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Living Life as a Queer Person: Role of Intimate Relationships in Consolidation of Identity

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Growing Up Gay in Urban India

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the participants’ experiences of intimate/romantic relationships and the ways in which relationships affect the gay/lesbian identity development. In this chapter, I go beyond the individual narrative of growing-up experiences into the interpersonal and relational dimension of being gay. Here I state that, being gay and being gay with someone are two different things. Forming a romantic/sexual relationship with a person of the same-sex can be a self-affirming experience for many. It may also make a person’s/couple’s sexuality much more visible and bring with it a range of challenges and negotiations associated with living outside of the heterosexual script of marriage, children, and monogamy. In this chapter, I discuss multiple socio-cultural factors that form the backdrop against which gay/lesbian relationships are lived out. I also discuss challenges specific to same-sex relationships in a heterosexually constructed world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Goffman (1963) uses the term ‘discredited’ to refer to those whose stigma is known/visible and ‘discreditable’ to refer to those whose stigma is unknown and concealed.

  2. 2.

    This idea was discussed in the context of a possible demand for gay marriage in India, at the National Seminar on Feminist Queer Organizing, a two-day meeting organized by LABIA, a queer feminist LBT collective and Center for Health and Mental Health, TISS on 19th and 20th December, 2015.

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  1. Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

    Ketki Ranade

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  1. Ketki Ranade
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Correspondence to Ketki Ranade .

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Ranade, K. (2018). Living Life as a Queer Person: Role of Intimate Relationships in Consolidation of Identity. In: Growing Up Gay in Urban India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8366-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8366-2_5

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