It's queer

It’s queer that the Indian discourse on Gay rights has been entangled with the HIV and AIDS debate.
Somehow, it has been the need to address HIV transmission issues that has blown open the great Indian closet.
However, ‘Gay’ is an entirely Western concept, and that is why the discourse on the right of a person to have a same-sex partner will continue to be a thorny one.
Male bonding has always been a part of the socio-cultural paradigm, and intense male bonding that may or may not include penetrative acts was never really a problem until the Brits came along and imposed that draconian section 277 into the Indian penal code.
The bottom line is that most traditional Indian (and Asian) thought doesn’t look at play between males as ‘sex’.
It could be argued that some organisations, [with westernized Gay identified activists] in their zeal to find a space for the right of an adult to the privacy of his/her bedroom, have antagonized a whole section of males who don’t want to be labelled “Gay’ or ‘Bi’, just because they indulge in a bit of horse-play with the other guys. Or because they happen to ‘hold hands’ in public. In India, the common man thinks ‘indecent’ girls hold hands with men in public!
Only westerners [the Anglo-Saxon kind] have the peculiar notion that ‘straight men’ only hold hands with women. And these strange ‘western’ ideas are spread through English medium ‘missionary’ education : the result is that we have a whole lot of totally confused males running around thinking they are ‘closet queers’.

These guys on a steet in Bihar are certainly not 'Gay', but they have no hassles expressing their fondness for each other.

The only hitch is that sometimes that expression might just become safer if there was a tiny bit of rubber involved!