‘The Best Desi Boy in the World’: Examining Good Boy Masculinity and Queerness in Select Indian Fictions

This article seeks to understand what it means by the term ‘good boy’ and how queer adolescents tend to use such a figure to conceal and effectuate their non-normative body and mannerism. Owning to the complex mode through which sexuality manifests itself in relation to masculinity, this article seeks to explore the masculinity that the Indian queer boys use in order to be able to live in a highly heterosexualised and normativised society without having their masculinity questioned. In doing this, they exhibit a persona of a good boy, that is, sexless, competitive, agreeable, but most importantly, they try to delineate themselves from the hyper-masculine environment in which they socialise by rejecting the conventional modes of gender expression prescribed by masculinism. This type of masculinity appropriates the postcolonial expectation of the Indian society out of its boys and the traditional sexually repressive ethos in order to pass one as someone who is not sexually active by rejecting heterosexual activity without betraying the fact of one’s homosexuality. This article will examine in detail the character of Mohanaswamy in Mohanaswamy (2016) the character of Avinash in Don’t Let Him Know (2015) and Karun in The City of Devi (2013) in passing reference.