Background

The everyday realities that overshadow the lives of LGBTQ+ individuals across the globe are steeped in layers of deep-seated hierarchies, prejudices, and inequities. In India, the queer community is relegated to the extreme fringes of society through the (mis)use of religiocultural and legal frameworks that negatively respond to queerness as abominable deviance that is to be silenced, discriminating and alienating queer folks in all spheres of social life. A recent study by Boston Consulting Group, IIM Ahmedabad, and Pride Circle Foundation based on a survey of 1700 Queer college students across India found that 64% of students faced discrimination or ridicule in some form or the other. This raises the pertinent question: how far are we from creating safe spaces for the queer community of India? 

The September of 2018 witnessed a landmark intervention in the trajectory of Queer rights movements and activism in India — the Supreme Court of India struck down Section 377 of the Indian constitution that legally criminalized homosexuality in the country. Though an important milestone in improving the everyday lives of the queer community in India, the decriminalization of homosexuality is only one of the many meaningful legal and policy injunctions that are necessary for the quest for equal rights, and many more interventions are yet to follow. While fighting for legal sanction and legitimacy, a primary evil that disturbs and disrupts the normality of the LGBTQ+ community’s everyday lives is social abjection. The rigid boundaries of conservative Indian society are still firmly rooted in beliefs that manifest in the discrimination of the queer community. The CSDS-KAS Youth Survey 2016 indicated that six out of ten youth in India viewed homosexuality as wrong.