If you and your family have access to information, I suggest you do it whenever you feel strongly about your identity." Staying in the closet is a huge psychological burden. Detach a bit from your family both emotionally and financially before you plan to take this step."Īnwesh Sahoo, Mr Gay India 2016, who came out to his family at the age of 16, has a different perspective: “I would not recommend waiting for the perfect time. I always tell people to be fully aware of their own reality.
“I know of someone who got a sudden rush of inspiration from a TV programme and decided to come out to his family. “It was for no small reason that I was in the closet for 41 years," he says. He says LGBT people must not get carried away by what they see in the media. Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, whose story of coming out has been well-documented in the media over the past several years, now heads several initiatives to help LGBT people, including the Lakshya Trust that works for HIV/Aids prevention in the LGBT community. The study goes on to conclude that most LGBT people are acceptable to family only if they agree to behave like heterosexuals.
It comes as no surprise then that a tribunal recently ruled that the only danger to lesbians in India is from their own families.Ī recent study found that one of the major factors that results in the stigmatization of LGBT people is parental reaction towards homosexuality. Stories of family acceptance that you see on TV and other media are more of an urban phenomenon."Įven in educated urban India, suicides by lesbian women make headlines every year. Refusal to marry brings more physical abuse. “Village medics and babas often prescribe rape to cure lesbians of homosexuality. “Ambedkar thought of the village as a unit of violence and that is most true for LGBT issues," she says. Ambedkar when talking of the rural socioeconomic environment. Vyjayanti Vasanta Mogli, a transwoman LGBT activist and public policy scholar at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, who has openly spoken about her abuse at school, says that lesbian women and transmen in rural areas end up at the bottom of the hierarchy when it comes to basic human rights within the unit of family and village. In other parts, lesbian women are subjected to family-sanctioned corrective rapes, which are often perpetrated by their own family members.