to the rainbow umbrellas, Rishi Kapoor’s Dean Vashisht is reduced to an archetype, a comic spectacle bowing to majority perceptions of how a gay man ought to behave. Every time he appeared, there were hoots and whistles in the cinema hall. Young girls giggled. Young boys made wry faces.

I wish effeminacy was shown deeper than just mannerisms in films. I wish it played in the eyes, and modulated the speech of the gay character. I wish it nudged its owner, while being among people, in conversation, to indicate a richer, inner world with the mere flip of the head or shifting of the hand. I wish it emerged in a slender and benevolent vision that encompassed everything, pain and pleasure, in a mighty river coursing through the heart. I wish that was the sort of effeminacy I got to see on the screen.

Beyond this, I also take issue with the portrayal of Dean Vashisht because it hews too close to reality. Set in an obviously straight world, Dean Vashisht’s life is a harrowing swansong to loneliness. After retiring from St Teresa’s over the SOTY scandal he returns to his pad, and though the film shows him cheerful when he remembers his students, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that Dean Vashisht is merely biding time, waiting unquestioningly for the next stage.

That’s not fair. It’s difficult to escape the sentiment that Dean Vashisht’s life has not been right and he is not just waiting for, but seeking, death as a shot at redemption. I don’t mean right or wrong in terms of the morality of being gay but in terms of any attendant pain.

I grant that this may well be true. It certainly is true for the many elderly gay men and women I know. So what is wrong with Johar’s portrayal of an inescapable reality of gay life?

Art, I was told once by a friend, is not simply about representing reality. That would make it no different from journalism. Art is about wrapping reality in a vision, one that exposes the patron to some hitherto-unknown or unsaid truth, something that hits home with the shock of the new even as one sees how blindingly familiar it is.

Art, in other words, must traverse that slippery space between reality and our understanding of it. Of course, this is far easier said than done, and to Johar’s credit, he is the only mainstream Bollywood director to give substantial, and overall non-negative, footage to gay characters.

So what would I, as a gay man, like to see? One option, of course, is the realm of fantasy; a parallel universe where gayness is the norm and straightness the deviancy. This is not as impossible as it sounds, I mean in art. Sarah Waters has created comprehensively gay worlds in her novels, worlds sewn together not just with gay characters but the gay instinct, so much so that straight affection seems unnatural, even forced.

That may be impossible within the confines of commercial considerations and social approvals that all art, including Johar’s, operates in.

The other option — and the more realisable one — is for Johar to shift gradually from the monotonous trajectory that he has been traversing. After all, this is the same director who made a rather wonderful short in last year’s Bombay Talkies about a closeted gay man married to a woman. That film, of course, had “non-commercial” written all over it. Are we to understand that Johar would deign to show us the good stuff only when his money is not on the line?

Hopefully not. He stands at a juncture where he has enough muscle, both financial and directorial, to change the rules. Represent reality, show the truth, allude to the neuroses, sure, but also, pry open hidden worlds of wonder and love, deep compassion and sex, heights of passion and despair. All this with an eye for the real reality, not the cosmetic variety that is comforting because it “fits”.

Johar could do worse than look to other countries for inspiration. Consider, for instance, a recent movie that made waves at film festivals. Stranger by the Lake is a dark tale about obsession and criminality within a thoroughly gay ecosystem. Directed by Frenchman Alain Guiraudie, it is one of those gay films that start promisingly, with beautiful shots and the possibility of tender love, but quickly degenerates into the morbid.

It is like a gay “Unfaithful“, without the addendum of a marital relationship. It shows, in a word, that sex is a primal force that sets aside every other consideration. I think my problem with the film is that Frank, its central character, does not have a moral compass. In spite of the truth staring him in the face, he chooses a certain road that, regrettably, is considered par for the course for gay men. It is not a pleasant film, but what it does not do — so important to the gay viewer — is turn into an apologia.

I might even go so far as to say that it is slyly insulting to stereotype gay men as sex-obsessed. But it still works because it does not try to cover up everything under a uniform layer of syrup. Even in its despicability, it shows a slice of life I can relate to. Ultimately, it is my story. Can I expect something like it from you, Mr Johar?