Perception of the LGBTQ+ community comes through whispers, caricatures, laws, and cautionary tales.  So, one naturally grows up absorbing them long before learning to examine them. It gets deeply ingrained that there exists a “normal” way to love, a “natural” way to desire, or inhabit a body, and a correct way to move through masculinity or femininity. And anything outside of it is either dismissed, sensationalised, feared, or forced into explanation. Because when language surrounding identity arrives through shame, mockery, misinformation, or fragmented representation, understanding oneself becomes a process of both discovery and deconstruction.

Heteronormativity, despite how clinical the word may sound, is not merely the assumption that heterosexuality is common, but the deeply embedded belief that it is the default, the natural centre around which all other identities must explain themselves. In such an environment, one must learn which inherited ideas about themselves need to be unlearned and relearned, in addition to exploring themselves.

In India, queerness and the queer community have historically existed quite ironically. Despite ancient texts, temple art, regional folklore, and oral histories revealing the fluid understandings of gender and sexuality from times before colonial intervention, rigid binaries became institutionalised socially, legally, and morally, over time. Section 377, introduced under the British colonial rule in 1861, criminalised same-sex relations for over a century, reinforcing the notion that queerness was deviant rather than deeply human. Its decriminalisation in 2018 was undoubtedly historic, but laws alone cannot undo generations of silence. One person I spoke to recalled realising this at the age of ten. They said that they already knew, in some unarticulated way, that they were queer, but whenever online posts discussing homosexuality appeared, they would instinctively scroll past them. Not out of hatred, but discomfort. “It didn’t sit well with my heteronormative mindset that people could openly be gay or bisexual,” they admit. It was only later, during lockdown, when they were isolated with their thoughts and exposed to wider conversations online, that they began confronting the beliefs they had unconsciously inherited.

Pride is seldom the beginning of queerness. Queerness begins with confusion. Spiralling in shame, one cannot immediately explain what the exhausting attempt to fit into a life that feels more socially acceptable than truthful is like.

One individual reflected on remaining emotionally distant even while in a relationship with another woman because conforming felt safer than honesty. “I kept telling myself there was only one ‘correct’ way to live,” they say. “I thought maybe I could just suppress this part of myself and fit into heterosexual society instead.”
Another describes how even a casual joke from their sibling asking if they were a lesbian immediately provoked defensive denial. Later, what disturbed them most was not the question itself, but why they had instinctively treated it like an insult.

However, a deeper struggle lies ahead in this conflict. Even now, much of queerness continues to be reduced to vocabulary before it is understood as somebody’s daily life experiences. Pride becomes the alphabet before it becomes the people. Labels become categories before they become stories.

One person described how exhausting labels themselves can become, especially for individuals whose identities do not fit neatly into familiar categories. “There’s pressure to identify yourself clearly instead of just existing and figuring things out naturally,” they explained. Another spoke about how asexuality is constantly misunderstood because people collapse romantic attraction, sexual attraction, and libido into the same thing. “People think if I say I’m asexual, it means I have no libido and no romantic feelings,” they say. “But those are all separate things.”

It is perhaps because of this emotional and intellectual gap that gender and queer studies have become increasingly significant within Indian academia over the past few decades.

Emerging initially through feminist scholarship and women’s studies programmes during the 1970s and 80s, these disciplines gradually expanded to examine sexuality, identity, embodiment, law, and social power through more amalgamated lenses. Various institutions, such as the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Ambedkar University, and Ashoka University, have largely contributed to conversations surrounding gender and sexuality through research, archives, and interdisciplinary teaching.

But in contrast to popular assumption, these disciplines are not merely invested in categorising identities. They are disciplines of interpretation. They ask how societies construct normalcy. Why certain bodies are granted legitimacy while others are scrutinised? How shame becomes socially inherited. How language shapes one’s understanding of selfhood.

Assistant professor Madhusudan N, A PhD scholar in Gender and Queer Studies and the host of “Gender-Queer Capsule” a podcast that speaks of all things queer, recalls becoming aware of these systems as early as when he was in the ninth standard, and a teacher pulled him aside and asked why he “behaved like a girl.” Years later, he would also learn that some teachers questioned whether his voice sounded “masculine enough” for leadership when he was being considered for a school team captaincy. “I still didn’t know the word ‘gay,’” he reflects, “but the boys around me already used it as a slur. Somehow, all these supposedly straight boys already knew before I did.”

Even now, he admits, walking past groups of men sometimes makes him unconsciously alter the way he carries himself. “It’s a subconscious response,” he explains.

Professor Madhusudan also spoke about how queer people themselves can sometimes begin performing identities through stereotypes they inherit online or within queer spaces. As a gay man in Bangalore, he observed how certain aesthetics, partying cultures, or hookup culture are often mistaken for the identity of the entire queer community. “There’s nothing inherently wrong with pleasure, sexuality, or self-expression,” he clarifies, “but sometimes people start believing these behaviours are what make them queer.” For him, queer studies become important precisely because it allows identities to exist beyond reduction. His own doctoral research examines queer Indian novels written after the reading down of Section 377 and asks what queer love looks like when it is finally allowed emotional complexity rather than caricature. “We’ve always seen heterosexual love stories,” he explains. “But what happens when two men love each other? What does their emotional language look like?”  His experiences and insights are largely thought-provoking and very inspiring.

Equally, Assistant professor Anusha, A PhD scholar in Gender and Queer Studies, reflected on how allyship itself is often misunderstood within heterosexual society. “People kept asking me, ‘Why are you studying this if you’re not part of the community?’” she says. Her response remained simple: one does not need to belong to a vulnerable group to recognise injustice against them. Much of her work, especially around trans identities and public spaces, emerges from questioning the systems that society forces vulnerable people to survive within. Speaking about washroom discrimination and bureaucratic scrutiny faced by trans individuals, she remarked that for many cisgender people, using a public washroom is merely an inconvenience, whereas for trans individuals, it often involves surveillance, fear, humiliation, and danger. Her insight returns the conversation to something essential: gender and queer studies are not abstract ideological exercises, but attempts to make everyday life more inhabitable for people who have historically been denied ease within it.

Professor Anusha spoke admittedly about recognising her own participation in prejudice during her younger years. Growing up in a deeply patriarchal society, she admitted that even she once held transphobic assumptions because those biases had been normalised around her. It was only through reading, discussion, and later entering gender studies that she began understanding how systems themselves deny queer and trans individuals’ dignity, safety, employment, and visibility.

Perhaps most importantly, she emphasised that gender studies are not simply about queer identities alone. “Gender studies teach empathy,” she says. “It teaches people to see life from another person’s perspective.”

And maybe that is ultimately what makes these conversations so necessary today. Not because they offer definitive answers to identity, but because they allow people the dignity of complexity. They remind us that queerness is not an abstraction, stereotype, or ideological debate detached from reality, but a profoundly human experience shaped by memory, fear, longing, performance, shame, intimacy, and becoming.

To understand queerness, then, is not merely to memorise language or perform acceptance politely. It is time to reconsider the frameworks through which we have been taught to understand love, gender, belonging, and even ourselves. And perhaps in doing so, what expands is not only our understanding of queer lives, but the breadth of our humanity altogether.