ShikhaSpeaks.com: Why it's still a taboo to be a Transgender,Gay,Lesbian in India...Big Question...But it really hurts isn't it!!!!!!!

What's it like to be gay in India? This is a difficult question to answer, because anyone who has ever been to India knows that India is a country that is astoundingly socially diverse and full of complex contradictions. An affluent gay teenager living in a remote green little village near Uttar Pradesh is probably going to have a very different experience compared to an impoverished middle-aged married lesbian woman living in a slum in the heart of Mumbai. Generalising experiences to arrive at 'universal truths' is very tricky business, but I'll provide a couple of perspectives here based on my experiences living in this country for the past couple of years.

I am a big supporter of this community because I have many friends all over who belong to this community really proud of their achievements too, but somewhere I feel except in fashion world this community is being ignored widely in India and these people are still fighting for "Right to Equality".......

LGB people are indeed at risk for excess mental distress and disorders due to social stress, it is important to understand this risk, as well as factors that ameliorate stress and contribute to mental health. Only with such understanding can psychologists, public health professionals, and public policymakers work toward designing effective prevention and intervention programs. The relative silence of psychiatric epidemiological literature regarding the mental health of LGB populations may have aimed to remove stigma, but it has been misguided, leading to the neglect of this important issue.

The concept of social stress extends stress theory by suggesting that conditions in the social environment, not only personal events, are sources of stress that may lead to mental and physical ill effects. Social stress might therefore be expected to have a strong impact in the lives of people belonging to stigmatised social categories, including categories related to socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. According to these formulations, prejudice and discrimination related to low socioeconomic status, racism, sexism, or homophobia—much like the changes precipitated by personal life events that are common to all people—can induce changes that require adaptation and can therefore be conceptualised as stressful

All right, here's my take on what it's like to be gay in India today:

The Pride Marches are only one element of a much grander, sweeping, progressive LGBT cultural revolution. If you're fortunate enough to live in one of the aforementioned cities, you won’t have to limit yourself to just one day of marching. There is a broad spectrum of pro-LGBT events that take place across the year, from various Queer Film Festivals (Mumbai's Radha and the Bengaluru Queer Film Festival (BQFF) come to mind), to diversity fairs, to workshops, to open panel discussions, to various other performances. All of these events have fostered a sense of LGBT identity, and are breaking down barriers in social perception - both how the community seeks itself, and how others identify "us." The only shortcoming of such events is that they tend to be confined to metropolitan cities, so their reach is not as widespread as it could be. The average villager gay boy living in villages 7 small towns would probably never have heard of any of these events. Pride marches continue to be the main flagship event which draws national media attention and gets decent coverage.

One of the main reason why gay Indians haven't died out as a species despite living in potentially conservative/hostile environments is because of the existence of wonderful support groups. Online social networking has played an immensely helpful role in creating positive, self-affirming spaces.

Very few individuals are open about their sexuality in India. Most gay people are either semi-closeted or totally closeted, because being queer (or to use a more accurate local linguistic label, being "a gay") is fundamentally incongruity with the expectations of a traditionalist heternormative society. The majority of the gay Indian friends I've made are only "out" to their other gay friends; they haven't told anyone else, and some of them never plan on coming out. A good portion of them live double lives, wherein they pretend to be "straight" around their family, friends, and colleagues. For several of them, the gay gene gets activated only in the privacy of a locked off bedroom. Thankfully, things have gotten much better with the rise of the LGBT rights movement in India - more and more individuals are slowly starting to come out to their close friends, and some of them are even beginning to tell their families. Being gay in India is slowly but surely becoming socially tolerable in certain pockets of mainstream society, and this subtle shift means we're headed in the right direction.

Many of the metropolitan cities in India have witnessed Pride Marches over the past couple of years: Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Everyone comes out in robust form to celebrate their diversity. :)

Part of the experience told by being a gay Indian is the emasculation that many men go through. I mean this mostly figuratively, but it can and does take place literally too. In India, there is a strong historical presence of a third gender (known in Hindi as Hijras), and some Indians equate being queer to being gender-deviant. Most people don't have clarity on the differences between concepts like sex (chromosomal), sexual orientation (gay, bisexual, pan-sexual, asexual, etc), biological gender identity (male, female, hermaphrodite, eunuch, other), and physical/psychological gender expression (occasional cross-dresser, transgender, transsexual, gender queer, etc.). The repercussions of this lack of clarity are that people lack the vocabulary to accurately distinguish gay men from other subgroups. The word "chakké" gets thrown around a lot in Hindi - if I've understood it correctly, this word signifies a man who has undergone castration and now cross-dresses in public (Ever been on an Indian train?), but is distinct from a man with fully functional genitalia. Personally, I tend to employ the words "gay" or "queer" when I self-label: It is convenient, it is potent, it is subversive, and is indicative of the fact that I love them regardless of what their gender might be.

Surprising as it might sound, India has got a couple of stellar gay publications! The ones I'm familiar with include Bombay Dost, The Queer Chronicle, Gaylaxy Magazine, and The Pink Pages. In addition to these, there are a couple of high quality blogs (Gaysi Family comes to mind), and there's even a whole queer literature store called Queer Ink. I've also heard of niche stores like AzaadBazaar with sell Pride gear. The reason all of this is significant is because it is a definitive indicator of the emergence of a growing Indian LGBT conscience: Indian commerce has awoken to the purchasing power of the pink rupee. Bollywood used to portray gay Indian men in purely comical roles, but we now have films with more sensitive representations (especially independent short films). Certain Indian fashion designers are openly gay (which is not without controversy - there have been multiple reports of young straight Indian male models being forced to sleep their way up the fashion industry), and certain Indian celebrities have endorsed gay rights vocally.

Before this whole answer reeks of complete ignorance and middle class privilege, I'd like to spend a few moments examining what it means to be poor, uneducated, Indian, and gay. The answer I've heard most often is that such men go join Hijra dens, but I know this isn't the only case - organisations like the Naz foundation, the Humsafar trust, and Sangama (Bangalore), continue to actively fight for the rights of sexual minorities and at risk communities. They routinely hold seminars and outreach camps - e.g. free HIV testing, contraceptives, and counselings sessions. The socio-economic interplay is interesting: Many transgender individuals face immense discrimination from within the "Indian LGBT community" itself to the extent where the politics of an "Indian queer identity" is hotly debated - Are we inclusive? Or are we intentionally excluding the marginalised to promote socially-acceptable narratives? Where does the line get drawn? Pride certainly brings out a colourful mix of people, but once we're all done marching, do we go home as brother and sister, or do we fractionate into our own secure/impenetrable social cliques? Food for thought.

All things considered, being openly gay in India remains tough. . However, society is slowly changing, and people are getting used to the idea that it's ok to be gay…

For my part, I worry about several issues both outside and within the community, but at the end of the day, I can't help but feel hopeful. India is progressively undergoing a massive cultural shift, and as younger generations gain more exposure about the world around them and grow emboldened, I'm confident that things will get better with time.

While the gay rights movement in India is definitely gaining strong momentum, it will take a long time before social attitudes allow openly gay men to coexist peacefully.

This is why most Indian men have yet to fully come out of the closet. With social progress, people have started coming out to their circle of friends and to their families, but very very few people life totally open….