Big City Blues

Queer people find vibrancy and welcome anonymity in megacities but there is a limit to the choices they offer

- Santanu Bhattacharya

I call myself a ‘city person’, having lived in megacities all my life. I love what cities have to offer—opportunity, vibrancy, diversity, a transitory population that never stands still. But I also love living in cities because it affords me a kind of anonymity that smaller places wouldn’t, where I’d know everyone and they’d know me, where a monoculture would stamp out diversity, and where I’d feel too exposed as a queer person. In a city, I can be anyone, I can choose whom to be friends with, I can co-opt myself into communities and drop out when it stops working for me. There is something harshly transactional about a city that makes you believe that you hold the key to your life, and that sense of choice is fundamental to the queer existence.

For much too long, queer people have fled their smaller towns and villages to massive megapolises, in the quest for this anonymity. Closed communities are good at picking on those who stand out from their idea of ‘normal’—it could be something as minor as a high-pitched male voice, or as major as wanting to settle down with someone of the same sex, queer people have been put on trial and burnt at the stake for generations. Cities then have become our safe havens—eye contact with a stranger in a local train, an underground pub, parties and baths, the options are all there for us to curate our own versions of queerness, and discard them when we’re ready to move on.