“That I don’t hold hands in public unfailingly irks my partner. Last year, on 6th September, when the LGBTQIA+ Indians ‘awoke to life and freedom’ after the Supreme Court struck down Section 377, thus, decriminalising consensual sex between same-sex adults, my phone beeped with a teasing message: ‘Now, will you hold my hand?’.
Holding hands could be an excellent place to start, now that I have the “permission from the highest law of the land. But it’s a difficult psychological jump—partly because I lack the adorable propensity for PDA, but mostly because my queer self is still negotiating the terms of when to fit in and to stand out.
The more conversations I have with my queer female friends about life post-377 India, the more I am convinced that our feelings of ambivalence are interlinked. We have the approval of LGBTQIA+ rights on paper, yet we live in a morally vociferous majoritarian society that still can’t fathom two women getting married, adopting a child, or buying property together.
In the context of clinical counselling and mental health programmes, however, there’s a profound indication that something has changed. There are institutional resources available for the LGBTQIA+ community now that didn’t, quite deliberately, exist earlier. Counsellors, today, are aware and informed to not treat nonheteronormative behaviour as a variation of an illness, but to see it as normal, and help individuals and families to adjust. But these initiatives are limited to India’s urban cities only.
This story is from the October 2019 edition of Cosmopolitan India.
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This story is from the October 2019 edition of Cosmopolitan India.
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