Queer Love in the Times of COVID-19

One day during the lockdown, I decided to put on some nail paint. The next thing I knew my family was verbally abusing me and questioning my masculinity. By the evening I was frantically trying to remove the paint. I suddenly realised that while my whole family was sitting together, talking to each other, I was all alone. Queer people like me, who spent the lockdown in their homes, were disproportionately traumatised. Home is not a place of joy, but a place of seclusion, a site of violence, for people like us. Simple acts are seen as transgressions; putting on nail polish and earrings can lead to arguments which cause emotional and psychological trauma.Within the walls of our homes, our queer selves do not have space, respect or tolerance.

Throughout me teen years I resisted forming close relationships with people fearing they would leave once they realised I’m queer. The fear killed me from within, and I started policing every action of mine. I could never get the affection I needed from my parents; they had their issues to resolve. And once I found the right people who loved me for who I am, I just wanted to be with them.

There are no words which can convey the joy it brought to be able to hug my friends, or cuddle with them or be physically affectionate. Lockdown took all that away. I was far away from Delhi where I was completing my undergraduate degree, the place where I had the people I love. Instead, I was stuck at home, a place where I am seen as an abomination. I constantly face passive-aggressiveness, death threats, and homophobic slurs from my family. Sometimes they also realised the unfairness of their actions. But the pressure of social norms, the fear of other people’s opinions, and the need to see me conform made them move further away. My relationship with them is a culmination of a constant cycle of acceptance and rejection. The pandemic made me realise that we have to stop acting like family is everything, and that they are always going to be there. A family is the people where we feel safe and loved, without any discrimination or judgement of our choices, where our mistakes are corrected but not used as a mark of shame.

Queer people almost invariably depend on our chosen families, with whom we share a deep bond of love, care, affection and understanding. It’s with them that we forge deep, unending solidarities, based on shared experiences, and an affinity for ‘non-normative’ desires.
After the initial wave of the pandemic, everyone started indulging in the celebration of festivals like Diwali and Christmas given that they had been away from each other for so long. This meant catching up with family, friends back home and relatives — people who preserve and continue these conventions. This also meant more questions, misunderstandings, and even hostility. These celebrations are not the same for queer people stuck with their family. These festivals celebrate conventional structures like religions and state, which marginalize, exploit and oppress queer people, and even strip them of their rights. I can’t celebrate a festival that obliges me to stay happy for a celebration of heteronormativity; that asks me to hold my family in high regard because they are related by blood even though they do not respect my existence; that insists on decorating the walls and surroundings with colourful lights and diyas when I only feel exclusion, anxiety and darkness.

It was isolating and hurtful to look at everyone enjoying themselves when you know it’s just not for you. My family expected me to behave normally like ‘the man of the house’. Such restrictions almost felt suffocating and I could not adhere to them. I always wonder if something is wrong with me because I am the only one who isn’t able to ‘fit-in’. The strained relationship with family doesn’t help, making me feel only more like an ‘outsider’. During the lockdown I did have access to therapy and medication. But these only helped to an extent, because I had to go back to the same restrictive environment.

I remember when in the last few years, I found my friends and lovers – that’s when I found the joys of love, friendship and compassion. I learned what intimacy meant to me, and it’s importance. I learned why emotional intelligence matters so much. During the lockdown, I was spending almost every single day on my laptop or phone, but after some time the video calls and texts did not make me feel connected to my chosen family. All I craved for was touch, reminiscent of my friends hugging me tightly, or caressing my hair teasing me, or just snuggling with my lovers. Queer people are defamed for being promiscuous, deviants and sex-deranged. But most of us see sex as a language of love, connection and intimacy, which we don’t often find growing up. Under the heteronormative system, sex is considered a taboo. Largely, it is acceptable after marriage and for procreation. For us, it is the language of acceptance, pleasure, peace and happiness. It isn’t that heterosexual people don’t see sex as a way of pleasure. It’s that their world view is what is acknowledged and reflected in the whole world – all the movies, the festivals, the public spaces, among other things. Our forms of love and desire exist on the margins.

Queer people form most of the intimate and lifelong connections in private spaces. We cannot risk the visibility of our desire in public spaces as the consequences can be fatal. Section 377 might have been read down but stigmatisation still lingers in social spaces. We know how it feels to be told again and again that to love someone in this way is wrong. But when we love someone, we do so with all our heart, showing the world that loving can never be wrong. All this whilst healing the emotional and psychological wounds that society inflicts on us. The pandemic was a glaring reminder of the wounds that were inflicted on me by my family — supposedly the most private and scared of spaces. It made me realize why freedom and inclusive, affirmative spaces full of love & acceptance are so crucial – all things the pandemic took away from me. It is necessary to create a new sense of what sex, love, intimacy, friendship and family mean.