Which is just what NGOs working in this area set out to do amongst, what they have identified as, Men who have Sex with Men Commercial Sex Worker (MSMCSW) groups operating in the various metrosonly to discover a plethora of other problems that were already plaguing these sex workers. As Anjali Gopalan of the Naz Foundation (India) Trust, a McArthur Foundation-funded HIV/AIDS and sexual health agency working with a variety of people including male sex workers, street children and youth in schools and colleges, found out. Says she: "We realised that concern for safe sex would happen only once the sex workers were helped in resolving their other more immediate predicaments."
Take Keshav, for instance. Fear of AIDS is the last thing on his mind. An unemployed graduate in his late 20s, Keshav has been a full-time sex worker in Delhi for over five years now. Suffering from an anal fungal infection, Keshav says he would rather have someone fund his cure than lecture him on the use of condoms. "Why doesnt the government help us organise ourselves so that we can insist on the use of condoms? Instead they pretend we do not exist? Is it our fate to go to unequipped government hospitals where doctors treat us like an abnormal species?" he asks. "We are indeed the lowest of the lows. The police is forever ready to crack down and sodomise, forcing us into being so ridiculously clandestine."
A victim of such harassment, 14-year-old Shombhu Das in Calcutta has been picked up by the police many times while soliciting for sex at the Sealdah railway station. "Each time they booked him under the Vagrancy Act, took away his earnings and assaulted him sexually," says Sujit Ghosh, a member of Nazs Calcutta MSM Outreach project. Noting that children like Shombhu are petrified of cops, Ghosh reasons that theyd rather earn a quick buck by hurriedly performing as per the clients wishes than negotiate the use of a condom.