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This book describes experiences of growing up gay/lesbian in the cities of Bombay 1 and Pune in India, in the late 1980s and 1990s. This is a retrospective study, wherein participants in their mid-thirties are describing their childhoods, adolescence, youth and growing-up years. So while I present this book to readers today, in times that are characterized by a lot of visibility to LGBTQ issues, it talks of a time defined by invisibility and silence and the resulting isolation of persons with same-sex sexuality. Readers may note that things have changed and yet have not. There are many more cities and small towns in the country today that are holding their very first LGBTQ Pride Marches, for instance; and yet the distress of a child who has to wear a particular type of school uniform based on the gender assigned to them at birth, remains the same and so does the police harassment of a hijra , 2 or familial violence faced by a lesbian woman. In fact, one could argue that today, much more than ever before, we are living in times of intolerance of difference and hate. There is much more surveillance on how we live, what we eat, what we read, and who we love and live with.
This book is a result of my decade-long engagement through research, therapeutic practice and activism in the broad area of LGBTQ rights; and more specifically with the question of the ways in which difference from naturalized heterosexuality affects individual life experiences across the life span. I explore experiences of growing up gay from two primary locations—as a mental health professional/activist and as a queer feminist activist. As a mental health professional/activist, I have witnessed the medicalization and pathologization of non-normative sexualities and gender expressions within psychological and psychiatric literature and practice. While there is increasing emphasis on gay affirmative literature, there still exist large gaps in understanding the lived experience of persons who transgress norms of gender and sexuality, and whatever is available as literature on affirmative practice is far from being mainstreamed or incorporated in the education and training of mental health professionals. As a queer feminist activist, I am witness to, and participate in, conversations around strategy-building and campaigns for assertion of queer rights; these assertions primarily represent adult queer persons. However, here too, non-heteronormative childhood/adolescence and its struggles with institutional forms of heteronormativity seem absent. This book is an attempt to give voice to the silences that I have encountered within the mental health literature as well as queer literature in India.
With respect to the representation of gay and lesbian lives in research and academic literature in India, I suggest that there is a near-absence of language, image, and discourse around childhoods that do not conform to the gender binary or the idea of naturalized heterosexuality; and yet there is a simultaneous public health discourse of ‘risk and vulnerability’ to HIV and other sexually transmitted illnesses that are linked, in the popular imagination, to gay and bisexual men, men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women. Reports of lesbian suicides, depression, suicides/self-harm among transgender persons, and substance abuse among LGBTQ youth, are a few other mental health concerns that are documented in literature in India. Thus, from no representation within certain discourses such as child rights/child welfare schemes of the state, and a proportionately higher representation within health/mental health literature as pathological-vulnerable-victim, to popular imagery of resilience and pride within LGBTQ campaigns, I suggest in this book that the lived realities of young gay and lesbian individuals are likely to be somewhere in between: in the experience of living, negotiating, passing, and asserting.
Using a life course and a critical psychosocial perspective to understand experiences of growing up gay has enabled me to: (a) understand the internal/psychic world of a gay/lesbian child and young person, while being attentive to ways in which childhoods and growing up years are constructed through naturalized heterosexuality and therefore the negotiations that the gay child has to undertake to navigate their way through the growing-up years; and (b) study growing up gay in the context of a historical time and space. For instance, what was it like growing up in 1990s Bombay/Pune? How visible were LGBTQ lives then? A critical approach in this book also means asking questions of representation of LGBTQ lives in disciplines and fields of enquiry—such as childhood studies, developmental psychology/life span studies, family studies—in India and uncovering heteronormative biases in their conceptions of childhoods, adolescence, and families.
In the writing of this book, particularly Chaps. 3 – 6 , I have retained several first person narrative accounts of the study participants; in fact, narratives appear in two forms in this book. One form of the narratives is as prelude to each of the chapters from three to six. These narratives, while written in the form of a first-person account, are not gathered from one particular study participant. They are at times reflective of common/ shared experiences of study participants; at times they reflect things shared in conversations among friends, or at a meeting of our collective; and, at times, they are based on my own personal/ life experiences. The second form of narratives presented through chapters Three, Four, Five and Six are excerpts from interviews with individual participants.
I hope that the insights from this book would serve as a mirror to young queer persons and help them and their loved ones make better sense of the struggles and joys of growing up gay. These may also be useful for students and practitioners of mental health sciences, childhood studies, teachers and mentors to young people, to develop more empathy for diverse experiences and provide better support, services, and solidarity for all.
This book has been an exercise of finding a voice , a first person voice of experience—of myself and those of my participants. I am immensely grateful to all my study participants for lending their voices to this endeavor, and for sharing some of the most intimate, as well as mundane, aspects of their lives and growing-up years with me.
There are many people and institutions that have supported and helped to strengthen this work.
I would like to thank everyone involved with the Health and Population Innovations Fellowship Program, Population Council, India, and specifically Dr. Shireen Jejeebhoy and Prof. Pertti Pelto, my mentors during this fellowship during the years 2006–2009. It was during this fellowship that I first started working on the psychosocial aspects of growing up gay. Yogita Hastak and Sudeep Jacob Joseph for being the best research associates that one could ask for; Yogita, thanks for the tireless transcribing of interviews and for your deep empathy with all the study participants. Thanks to the Bapu Trust for Research on Mind and Discourse, Pune for housing the fellowship.
I owe a special thanks to organizations working on LGBT rights in Mumbai and Pune that supported my field work for this study. Samabhavana Society and Samapathik Trust, in Pune, and Humsafar Trust, in Mumbai, provided me immense support during the initial phases of collecting data.
I would like to thank Prof. Shubhada Maitra, my Ph.D. supervisor and friend; Prof. U. Vindhya and Prof. Nandini Manjrekar, my doctoral advisory committee members, and Prof. Surinder Jaswal, Deputy Director (Research), Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai for their inputs and encouragement throughout my doctoral work.
My colleagues at TISS, Prof. Ashabanu Soletti, Brinelle D’Souza, Dr. Smitha Nair, for your encouragement and for accommodating my writing schedules in the last one year.
Thanks to Shinjini Chatterjee and Priya Vyas, Springer India, for all your support and patience in the publishing process.
Dr. Asha Achuthan, I cannot thank you enough for your tireless and constructive engagement with my ideas throughout the writing of this manuscript, for your feedback and innumerable editorial suggestions every step of the way.
LABIA, Bombay as a space and the people who make this space, have over the years come to mean much more than being the initial contact point for meeting potential study participants. You all have become a significant part of my political and academic thinking and writing. Huge thanks and hugs to all friends and comrades at LABIA as well as several other queer groups across the country; I have learned immensely from all of you, and it is our shared learnings, experiences and dreams that have provided vision and support to this work.
My therapist, doctor, and go-to person, Dr. Neha Pande; words cannot express my gratitude towards you. It is your mirroring that has helped me become the person I am today.
Finally, I would like to thank my partners, friends, and families of choice; the many people who have nurtured me over the years and shown me the many meanings of the terms growing up and home .
Abbreviations
- ABVA
AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan
- AIDS
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
- APA
American Psychiatric Association
- APsyA
American Psychological Association
- CSA
Child Sexual Abuse
- DSM
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
- HIV
Human Immunodeficiency Virus
- ICD
International Classification of Diseases
- IJP
Indian Journal of Psychiatry
- IPC
Indian Penal Code
- LBT
Lesbian, bisexual women and trans persons
- LG
Lesbian and Gay
- LGB
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
- LGBTQ
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer
- MHPs
Mental Health Professionals
- MSJE
Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment
- MSM
Men who have sex with Men
- NACO
National AIDS Control Organization
- NALSA
National Legal Services Authority
- NGO
Non-governmental organization
- NHRC
National Human Rights Commission
- PAGFB
Person Assigned Gender Female at Birth
- PUCL
People’s Union for Civil Liberties
- TG
Transgender
- WHO
World Health Organization
Contents
About the Author
Ketki Ranade, Ph.D.
is currently Assistant Professor at the Center for Health and Mental Health, School of Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Ketki has worked for over a decade as a mental health service provider, trainer, researcher and activist and has developed mental health service programs in low income urban settlements and institutions in Pune, Maharashtra. Ketki has conducted research and published in areas such as medicalization of homosexuality, gay affirmative counselling, familial responses to gay and lesbian family members, and sexual rights of persons with psychosocial disability. Their areas of teaching include mental health policy, legislations and advocacy, clinical social work, interdisciplinary perspectives in mental health and qualitative research methodology. They have been a research fellow under the Health and Population Innovations Fellowship Programme (2006–09), Population Council, India. They were a member of the Expert Committee on Transgender Issues formed by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India in 2013. Ketki is also member of LABIA, a queer feminist LBT collective in Bombay. Ketki uses the gender pronoun ‘they’.