My (Chosen) Family Saved My Life

How India’s Closeted Queer Youth Are Re-imagining Home Through Found Families

Note from Kate: This month’s essay is a guest post from Abha Ahad of girl online. With Substack guest posts I want a guest writer to write about something I would never be able to myself, and Abha has absolutely risen to the task with a moving piece about the lives of young LGBT+ people in India. Really excited to share this with you all as my first guest post, and thank you to Abha for her incredible work. You can find my guest post for girl online here, on the much less serious topic of Hegelian e-girls.

About Abha: Abha Ahad is a full-time writer and part-time digital nomad. She writes features reporting on gender, culture, and the internet and is the creator of girl online, a weekly newsletter reporting on the evolution of digital girlhood.

“If it weren’t for my chosen family, I wouldn’t be talking to you today. I would be sitting silently in some corner,” Dev*, a 21-year-old bisexual man from Delhi, India tells me as we sit down to talk about chosen families. Dev’s words are not surprising to me considering that we live in a country where the existence of Queer people was illegal until 2018, conversion therapy was legal until 2021 (and still practised widely), and being Queer is still fatal.

“You see... your family, they love you, you love them, but you know that it will change if you tell the truth [about who you are],” he opens up. For young people like Dev, their biological family isn’t all-accepting and ever-loving. Their acceptance and love come with a huge asterisk – being cisgender and heterosexual. For us, to come out publicly as a Queer person at worst means ostracisation from our biological communities, and at best means that our biological families agree to turn a blind eye towards who we are.

Any human being needs community to thrive. We were not meant to live our lives within our bubbles and crawl through the perils of existence hoping to see the light at the end of the tunnel someday. We are meant to commune, collaborate, and conspire with our loved ones. Light every cornerstone inside the tunnel with laughter and joy before we finally reach the end of the tunnel as shrivelled, old people who have lived well.

Social anthropologist Kath Weston introduced the term “chosen families” in her 1991 book “Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship” to explore how in San Francisco in the ‘80s Queer folks found kinship among their partners and friends. For those people who were ostracised from their biological families, their friends came together to play the roles of parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, and uncles. Weston was among the first academics to view the issues of Queer people outside the lens of their sexuality.

About four decades and 7500 miles later, this is exactly how Addy*, a 17-year-old biromantic high school student from Chandigarh and her online friends reimagine the dynamics of their found family. “We have assigned roles such as my “two mothers” and everyone else is my sister(s) except one who is my “aunt,” she explains. “Whenever I go to talk to my [biological] parents it results in some kind of an argument. But that’s not the case with my chosen parents. It’s nice calling someone “mom” and they actually care.”

Addy comes from a home that isn’t open to discussing taboo topics like gender and sexuality. For the longest time, she didn’t have a trusted adult to clear her doubts about her body, that is until she found her new (and secret) family. “My family helped me discover myself,” she tells me. “I didn’t always used to like the way I looked. I was beating up myself for merely existing. My “mother” and “sisters” helped me overcome my body dysmorphia.”

Unlike many others who find their families in adulthood, Addy found hers when she was 13, thanks to digital fan communities. “I am the youngest in my family, and in many ways, they’ve watched me grow up,” she tears up. “They help me a lot with personal stuff like dating advice, school and college stuff. Sometimes, even frivolous stuff like picking outfits.”

For India’s Queer people – as it is with Queer folks from most conservative communities – coming out doesn’t end with the announcement itself. It is a process of not just accepting yourself, but also convincing your family and community that you are still worthy of love and that you are the same person you have always been. “The emotional labour is draining,” Simran* a 24-year-old trans woman from Chennai tells me. “But I don’t have to explain myself to my chosen family. I am cherished for just existing. It is liberating.” Unlike Dev and Addy, Simran's only family is her chosen family. Her biological family disowned her saying they weren’t ready to accept a daughter in place of their first-born son.

“Every time I visit my family, I wonder if it's the last time I see them because next time I might love a girl enough to decide that she's worth their anger,” an anonymous user of Queering The Map writes in a note pinned to a village in Andra Pradesh leaving a digital footprint attesting to how Queer Indians are forced to choose between the people they love.

One of the major reasons even straight-passing Queer Indians are forced to come out is the societal expectation to get married and conform to the heteronormative standards of living. In a 2009 survey, Humsafar Trust, a non-governmental organisation working to provide support groups for Queer men affected with HIV in India revealed that over 70% of Gay men in Mumbai – arguably the most urban and progressive region in the country – are stuck in heterosexual marriages.

“My family naturally was on the lookout for an appropriate groom. I rejected several men and then, to get out of the rut, I informed them that I am, in fact, queer,” Sayema* a 30-something lesbian tells Outlook India. Like the others, Sayema also confesses that her chosen family came to her rescue when she had to leave her biological home after informing them of her identity.

The reasons Queer Indians choose their own families are varied, but the road to that is often the same – a culture that sees Queerness as an imperialist import, a culture that believes it is all in the head, a culture that places the heavy burden of familial reputation inside of the pants of their children, a culture that is quick to discard anyone that doesn’t fit within its heteronormative ideals.

And on some days, when your shoulders are burdened with the heteronormative expectations of the people who are supposed to love you, you just need an extra shoulder to cry on. This is the simple reason India’s Queer youth are finding a home in the people they chose to be with rather than the ones they were assigned at birth.

Chosen families are attesting to the fact that you don’t have to simply accept everything that you’ve been assigned at birth. You are allowed to think, shed what doesn’t truly define you, and build the life you want. They prove that there is, indeed, light at the end of the tunnel.

“There was a time when I thought I was unworthy of love. Now, I know I am not. It isn’t always happy. We have our arguments. But at the end of the day I know I will be seen and heard,” Simran sums up how it is to be part of a found family perfectly.

*To protect the sources' anonymity, all the names used in the story are pseudonyms.