Thomas Waugh interview: ‘What’s going on with Heated Rivalry? Yes, it is as it should be’

Thomas Waugh is an Indophile intellectual of Canadian origin who first came to India in the 1970s, and has been coming here ever since. Not merely as a tourist, but as a teacher, author, film scholar and film buff, who has written articles on several Indian, mostly Bollywood films, and has even shared the dais with Bollywood stars at events.

Waugh, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, School of Cinema, Concordia University, is also a queer theorist and activist. He has forged deep friendships with members of India's queer community, most notably the late Saleem Kidwai, Shohini Ghosh, and R Raj Rao. Over the years, these friendships have invariably led to teaching assignments in prestigious public and private universities in India. At such gigs, Waugh, who has taught for over 40 years, was an instant hit with students who flocked to him for inspiration and insight into a variety of wide-ranging subjects, which included film studies, literature, authorship and sexuality.

Now in his late seventies, Waugh was in India once again in January. R Raj Rao caught up with Waugh in Mumbai to talk about the publication of his memoir, Writing in the Flesh, which has been described as “a brutally honest, hilarious, and super sexy celebration of queer kinship and friendship”. Excerpts from the interview.

In your long career spanning half a century, you have written many scholarly books on film studies and sexuality. Why did you want to write a memoir now?

I’m retired, and my friends tell me I’m a good storyteller (a.k.a. “gossip”). I thought it would be an adventure to produce an irreverent chronological insider account not only of academia, but also of progressive middle-class gay male social, intellectual and sexual life in the West over the last 75 years.

I’m not a very hip demographic, a cis-homo able-bodied home-owner dude of Northern European descent, so I enjoyed throwing this challenge at myself, “make it hip, sexy and fun… as well as astute, self-critical, political and engaging”. I hope I’ve succeeded.

I’m deeply indebted to my publisher McGill Queen’s University Press, in Montreal – who have brought out four of my earlier mammoth tomes on queer and Canadian cinemas – for taking on this somewhat unconventional project. I think they’re secretly hoping it’s my last.

I’ve also brought out several books on pornography, both academic and trade Montreal – including editing several vintage collections of underground smutty graphics Montreal – so I had to live up to my reputation and make this one sexy too.

Your memoir is different from most memoirs in that you write a book about your life and loves anecdotally, but you also theorise about them. This, as you say in Chapter 1, produces a very “hybrid effect”.

I can’t believe you’re accusing me of theorising. This will clearly scare away readers who hate big words, Deleuze citations, and deep abstract ruminations! I would prefer the word “historicising”.

Seriously, I’ve tried to be thoughtful and aware of roots, predecessors and other writers to whom I’m indebted. But I’ve also really made an effort to be accessible, clear and down-to-earth at the same time. As a veteran teacher who lasted 41 years in the lecture hall and seminar room, and as an old Marxist and gay lib radical, I know that emotions, relationships, desires, bodies and lifestyles all have material and societal undercurrents. So, I thought let’s try to understand them through looking inwards, as well as remember them and celebrate them. Otherwise, hybridity is really hot right now, right?

What kind of reader do you have in mind for your memoir?

Good question. I’m targeting cinephiles (although I had to delete for reasons of size a huge appendix devoted to one hundred films/filmmakers who changed my life, now available only via my website https://thomaswaugh.ca/). But Gen Z smartphone addicts don’t watch films anymore, do they? I want readers who are engaged by my references to Johnny Guitar and Sholay…Frothy Hindi movie that stirred up expatriate homesickness in 1971 (snowflakes falling on Montreal scene). Poster public domain.

Booklovers around the planet (literate ones), including Indians (I’ve inserted a film still of Akshay Kumar dancing nude behind a banana leaf!). And fans of autobiographical literature.

Reading dozens of such works as I wrote (especially but not only queer ones, from you to Hanif Kureishi to Audre Lorde to Bruce LaBruce), I discovered a whole new rich and transhistorical culture of self-writing that I now officially and in all modesty aspire to join.

Readers situated along the whole Kinsey scale, 1 to 6! – not just gay men, hopefully. A heterosexual woman pal read the book as a manuscript and urged me on (although she disliked my use of the pejorative “breeder” to reference heterosexuals, which of course I’ve stubbornly clung to.) I think she and other hetero readers appreciate my refusal to soften the gay sensibility, perhaps in an outsider, voyeuristic way, including my retention of all seven of my unabashed references to rimming!

English-reading readers around the planet, not just North Americans, especially of course those who will get my jokes and will not be thrown off by Canadian geographical references and suggestive archival photos.

Your book reproduces your long “coming out” letter to your parents, and their equally long reply. How important is it for queer people to come out to family?

I recognize and respect your principled stand against the 1970s-style requirement for queer people to come out to their parents, in the Indian context and elsewhere. Everyone’s situation is different, especially since the advent in the West of same-sex marriage.

I came out in the 1970s as soon as I became financially independent. My parents were both public intellectuals – preacher and teacher respectively – and it felt right to assure them in writing of my enduring filial love as well as the divergent paths I was following. In particular, I could no longer tolerate as a 29-year-old prof living in another province coming home to visit the folks and having to put up with constant badgering by my irrepressible mother about attending church with my family and finding the right Christian girl. I cheated by “coming out” as a religious agnostic in the same letter as my “Guess what I’m gay!” revelation, killing a second bird with the same stone, because I could no longer tolerate performing the hypocrisy of attending my father’s parish service with the family.

Now interestingly, I’m traversing a situation that echoes slightly the 1970s crunch with regard to my nine great-nephews and nieces – around this new book! I’m slightly weirded out as I share Writing in the Flesh with their parents, my nephews and nieces (who are all cool): I’m trying not to think about 14-year-old Hope picking up her great uncle’s queer book from her mom’s bookshelf and seeing my dick in the illustrations on pages 95 and 152 etc. Of course, she and her siblings and cousins already all know that Uncle Tom is a bit strange…

Ultimately, as I said, everyone is different and every family is different, East and West. But every queer person has the right to live their life without shame, secrecy and denial. Of course, India and its love of open secrets and lingeringly flourishing system of compulsory heteromatrimony, complicated by specific dynamics of caste, class, gender and religion, make things extremely tangled as well as totally unique over here.

You are married to your partner, whom you refer to as your husband. You also once unsuccessfully tried to father a child with a lesbian. Doesn’t this make you homonormative rather than queer radical, which your emphasis on the body in all its nakedness otherwise does?

We all live lives full of contradictions. At the same time, the concept of “homonormativity” cannot be applied literal-mindedly and reductively to individual legal and reproductive choices. The concept instead references a complex negotiation with values and the institutions one upholds.

My legal marriage, an open one by the way, has much to do with dental and medical coverage and nothing to do with selling out to the American dream of normative conjugality. Otherwise, I think that queer parenting can be a true queer radical practice. I’m sorry my sperm didn’t take and give me an opportunity to discover intergenerational reciprocal learning, freedom, and joy hand in hand with a kid.

You celebrate the fact that you foreground the body in the book. Would you define this as a sort of queer aesthetic?

Yes. All aesthetics arise from our bodies, and not only our eyeballs and eardrums, whether or not we explicitly acknowledge this. As a diverse community shaped by identities and erotic relationships, the corporeal dynamics of our individual and communal queer cultures are always on the surface, aren’t they?

As a four-eyed effeminate boy whose body was heaped with shame, I continued processing this legacy as an adult. Reading self-writing that doesn’t acknowledge the authorial body annoys me. Speaking as a gay man, our everyday culture with its webs of heightened attractions to others and awareness of one’s power of attraction, cultivates corporeal aesthetics as automatic reflexes. It’s interesting being aware over here that so many individuals who have shaped your heritage, from Buddha to Ramakrishna to Gandhi, have also foregrounded their bodies…

Meanwhile, swimming has always been an integral part of my life, and, as an adult, massage and sauna. You observe that I have almost constructed a theory around them. They’re of course part of the body processing I mentioned above, fed by my hatred of commoditised team sports and illiterate jock elitism, including your Indian obsession with the boring industry of cricket.

Team sports were always part of the heteronormative machine of oppression for me, from elementary school onwards—where I was first rejected in the team selection rituals that were part of every games period. Swimming, sauna and massage are rituals of friendship, not competition, that instill in me agency, pride, good health, and of course pleasure.

You come from a deeply religious biological family. Your father was a church pastor. Was it difficult for you to reconcile institutional religion with queerness.

I did not have to reconcile institutional religion with queerness, since this process had already been underway for some time, especially in my dad’s branch of progressive liberal Protestantism. We had had women pastors since the 1930s, and LGBTQA+ pastors were to emerge openly in the 1980s. Lesbian pastors officiated at my mother’s and my sister’s funerals, and I have a dyke pastor cousin.

I am not part of queer Christian communities but identify strongly with their various idealisms. My agnostic skepticism hardly raises an eyebrow among Western readers…

On the other hand, you write about your “chosen family”. Can you elaborate on your concept of chosen family?

I devote a 50-page chapter to this category, which arguably is more relevant to queer people than to any other social group. I could easily have doubled the size, voyaging through categories like “gay male sisters in struggle,” workplace comrades, pedagogical mentees, roommates, “fag hags” (which is not a pejorative for me) and several others.

Long-lasting friendships, as with yourself, are very important to me, and I wager with most queer people. I recently realised that much of my academic work also engages with dynamics of chosen families and friendship, including students.

You have been accused of sex tourism and of “inappropriate fraternizing” with your students. You defend yourself against these charges in your book. You call it “homophobic and postfeminist hysteria”. But why did you feel the need to defend yourself? Moreover, what’s your defense?

Post-#MeToo vigilante feminism injected a facile and judgmental moralism into public discourses around fraught relationships such as those between teachers and students, between sex workers and clients, and between citizens of different cultures or ethnicities (especially in the context of global post-imperialism). I not only had the right but also the obligation to defend myself and confront the attackers, to make the world safer for outsiders and transgressives.

Fortunately, such moralism is on the wane, especially in the West. “Sex tourism” is a concept that I have tried to re-invent and recalibrate in my book – along with other old-fashioned pejoratives like “fag hag.”

While I of course would never deny the abuses around the commoditisation of bodies in the Global South by First World (and local) predators/consumers, I think that the loose bandying around of the term by “trafficking” conspiracy pundits demeans both politics and language. It also demeans the agency of men and women, adults and teenagers in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines, the Maghreb and Latin America – to name only those.

When a reviewer of my manuscript blithely announced that I “exploit men in third world societies,” I was defensive at first of course. I was also intrigued that the academicisation of life writing and the attached protocol of peer review was encouraging anonymous evaluators to condemn writers’ lives!

But this provocation deepened my level of analysis (I hope!). I would love to revisit some of the Indian men profiled in my book and ask them if they feel exploited.

You are an Indophile. You first came to India in the 1970s, and have since been coming here regularly. Several valuable relationships you have forged are with Indians. Why does India fascinate you so much?

India was the place where, starting at the age of 22 with a fresh BA under my belt, escaping from the institutional, familial, academic and cultural restrictions of Canadian society, I first felt free. I discovered autonomous adulthood and difference here, for two years, through my teaching gig in a posh so-called “public school” in Punjab.

Everything from the climate to the vibrancy of local cultures to the sensuality of sociality with my colleagues and adolescent students. You taught me the relativity of the Northern-European bourgeois conformity that I had been immersed in, and I never looked back. Inwardly, I was “coming out” as well, which made walking through the bazaar hand-in-hand with my beautiful Sikh colleague Suchet or watching my favorite student Jagjit play kabbadi all the more earthshaking to me.

Later as a film and sexuality scholar I undertook research on independent Indian documentary and on queerness in Indian cinemas, and was thrilled by the discoveries I was making all along the way. My adult romantic attachments with Indian men as I moved through my forties and fifties and beyond (five of them are profiled in my book, all under pseudonyms) of course solidified my “fascination”! All of them were younger, all of them shared things with me I would never have experienced as a tourist, all of them ended up moving into arranged marriages of course (and only one robbed me blind!).

You suggest that queerness no longer seems to be an issue with Gen X. Do you think that this is as it should be, given the way the world has progressed, or is it myopic?

I distrust progress narratives, but basically yes. Things are more complicated in India –outside of English-speaking cosmopolitan middle- and upper-class ghettos of course. The marriage industry here has lost none of its grip by and large. I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that marriage here has nothing whatsoever to do with sexual orientation.

Meanwhile, my 14-year-old great-niece Hope shared her favorite music video with me, offering Chappell Roan singing about shocking her mother through pole dancing in a West Hollywood gay male bar; my first exposure to the current rage for the gay male ice hockey epic romance Heated Rivalry was in a sold out 700-seat auditorium crammed with screaming hetero female teenagers. What is going on? Yes, it is as it should be.

Your book has portraits of yourself, friends and family But it also has erotic images, including a naked one of yourself. Did you have problems with your publishers about including these illustrations?

My wonderful, brave publisher has veered somewhat recently into the genre of life-writing. I’m very grateful for the risk-taking evidenced by their editor-in-chief Jonathan Crago, who valiantly sold the project to his publication committee, including all the naughty pics.

As a scholar of the visual arts for half a century, it was essential that my research include the visual archive, mostly photographic and filmic. And since this is self-writing, we’re talking largely about a self-archive. Jonathan recognized the importance of this and encouraged me forward. Of course, no one would deny that frank visuals stimulate sales…

Response to the cover pic has been very strong: a nude bust shot by my old friend Nick Bostick that makes me look like Socrates, much deeper and hotter than I really am. Nick has also had a calling as an erotic masseur and I personally have felt his magic. He is one of several buddies and exes who appear nude in the book, so I am not the only one to reveal all in its pages….

You have been a Bollywood watcher for long. Your website lists 100 best films, including some from India. How, according to you, has Bollywood evolved? Are we ready for an Oscar yet?

Since my retirement a decade ago, I’ve increasingly left it to the younger generation to provide ambitious and clever generalizations to far-reaching questions like this. I have not been keeping up, and things have got terribly complicated with streaming platforms.

The last Bollywood film I saw was Kapoor and Sons, which came out the year of my retirement, a sweet and complex family dramedy with nice queer twists and some muscular abs on display. In fact, a book on this film in our Queer Film Classics is to be out soon.

The Oscars don’t mean a lot to me since they’re all about politics and publicity in Beverly Hills, and not necessarily about cinematic quality. India has always been ready for an Oscar: there just needs to be an influx of NRIs into the industry (also known as American-Born Confused Desis) to swell the Academy voter block.