7.1 Some Propositions from Life Span Studies in the Study of Growing Up Gay
Applying principles of life span development to lives of lesbian and gay individuals, Savin-Williams (2001) has proposed four significant propositions that I have used and or reflected upon as guiding principles in this book:
First: We are the same. This implies that, even while studying lived experiences of gay and lesbian individuals amidst normative scripts of heterosexual development, we should bear in mind that there are several general characteristics and developmental processes in the lives of sexual minority individuals that are similar to those affecting all humans. For instance, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity, all adolescents have growth spurts, menses, nocturnal emissions, acne, and all of them have to negotiate issues of autonomy, individuation, attachment, intimacy, and identity.
While the principal of commonality of experience may be a useful tool in understanding the process of human development, it is necessary to resist universalist assumptions that homogenize and erase the growing-up experiences of many people. All bodies may not follow a universal biological clock; for instance, all adolescents with intersex variations may not necessarily experience menses or nocturnal emissions. Similarly, young malnourished girls may experience delay or irregularity in menses due to anaemia. However, assuming menstruation to be the hallmark of the experience of development of adolescent girls, would be using a majority experience to speak for all experiences. The same argument can be made about able bodies seen as marker of physical/motor or cognitive development and invisibilizing experiences of disabled persons. Through highlighting the difference in development trajectories and growing-up experiences of young queer people, I have attempted to challenge the majoritarian (in this case heterosexual and gender binary dominant ideas) assumptions that underlie an essentialist-naturalized-universalist discourse in life span studies.
Second: We are different. This implies that, due to a marginalized sexuality, sexual minority individuals experience a substantially different life course than do heterosexuals. Experiences of stigma and discrimination, and an accompanying sense of alienation, affects the childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and entire life of gay and lesbian individuals. In fact, the ‘social schedule/social clock’, as described by Neugarten (1979) to refer to prescriptions of life transitions based on social age, is informed by ideas of heteronormativity (among other kinds of norms), and lesbian and gay individuals are often ‘off schedule’ by default.
This proposition is one of the central themes of this book. I have sought, throughout this book, to understand the ways in which being gay/lesbian is different from being heterosexual and the ways in which it impacts growing up and life experiences. In other words, are there experiences that gay children or adolescents have that are different from their heterosexual counterparts? In this book, I highlight, through experiential accounts, a sense of difference described by most study participants right from a young age. For most participants, this difference was experienced as not a good but a ‘bad difference’, at least initially. Several participants described gender transgressions from as early as five or six years of age, in areas such as clothes, grooming, play, and preference of play mates. While gender transgressions were common for lesbian women and gay men, their impact and consequences were often different for men and women. Family, parents, friends, schools, and colleges emerged as normativizing institutions, reproducing social norms of ‘appropriate’ behaviours related to gender and sexuality. However, participant stories also include accounts wherein certain transgressions were tolerated through ignoring/invisibilizing/not seeing or acknowledging, as well as viewing these transgressions as situational, contained within a specific context or time period, not spilling over into ‘normal’ life. ‘Growing up’ ‘gay’ posed several challenges for the LG child/adolescent, which I argue, in Chap. 3, sets the developmental process of gay and lesbian individuals apart from their heterosexual counterparts. Being a minority even in one’s family and among one’s closest friends; finding one’s self in the absence of any gay affirmative language, images, or role models; fighting socially internalized messages of abnormality and pathology; dealing with feelings of alienation and isolation; all of this, in the absence of external support and with only the internal resources of an adolescent or a young person, can be an overwhelming experience.
Just as there have been unique developmental challenges in growing up gay, which I discuss in Chap. 3, there are also facets and challenges that are unique to gay relationships that I discuss in Chap. 5. For instance, one of the propositions I make in Chap. 5 is that intimate/romantic same-sex relationships for many young gay/lesbian individuals are not just romantic relationships but often a gateway to reduced isolation and a beginning of gay socialization. Similarly, there are unique challenges facing same-sex couples who are attempting to fit in with normative (heterosexual) scripts of couple-hood, or trying to defy them, or rewriting relationship scripts outside of the normative. I use the framework of sexual minority stress (Meyer 2007) to understand the impact of these unique developmental challenges on the life journeys of gay and lesbian young people.
Third: We differ among ourselves. There exist enormous diversities among gay and lesbian individuals. Sexuality is one aspect of an individual’s identity and it intersects with several other identities such as class, caste, gender, religion, and urban/rural background, to produce a range of diversities, not to mention diversities around sexual desires, practices, sub-cultures, language, and so on.
This proposition has been adequately acknowledged, but not fully considered and worked upon, in this book. While I have discussed frameworks that conceptualize identity and selfhood as constituting of multiple dimensions, I have kept a sharp focus on sexual identity and meaning/s of growing up and living as ‘gay’. Thus, other identity markers such as class, caste, religion, region, ability, and their intersections with experiences of growing up gay, have not been primarily focused upon in this book. This is not to undermine their role, but it is only to ‘freeze the frame’ or define the scope of this book, that I chose to primarily focus on, and seek to visibilize, gay/lesbian childhoods, adolescence, and young adulthood, about which we know so little in the Indian context. The intimate intersections of sexuality with gender are explicated through the life stories of gay men and lesbian women in this book. Other intersections, such as sexuality and socio-economic class, have been described when they have emerged in the data. For instance, class is inextricably linked with access to privacy that is so important while growing up, especially for someone with gender and sexuality transgressions. There is a need to have access to safe and private spaces to try out things that are highly stigmatized and forbidden, such as wearing lipstick for a young person assigned male gender at birth. Similarly, socio-economic class is a significant factor in a person being able to leave the natal home to escape marriage, or violence, or just to live independently and explore the possibilities of a life outside the normative familial/kinship heterosexual narrative. While these intersections have been noted at multiple points in the book, these have not been the primary focus of this inquiry. It is necessary to explore further the intersections of being and becoming gay with other social identities and locations and describe the range of diversities and differences in growing up as gay in India.
Fourth: We are each unique. This implies that every individual is unique and that, while there may be similarities of experiences and similar articulations about growing-up experiences, no two individuals are identical and any research using a development frame has to be aware of the same.
This proposition is a core tenet of the psychosocial approach that I use in this study. The psychosocial approach, while fully acknowledging and being appreciative of the role played by social structures and environment in the process of development, also emphasizes individual agency and action in shaping their own development. Thus, while all gay/lesbian persons growing up in the cities of Bombay or Pune in the late 1980s or 1990s may have faced similar environmental constraints in the form of invisibility, isolation, criminalization, or violence in private and public places (emanating from the dominant ideologies of heterosexism and gender binarism), the individual journeys of each participant of meaning-making, coping, and thriving, would be different. This difference may be partly explained not only by their other social identities, locations, access to resources, and support systems, but also by the unique way of each person of making sense, relating, and living.
To emphasize the unique developmental situation of each person and inter-individual differences in response to their environment, D’Augelli (1994) uses the concept of ‘developmental plasticity’, which refers to human responsiveness to environmental and biological changes. In fact, the model of lesbian, gay identity development of D’Augelli (1994), that sees identity processes as a result of three interconnected variables, is a good example of coming together of the subjective/psychological, interpersonal and social/environmental processes. The three variables discussed by D’Augelli are: (a) personal subjectivities and action (how individuals feel about their sexual identities over their lives, their engagement in diverse sexual activities with different meanings, and their construction of their sexual lives and feelings); (b) interactive intimacies (influences of early parental/familial socialization, peer and romantic relationship influences), and; (c) socio-historical connections (social norms, particularities of sub-culture/geographic communities, local and national social customs, laws, policies, cultural and historical continuities and discontinuities).
In addition to the four propositions proposed by Savin-Williams (2001) in the context of lesbian and gay identity development, I would like to add the dimension of time and space to the study of growing up gay. Socio-historical time and geographical space in which the life narrative of a gay person unfolds is a significant dimension to this study. The life course narratives and their analysis that I present in this book are replete with examples of a particular gay magazine, drop-in centre, helpline, doctor, counsellor, a party, a group, a collective that were significant in the growing-up journey of the individual. Similarly, some of the participants talked about visiting other spaces that impacted their experiences of growing up. For instance, one of the participants talks about attending a gay wedding in the U.K. during a student exchange program and how that affected his thought process. All of these refer to spatial (as well as temporal) specificities that are central to the life narrative. In other words, if one were to ask these very research questions in a village in India or another city or town, these narratives would perhaps be different. In terms of socio-historical time in a city, or a country, I suggest that the invisibility and isolation that participants described, even in cities of Bombay and Pune, are a reflection of the time in which they were growing up. After 2009 (Delhi High Court judgment decriminalizing homosexuality), for instance, most young people growing up in cities would not have to face the question, ‘Am I the only one who is like this?’ Similarly, at a time predating the colonial encounter, young people in this region probably did not ask questions about their sexuality in terms of an identity. Thus, temporal and spatial dimensions are significant in the study of human development. Here, I suggest that the idea of cohort effect that has been used traditionally within life span studies may be extended to the study of growing up gay.
7.2 Socio-cultural Realities as Context for Studying ‘Growing Up Gay’
In describing and analyzing narratives of young gay and lesbian persons about coming out to oneself and others, meeting community, and forming intimate/romantic relationships, I locate these in certain aspects of socio-cultural life in India. These include: the presence of a strong cultural script for homosociality; compulsory nature of heterosexual, endogamous marriage, and; a social and relational nature of identity that may not neatly fit in with the western individuated, bounded nature of self and identity.
In a highly gender-segregated society there are strict rules and norms for interactions between men and women, both in the public and the private domain. Kumar (1992) in his essay, ‘Growing Up Male’ reflects on the role of the gender-segregated education system in institutionally legitimizing the ‘purdah’ (separation) system between boys and girls, leading to a complete lack of access to the world for girls/women, and this, in turn, leading to a certain kind of dehumanizing of girls. On the other hand, close engagement with members of one’s own sex is encouraged as part of appropriate socialization and role modelling. Thus, homosociality—intimate engagement and social bonds among members of the same sex—is not just accepted but prescribed. As a result, intimate relationships between members of the same sex are often interpreted in the Indian context in terms of ‘friendship bonds’ and deep emotional connections that are celebrated within the cultural context. However, homosociality, especially among women as described by Sedgwick (1985), can often mean a continuum between homosocial and homosexual: women caring for each other, promoting each other’s interests, women’s friendships and bonds, and women loving women. In India, there exists a cultural script for homosociality or close bonds among men and among women. As suggested by D’Augelli (1994), cultural and historical continuities and discontinuities (such as same-sex imagery, narratives, poetry, literature, art, and myths, as documented by Vanita and Kidwai 2000) are important in the study of same-sex sexuality.
Marriage is seen in India both as compulsory for all and as a social duty. While modernization, urbanization, and related social phenomena—such as migration, increasing numbers of nuclear households, and changing gender roles—have led to some change in the form and shape of the institutions of marriage and family, the core ideas about ‘who can marry whom’ (dictated by dominant ideas of caste purity, community and kinship solidarity, strict gender roles) continue to hold strong. Vanita observes, “In India, most people have been, and many continue to be, married off at a very young age. Hence exclusive same-sex relationships are necessarily rare” (Vanita 2002, 3). In fact, the centrality of heterosexual marriage is such that any sexual relations outside of it (and by extension outside of the family and community network) are not acknowledged and are unthinkable for many. In this study, too, forced (overt or subtle) heterosexual marriage has been a reality in the lives of many of the participants or their partners. The all-pervasive nature of this ideology of compulsory marriage means that, often, gay and lesbian individuals aspire for, and see, their relationships, with heterosexual marriage as their reference point. Thus, the centrality of heterosexual marriage is a significant social reality that has to be kept in mind, while studying gay relationships.
One of the conceptualizations of the self, in a modern sense, is that of an individuated, bounded, autonomous self. But there are descriptions of the self as expressed in kinship, community, and relational terms, and identity is seen as informed by an interdependent view of the self. In such a context, familial concerns and filial duties are placed in high regard, and individuals are much more enmeshed in their social and familial relationships. The default presentation then of the self to the family or society is a heterosexual one, and identity is often expressed in social terms such as caste location of one’s family, gender, or one’s birth order in the family. Hence, disclosure or non-disclosure of one’s sexual identity in social life, embracing a ‘gay lifestyle’ as defined by a western gay liberatory discourse, needs to be viewed in light of a familial/relational construction and expression of self and identity, wherein sexual subjectivities may not translate into an identity based on sexuality. It is due to these specificities of the socio-cultural context that growing up gay in urban India may be different from the development of a gay identity and a gay life trajectory as described in psychological, or even popular, LGBT literature within Euro-American contexts. While conceptions of the self in literature suggest a mutually exclusive, polar opposite composition of the Eastern (socially embedded) and Western (individuated and bounded) ideas of self, the reality is likely to be more hybrid, especially in multicultural, urban locations such as Bombay and Pune, where I conducted my study.
The study of growing up and the development of a gay or lesbian sexual identity that I attempt to undertake here is also to be viewed in the socio-cultural context of naturalized heterosexuality; every form of non-heterosexual possibility is rendered invisible through a powerful, enmeshed matrix of family, marriage and kinship ideologies. In fact, marginality due to sexual difference, and exclusionary practices that one is subjected to due to one’s non-normative sexuality, are largely invisible and illegible, as opposed to other marginalized locations relating to caste, ethnicity, gender, and religion, that are determined by birth into a certain body, family, community, spatial location, or region, and enforced through practices of social segregation. However, this is not the case with exclusions based on sexuality, wherein neither its possibilities nor its prohibitions are explicated. Dave (2012) refers to this work, of making explicit, legible, and naming of this difference based on one’s sexuality, as politics of invention. The narratives of growing up gay in this book do exactly this. While negotiating invisibility, they talk of inventing and articulating new forms of relationality, belonging, and ways of being gay in a heterosexually constructed world.
7.3 Why Study ‘Growing Up Gay’?
Studying growing up processes of gay and lesbian individuals can often be confused with attempts at establishing an etiology or causation of homosexuality. In other words, trying to retrospectively understand experiences of childhood and growing up can be seen as motivated by a need to pin down the origin, or the cause, of this ‘deviation’ from the path of ‘normal’ development. Historically, such ‘causation’ research in medical/mental health sciences has been conducted with the motivation of knowing and removing the root cause of the ‘abnormal’ condition of homosexuality, or changing/converting of such perversion into ‘normal’ heterosexual functioning.
It is due to the dominance of ideas of heteronormativity and gender binarism (and pathologization of sexualities and gender expressions that fall outside of these), that most studies focused on children and adolescents in India assume all of them to conform to the socially assigned gender at birth and expect all of them to grow up to be heterosexual adults. As a result, there exists no literature on children and adolescents who transgress norms of gender and sexuality. Similarly, since sexuality is expected to emerge in adolescence, even the sparse literature that exists on emergence of gay or lesbian sexuality does not focus on childhood/s. This has resulted in invisibilizing of the childhoods of gay individuals, and more so in homogenizing childhood experiences by assuming everyone to be cisgender and heterosexual.
As argued in Chap. 3, childhood studies is dominated by a universal narrative of childhood: the child within the family unit, innocent, protected and cared for within the private domain. And then there are studies of the ‘other’ children; children and childhoods that are deviant from the normal child. Some examples of these within development literature, as well as state policy are, orphan children, children in conflict with law, trafficked children, child labourers, and so on. Despite sharing some commonalities with these ‘deviant’ children, such as facing neglect, abuse, violence within families, schools, colleges, among peer groups, running away from home, and facing violence in public spaces (Shah et al. 2015; Ghosh et al. 2011; PUCL-K 2001), gay and lesbian children do not figure in the discourse around childhood vulnerabilities in India.
This book is an attempt to start critical conversations within the disciplines of psychology, social work, childhood studies, and family studies in India and to think about exclusions inherent in these disciplines. It is an attempt to locate experiences of lesbian and gay individuals within a life course perspective, which includes their personal histories of childhood and growing-up years, experiences of institutionalized homonegativity within homes, schools, neighbourhoods, among friends, and their journeys of finding themselves and their communities. The motivation behind this book is to initiate inquiry and understanding about growing-up experiences of gay individuals in the Indian context, which would enable parents, families, teachers, child counsellors, activists, academics and policy makers to better understand, counsel, protect and plan relevant programmatic interventions, or tweak the existing ones to accommodate needs of young gay and lesbian individuals.
In this book, I also attempt a discussion about possible methodological considerations for studying gay and lesbian life span experiences/development. I suggest that a methodological approach with adequate attention to the intrapsychic and subjective experiences, while also laying out the context of institutionalized homonegativity and socio-cultural and historical dimension within which these experiences unfold, is necessary. While I have attempted to do this here, in the interest of a focused inquiry and narrative, I have left out other layers of social identity that need to be thought through in future work in this area. For instance, while describing ‘growing up gay’, I primarily focus on sexuality and do bring up other social locations of class and gender where possible, but I have not centrally focussed on ways in which being gay intersects with social locations of class, caste, region, gender, language, ethnicity, and so on. Similarly, in this book I talk about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of gay and lesbian persons living in the cities of Bombay and Pune. However, I stop at adulthood and adult relationships with partner/s and community, and do not look at experiences of older adults, as well as ageing, among gay and lesbian persons. These would be significant areas for further inquiry. I also do not address incremental effect: How do childhood experiences affect adolescence or later development? Nor do I discuss circularity of experience: How is the psychic/subjective experience of a gay person shaped by and in turn, how does it shape, interpersonal and community or social experience? I hope that some of these complexities will be addressed in future work on life span studies with lesbian and gay persons. Also, this is not a longitudinal study and instead studies experiences of over twenty to thirty years retrospectively of young gay and lesbian persons and, hence, limitations related to the research design, such as recall and recency effect, apply here too.
Longitudinal studies to understand psychosocial processes related to development of non-normative genders and sexual expressions/identities within a socio-historical context, and accounting for intersection with other social identities by forming multiple cohorts, would possibly be an ideal study design to develop further on this initial exploratory work. However, the current study, even with its design limitations, provides a base for an empathic understanding of growing up gay/lesbian. This can be used to develop interventions towards more inclusive familial and educational environments, to develop LG-informed and inclusive curricula for educationists, doctors, teachers, counsellors, social workers, and also to inform future research agenda in this area.