Such depictions, as some of his critics point out, did damage that was not helped by the fact that Johar himself, beyond a short in the 2013 anthology film Bombay Talkies, has not made a full-length feature with a queer love story at its heart. As is Dostana (produced by Johar) in which the two male leads ( John Abraham and Abhishek Bachchan) pretend to be gay in an over-complicated attempt to woo the female protagonist ( Priyanka Chopra). It is also not possible to overlook the troubling portrayal of queer folks, especially gay men, in some of Johar’s productions: the jarring comic sub-plot involving the two male leads (Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan) and a housemaid (Sulabha Arya) in Kal Ho Na Ho (which Johar wrote, but didn’t direct) is notorious. This is not to discount the role that other filmmakers, such as Onir, have played in telling much-needed stories about queer lives, nor is this an attempt to play down the space for such stories that opened up with the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 2018.
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