Reuters.com – By Jonathan Allen
Maharajganj, India (Reuters) – To earn a living, Kiran dresses up in women’s clothes, dances at wedding parties in the Indian countryside and tries not to struggle when he is raped at knifepoint by drunken male wedding guests.
The pay, he says, is pretty good.
He is one of thousands of launda dancers working the wedding scene in the villages of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh states, leading the groom’s raucous marching-band procession to the bride’s house.
They put up with routine violence because, they say, it is the only way they are free to live as “kothis”, a South Asian term for effeminate and transsexual gay men.
Most dancers soon get used to being bitten, burnt with cigarettes and cut with knives and broken bottles. In one common “party trick”, a wedding guest will hide a razor blade in his fingers and then bloodily caress the dancer’s cheek.