Who is the lonely queer Indian?
Loneliness as an emotional phenomenon is familiar to all human beings. Possessing an unparalleled capacity for both creation and destruction, it has its place throughout literature, culture, and history. But how does loneliness become a tool of oppression? Why does it become an identity? When does loneliness become isolation, and if so, can it affect some more than the rest?
For the LGBTQ+ people across India, for the citizens of a country that in spirit wishes for inclusivity, all living in an age of intolerance, short memories and impatience, these questions are more crucial now than ever before.
"Loneliness is personal, and it is also political," said Olivia Laing in The Lonely City. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt too spoke of loneliness, and its ability to make people conducive to terror. "Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other... Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result," she said.
But it isn't merely isolation that makes something unbearable, according to her, but the condition of being isolated and unable to manifest creativity when in that isolation.
"In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one's own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable... Isolation then becomes loneliness."
Earlier this year I came out to the world that I was agender. I breathed in deep, and took the plunge into a community which I had, until then, been isolated from. The consequences of intentionally making the "personal" political were profound, and by meeting members of the LGBTQIA+ community, I observed a solitariness that defined them.
While privilege allowed some like me to accept solitude as creative inspiration, cathartic peace, and the deepest self-reflection, to oppressed minorities around the world, people of the so-called "lower" social and economic classes, and to the LGBTQ community, loneliness is both an effect and a cause of worry, suffering, and an emotional pain that is forgotten in the search for statistically verifiable harm.
Studies of identity conclude that individuation requires isolation and loneliness. As Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
LGBTQ support groups around the world form for this reason, of people who are shunned for their differences revelling in this very individuality, and creating a community through the spirit of shared solitude. In the Indian cities of Chennai and Delhi that I have travelled to and familiarised myself with, most gay and queer individuals are lonely.
They meet others in their community, twice a week, share a drink or some food, and empathise.
"They're sharing a drink called loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone." For those who aren't a part of the higher socio-economic strata of society, solitude is internalized, and conviction is required tenfold when there isn't a community to support them and back their opinions.
Recently, the comedian Hasan Minhaj commented on the shock of realizing that "people could be bigoted even as they were smiling at you."
The solitariness of the queer community is a symptom of this very bigotry that can occur even within acceptance. Despite India passing a law that recognizes various group including the hijras as a unique third gender and giving them legal equality, they still struggle to achieve social equality. Vishruth, an Indian postgraduate scholar of biology and Tamil literature in the United Kingdom, spoke to me of his struggle in coming out as bisexual to a male roommate or friend. While most individuals in educated "bubbles" are progressive and "fine" in theory and legality with LGBT rights, he told me about how it seems that many cisgender and heterosexual individuals kind of internal block about interacting with gay people.
"There is a quiet, creeping inner uneasiness," he says, "about whether I can actually come out to him, and if I do so, will he become uncomfortable? The roots of this are in a basal, subconscious and cultured heteronormativity."
Another case to note is a video recently released by the Kochi Metro Rail, where the government took proactive steps to employ more members of the transgender community.
One such transgender person in the video looks at the camera strongly, and states, "When you see me, don't look at me twice." Since then, due to the social stigma and an inability to find rooms and boarding in the areas, as many as 11 out of the 23 transgender workers have quit. The struggle for acceptance into community, is a struggle to no longer be the "other" or viewed as exotic. This is an acceptance that relies on people learning the difference between identity and stereotype, and a change in the human psyche that understands this distinction.
Speaking to members of the LGBTQIA+ community in India, I understood that rooted in their alienation was society's general antagonism and belittling of the so-called "feminine" attributes of people, irrespective of sex.
One such individual who wished to remain anonymous, reflected upon his time many decades ago when he was struggling to accept his identity as a gay man. Back then, homosexuality wasn't a concept that people knew, but femininity was.
He hence had to undergo the intense internal conflict of whether he was a woman in a man's body, because it was so incomprehensible that a man could be attracted to other men. Society alienated him for this, where even another man he was with at the time, called him a "transgender" in a derogatory fashion during an argument.
Vishruth too spoke to me about how this antagonism of femininity in men is a cause of isolation and loneliness. "From the way people view the bodies of men and women, to how they perceive their sexuality, there is an over-eroticisation of the male touch, especially with other men. It is not seen to be normal to cuddle with a heterosexual friend, or hold hands with them without it having a "weird" connotation.
It is more bearable for people to imagine heterosexual women "experimenting" with each other, but not men." There is hence required a reworking of the popular aesthetic, which goes beyond merely securing rights and liberties. "Whether one is gay, "straight", bisexual, or agender, wearing mascara and having long eyelashes is cool!"Jabez, a gay student activist and a drag performer, speaks of their childhood memories of being left out in an amusement park. "Being left out as the "gay dude" in an amusement park... They just asked me to stay back because I cannot take these rides and that I am a "pussy". That still haunts me." While loneliness is a natural and known element in every human being, it has a more potent on the queer identity. Its potency has immense negative consequences, with various undocumented suicides of LGBTQ people across the country.
But the LGBTQ community has gotten more consolidated over the years, and now they have each other, don't they? So why the loneliness, you may ask. David Riesman in his publication titled The Lonely Crowd in 1950, established that loneliness isn't merely about physical isolation. It demonstrated that many feel isolated even when surrounded by people.
Applying this in part to the gay community, Michael Hobbes, in his iconic article on the Huffington Post, The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness, wrote about how the rates of depression, loneliness and substance abuse in the gay community in the United States remains in the same place that they've been for decades, while the rates for the cisgender population have reduced each year - gay people are two to 10 times more likely than straight people to take their own lives, and twice as likely to have a major depressive episode.
Epidemiologists and social scientists are attempting to understand this overwhelming feeling of emptiness and alienation in the US and European countries. However, a South Asian perspective of understanding loneliness is lacking. Foremost among the obstacles for such an understanding is the lack of statistical data regarding queer individuals across India and other South Asian countries. But it isn't hard to infer that, if in countries with better social standards and lesser stigma there is still such an overwhelming incidence of this issue, it must only be much worse in India.
One such stigma in the Indian context is that queer people are only interested in the physical and sexual aspects of it. "It always isn't about sex, gay men want a family too, and at times a friend, a nurturer, a guy on whose shoulders you can lean on," Jabez stresses.
And throughout their lives after they come out with their identity, these individuals are forced to repeatedly, in a way, "prove" their queerness, prove that they are suffering, and prove that they are alone, to be given any real attention at all. "Loneliness is a thing! it ain't made up... It haunts people down to death," Jabez tells me, with hurt visible in his words.
And this solitude is in no way limited to the adults. Teens in India, while attempting to discover their identity in a hetero-patriarchal world, resort to this solitude as respite. Professor Yasodhara who teaches gender and sexuality recalls her 14-year-old self, stating in a poem, "The more solitary I am, the merrier."
It reminded me of Martin Heidegger's words in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, where he asks, "...That solitariness in which each human being first of all enters into a nearness to what is essential in all things, a nearness to the world. What is this solitude, where each human being will be as though unique?"How can this negative emotion of loneliness be a respite? In fact, loneliness has long been known to have reactionary and partially healing connotations, rather than purely negative ones.
The scholar RS Weiss characterised loneliness as a response to particular situations and scenarios, and not as a weakness. Taking off from Arendt's views expressed earlier in this article, regarding true isolation only existing when the creative expression is removed as well, Michael Hobbes mentions the ways in which the queer community performs this solitariness.
He states, when it comes to the LGBTQ community, "Our distance from the mainstream may be the source of some of what ails us, but it is also the source of our wit, our resilience, our empathy, our superior talents for dressing and dancing and karaoke. We have to recognize that as we fight for better laws and better environments - and as we figure out how to be better to each other."
One would find that this notion of being alone is resplendent across history, dotting the timeline with lines tucked away within poetry and prose, from queer authors living in times where being so was rebellion, by itself.
Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Lonelines was defended in court with its then "radical" depiction of female same-sex relationships. Sappho, considered to be the earliest lesbian writer from the Greek era, wrote:
"Set are the Pleiades;
the Moon is down
And midnight dark on high.
The hours, the hours, drift by,
And here I lie,
Alone."
After considering these multifarious dimensions, we see that a truly political understanding of loneliness requires one to combine introspection with critical self-reflection, and an ability to understand that empathy is not as complete as we would believe.
In the overconfident assumption that one can understand the struggles of another, we forego the benefit of the doubt that the suffering may be beyond our own comprehension.
The LGBTQ community in India sorely requires this benefit, and this understanding.
Margaret Mead, a queer anthropologist, once said, "One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night."
It is time for the lonely queer Indian to be allowed to achieve that need, and to be accepted, at the very least, as human.