Not a coming out tale

I have never come out. 

I have fended off an endless stream of questions from friends and colleagues, had two terse conversations and endless vague text exchanges with my mother, and responded to questioning glances from strangers.

I have memories of feeling a searing attraction for boys when I was 13, of making pretend friendships and concocting tales of bonding with quiet, shy classmates I barely spoke to and of feverishly sifting through small-town pornography to find glimpses of male bodies.

I remember trying to couch the growing (!) interest by learning a sport and failing at it, by making my voice more masculine. I remember offering free exam-time lessons to spend more time with some people. I remember the crushes and the crushing feeling.

But I never came out. I never had a Ah-Ha! moment because a melee of such moments made up my sexuality; my attraction for boys was never neatly divided into a pre-coming out and post-coming out, mainly because I didn’t know when it began and when it ended and when it began again.

I grew up in a small town that spoke an alien language I could only sputter in, where the anonymity of the ‘CD parlour’ gave me more leeway to think about my sexuality than Will and Grace ever could, where the spicy red-chilli infused “noodles” formed a big part of my gayness. 

For years, I didn’t have a language to talk about this. I was gay but I was struggling to fit into school trousers with an ugly metal buckle belt, struggling to overcome insecurities about skin and nose and calluses and bruises, about the monochrome — sometimes even orange — clothes I had. 

I was gay but didn’t have a father, didn’t have a high-caste surname and my class fluctuated with how much I was willing to lie about it that day. 

When I learnt about coming out, in college and in a big city, I didn’t want to consign these parts of my sexuality to a hazy past. So I didn’t come out.

Not that my decision mattered. I constantly talked about boys — most of whom I couldn’t get — and everything about me, from my walk, gait, voice, clothes and apparently even handwriting, gave me away. I had conversations with myself and others about queerness — I found queerness, queerness saved me. 

I don’t want to diss people who come out. I see that many draw inspiration and courage from stories of coming out and others gain a sense of self and confidence from the exercise that is often an escape from imposed shame and oppression.

But for me, a singular moment of rebellion couldn’t have been enough for the many confusions that made my sexuality. It was a constant fight, a prolonged resistance against shame and subjugation – a constant coming out as fat, gender-queer, unsuitable bodied, gay, queer, lowered caste and a thousand other things. How many times could you say Ah-Ha?

I don’t have a date to make your understanding of my body and sexuality easier. My sexuality is my politics, it is the books I read, the icons I reject or the protests I get beaten up at or choose to stay away from. 

I have never come out. But I have been out all my life.

Dhrubo Jyoti is a journalist based in Delhi.