Pandemic Magnifies Struggles for India’s LGBTQ Youth

It is 7:30 p.m. on a regular Saturday evening. I am installed at my desk, my partner in the next room. I am on a Zoom call with 26-year-old IT professional Sourav, who is up on the terrace of his family home in one of India’s teeming metropolises. It’s the only place where he can be alone.

Sourav, who asked to be addressed by his first name only, is confidently gay, but being confined at home with his parents during the COVID-19 lockdown and subsequent work-from-home orders has meant a constant barrage of emotional abuse, including surveillance, various kinds of personal restrictions, being emotionally blackmailed, and being nagged to get married.

For India’s queer people, particularly younger people, the strict six-week nationwide lockdown between March and May meant not having access to affirming spaces, says Pooja Nair, a mental health practitioner who works with the Mariwala Health Initiative in Mumbai. This includes meeting friends one is out to, meeting one’s partner, or just simply getting outside and away from home.

“Because so many young queer people are still living with their parents, those kinds of outlets just shut down completely. And there was increased policing, increased vigilance … [which] meant that you yourself were also hyper-vigilant. A lot a lot of people have had to censor their gender expression, their sexuality, to ‘tone it down.’”

Statistics tell us that home is not always a safe space for many; it is the primary site of gender-based and other kinds of violence. By late March and early April, when lockdowns had been announced globally, news media reported a spike in domestic violence all over the world. Even these elevated numbers likely underestimate the scale of the issue, because being locked in with abusers makes it hard to access help.

In the case of India’s gender and sexual minorities, it has also meant a loss of community. “Because of compulsory physical distancing, one major loss… [is] the loss of community care which is their basic means of sustenance, irrespective of class, caste, religion, and nationality,” writes Kaustav Bakshi, assistant professor at Jadhavpur University, Kolkata, who is also a researcher on queer lives. This “community care” can include “social protests, political organizing, and cultural comradeship” that extend beyond the more interpersonal and affirming spaces that Nair mentions. This lack of access can be “emotionally devastating,” Bakshi tells WMC.

Privacy is another challenge in many Indian settings. “People do not have a sense of privacy,” says Bakshi, and this is particularly true in families. “Many of us from a more privileged class can afford to close our doors, [but] it’s not so easy for many other people.” During the lockdown, a young man Bakshi knows had needed help from a mental health professional. When he suggested a therapist, the young man told Bakshi that he’d rather speak to him instead. “He said, I cannot speak to a psychiatrist without my parents eavesdropping.”

“Privacy is just a dream for me right now,” Sourav says, speaking quietly from his terrace. “For the last hour we have been talking, I have consciously kept my voice at a certain level [or else] it will be heard downstairs.” One of the two rooms in his house is a study-plus-prayer room, the other a common bedroom.

For other queer people, the pandemic meant being forced to return to homes they had “escaped” from, says Ketaki Ranade (who prefers to be called KP) of the Centre for Health and Mental Health, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. They go on to explain how young people often use the excuse of education and jobs to get away from families who do not accept them. This allows them to explore their genders and sexualities without confrontation or the perception of rebellion. “And then … abruptly … colleges and jobs and all these things just shut down, and you were told to leave as soon as possible.”

This can create what KP calls a “classic glass closet” scenario: Your family knows about your identity, but behaves as if nothing has changed, and keeps bringing up topics about how you dress, about getting married, and so on. “For queer and trans communities … our relationship with home is just so, so vexed,” they say. “The young person may also need, to some extent, to be visible to the people who matter, to be validated by them. And that is exactly the sort of power that gets abused by families. So it is very, very complex to have to live with people who don’t see you for who you are, for five months or six months at a stretch, with the added threat of overt violence.”

Still, many queer folk had no choice but to return “home” when a lockdown was first announced due to financial constraints. “There is nowhere else to go,” KP says. “The state is not going to look after you if you are not part of a family unit. And then, if you don’t have ‘community’ [or] another kind of relating where someone will be there, look out for you, and that kind of thing, [then] where do you go?”

In September 2018, the Indian Supreme Court decriminalized consensual homosexual sex. Earlier, this law, known as Section 377, a colonial-era leftover that saw sexual acts apart from peno-vaginal intercourse as “unnatural,” had been misused to threaten or blackmail gay men. But even if homosexuality isn’t criminalized, social acceptance is iffy at best. Plus, there aren’t any specific laws to deal with homophobic or transphobic violence, definitely not when the society is battling a global pandemic. “Very often [in an emergency] we’ve had to rely on very creative ways responding, because as marginalized people, the relationship with law is very tricky. You never know when you’re going to end up in the dock when you walk in to get some help,” Nair says. “That is the deal with queer lives — creativity and survival.”

Even in terms of accessing health care. Trans folks, for example, struggled to get their hormone medications and injections during the lockdown periods, and even after some areas opened up, because their treatment is seen as “nonessential.”

“[Transition] is seen so much as individual choice and more than that, as aspirational,” says KP. With a public health crisis on, it is unsurprising that gender-affirming surgeries are being postponed. “But people have planned, put together money, done all these health checkups, and then this pandemic breaks … and now suddenly, all of that is on hold. You’re not even seeing this being reflected anywhere, not in the media, not in health conversations, and definitely not in public health and planning.”

Given the alternatives, Sourav considers himself lucky. “Extreme work pressure” has been his salvation. “[Work] is keeping me busy so I don’t get negative vibes.” He hopes his parents will come around one day, because leaving them is not an option, not even when the pandemic is over. “The biggest boon of my life is that I have immense patience,” he says, and for now, that will have to do.