Most people never have to think about whether they can hold their partner’s hand in public, introduce them at a family wedding, or list them as a dependent at work. That ease is a privilege built entirely on being heterosexual. The moment attraction falls outside that norm, it gets labelled a problem to be hidden, corrected, or punished. Same sex desire is not rare or new, yet the reaction to it reveals just how much of our social structure depends on keeping heterosexuality unquestioned.
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What are same sex desires, really?
Same sex desire simply means romantic or sexual attraction between people of the same gender, whether that is women attracted to women or men attracted to men. These are often called homosexual relationships, and they exist across every culture, class, and region, even where they are never openly discussed.
The stigma attached to these relationships is not really about the act itself. It comes from what same sex desire refuses to do. It does not organise itself around procreation, and it does not need a man and a woman playing fixed, unequal roles. Two people of the same gender come together for intimacy and pleasure, not to produce children or to fulfil a social duty. That single difference unsettles a lot of assumptions that mainstream society treats as natural laws rather than social choices.
The violence of silence
Ask anyone who has grown up same sex desiring in India, and silence is usually the first thing they mention, not slurs or violence. Heterosexuality is assumed so completely that many people cannot bring themselves to talk about their attractions even with their closest friends. School and college textbooks rarely mention same sex relationships at all, so students grow up believing their feelings have no name and no precedent.
This omission is not accidental. Research on healthcare access in India has pointed out that the absence of any mention of same sex desire in official policy and curricula allows harmful ideas, including the notion that homosexuality itself is something that needs to be cured, to survive unchallenged. When an entire education system acts as though same sex desire does not exist, young people are left without language, role models, or anyone to turn to. That isolation is its own form of harm. It cuts people off from the exact support systems, like friends and family, that most people rely on during confusing or difficult phases of growing up.
When home stops being a safe haven
For most people, family is the first line of support. For same sex desiring individuals, family is often the first source of violence. When parents discover a child’s attractions, the instinct in many households is to treat it as a phase to be corrected rather than an identity to be understood. This can mean constant monitoring, verbal abuse, forced counselling, or pressure into heterosexual marriage.
The trauma of corrective rape
In its most extreme form, this pressure takes the shape of what is called corrective rape, where a family arranges for a relative to rape a same sex desiring person in the belief that this will make them heterosexual. Crisis workers in Telangana who work with an LGBT support collective have documented such cases, though they believe the real number is far higher than what gets reported, since survivors usually come forward only when they need help to leave home, not to report the assault itself. Many victims choose to cut off ties with their families entirely rather than relive what happened.
This kind of domestic violence forces people into an impossible choice: hide who they are and stay under the same roof as people who see them as broken, or leave and risk homelessness with little institutional support. Studies on family dynamics in India note that because the family holds so much social and emotional authority here, the fear of losing that acceptance often pushes individuals to conceal their identity for years, sometimes for a lifetime, rather than risk rejection or harm.
Discrimination that follows you to work
Even those who manage to build a life outside a hostile family often find that the workplace repeats the same pattern of exclusion. A heterosexual colleague can bring their partner to an office party without a second thought. A same sex desiring employee usually cannot, unless they are prepared to risk gossip, harassment, or worse.
The numbers back this up. A 2016 workplace climate survey found that 57 percent of LGBTQIA+ employees in India had faced some form of discrimination or harassment at work within a single year. Hiring is affected too, with one study finding that resumes signalling an LGBTQ+ identity received 40 percent fewer callbacks than identical resumes without that signal. Pay is affected as well, with international labour researchers estimating that LGBTQ+ employees in India earn between 15 and 30 percent less than equally qualified heterosexual and cisgender peers.
Beyond hiring and pay, everyday workplace culture can be openly hostile. A recent industry survey found that more than half of LGBTQ+ employees had experienced or witnessed anti-LGBTQ+ comments from co-workers, and a majority of Indian companies still have no formal policy protecting employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Practical benefits suffer too. Same sex partners frequently cannot be nominated for health insurance, provident fund benefits, or emergency contact status, since company policies are usually built around a heterosexual, married default. The result is that many employees stay closeted at work even when they are open about their identity everywhere else, simply because the professional cost of visibility is too high.
Why same sex desire threatens patriarchal logic
It helps to ask why same sex relationships attract this much hostility in the first place. Heterosexual marriage in most Indian households is built on a specific division of power. One partner, usually the man, is expected to earn and lead. The other, usually the woman, is expected to manage the home and raise children. This division is often defended as natural, but it is really a social arrangement that keeps unpaid domestic labour tied to gender and keeps decision-making power concentrated on one side.
A same sex household does not automatically reproduce this hierarchy. Two women partners, for instance, are not divided along a pre-set line of who earns and who cooks. Roles can be shared or negotiated rather than assigned by gender. Because same sex couples are not having sex to produce children, their relationship also sits outside the reproductive logic that heterosexual marriage is traditionally justified by. Legal scholars examining Indian sexuality law have made a similar point, arguing that the protections extended to intimate relationships in India have historically been reserved for unions that mirror patriarchal, heterosexual marriage, which is part of why relationships that fall outside that mould have had to fight so hard for basic legal recognition.
Seen this way, the stigma against same sex desire is not really about sex at all. It is about what happens to a social structure once you remove the assumption that men lead and women follow, and that sex exists mainly to produce the next generation. Same sex relationships expose that structure as a choice, not a law of nature, which is precisely why they are treated as such a threat.
Legal recognition without social acceptance
On 6 September 2018, a five-judge bench of India’s Supreme Court struck down the part of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalised consensual same sex relations between adults, ruling that any discrimination based on sexual orientation violates fundamental rights. It was a genuine milestone, ending 157 years of a colonial-era law that had been used to harass and blackmail people for decades.
But decriminalisation is not the same as equality. It removed the threat of prosecution, not the discrimination baked into families, schools, hospitals, and offices. Same sex couples in India still cannot marry, adopt jointly, or automatically inherit from each other the way heterosexual spouses can. Silence and stigma also do not disappear because a law changes. Attitudes shift far more slowly than statutes, and for many same sex desiring individuals, the daily reality of concealment, family pressure, and workplace bias has changed very little since 2018.
What do you think? If same sex relationships genuinely threaten patriarchal power structures more than they threaten any religious or moral code, what would real equality for same sex couples actually require beyond decriminalisation? And why do you think educational institutions remain so reluctant to even mention same sex relationships, when the silence itself causes so much harm?
References
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9423841/
- https://www.livelaw.in/columns/corrective-rape-homophobic-rape-curative-rape-lgbtq-183632
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11076941/
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26318318261433754
- https://www.britsafe.in/safety-management-news/2024/time-to-take-pride-the-problems-faced-by-india-s-lgbtq-employees
- https://www.law.cornell.edu/gender-justice/resource/naz_foundation_v_govt_of_delhi
- https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2018/9/6/india-decriminalises-gay-sex-in-landmark-verdict
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