Prince Manvendra has a boyfriend!

Remember Prince Manvendra? He was the subject of our Out Spotlight XXI. Out recently published a piece on him, complete with his revelation that he has (gasp!) a boyfriend! The prince was quite coy about it with the interviewer at first but then ended up having dinner with the interviewer and introducing him to his new BF. Excerpt follows. Click the source link for the full article.

When we meet for dinner that night, he’s got a surprise for me -- his Mystery Lover, a hulking, swarthy, 44-year-old Gujarati musician, not quite a royal but hailing from a Rajput landowning family. He’s dressed, like the prince, in a traditional red kurta, his ears heavy with ancestral gold rings and studs. Mystery Lover, or M.L., who was educated in the United Kingdom and speaks with a plummy Indo-British accent, asks me not to use his name in this story. “This will bring all sorts of strange people into my life that I’m not ready to deal with,” he says. “And I don’t want to put any additional strain on a new relationship.”

I ask how they met. M.L. does most of the talking, diving into a plate of tandoori prawns, while the prince, who has a tiny appetite and is rail-thin, picks at his food and mostly listens. They connected a year and a half ago through the Gay Bombay list-serve. There was no immediate attraction, they say. “We took one look at each other and I thought, Oh, God,” says M.L. “Me too,” says the prince. “I thought, He’s absolutely not my cup of coffee.” But they stayed friends, bonded by their Rajput roots and love of classical Indian music, and talked in general terms about what each wanted in a lover. Finally, out of town one night for a concert, they shared a bed, with a bank of pillows between them.

“It was the Great Wall of China,” the prince says coyly. “He didn’t want to break my virginity.”

“What virginity?” says M.L.

The prince ditched M.L. in the morning. “My suspicions were confirmed about blue bloods being shit,” says M.L. But they started dating. Eventually, they really slept together, at Dada’s place. The proper affair began rockily because of gossip from the Gay Bombay crowd. “We go to a movie premiere,” says M.L., “to find these bitches doing these low-sweeping curtsies, calling us ‘Your Highness.’ ”

Since then, things seem to be going OK. M.L. is affectionate with the prince, calling him Hukum, a Hindi honorific that means “your command.” The two talk about building a house together on the prince’s farm.

There is just the matter of the prince’s fear that he can’t love. He can’t quite answer seriously when I ask him what he likes in M.L. “He’s arty-farty,” he says. “I thought he’d be a good hunky guy from the warrior clan.”

M.L. senses the hedging. “I think you will find that our Manav is not very communicative,” he says.

But I’ve come to feel protective toward the prince, and it’s not the first time M.L. has disparaged him in front of me for being a frigid noble. Does it bother the prince?

He shakes his head. “Sometimes I feel I’m not human at all,” he says.
“Don’t say that,” says M.L., suddenly tender.

“I want to change,” says the prince.

After dinner, we walk along the promenade by the stinking, trash-filled Arabian Sea and talk about gay rights. I tell them about the Gay Bombay meeting, how confronting the police had barely come up.

“India needs a Stonewall,” says M.L.

That’s why the prince never stops talking to the press. “The moment you stop doing press...” he trails off. “I’m trying to see the next celebrity come out.”

We hug goodbye on the roadside and promise to talk soon. In the cab, I turn around to watch them walking side by side up the highway -- just two more gay men trying to cut through the baggage of adolescence and find love in midlife. Except, of course, one lives in a palace, oversees 200 servants, and commands millions of hits on Google. Not that you’d have to remind him. Even on bad days, you can’t forget that you’re a prince.

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