Queerphobia as casual banter

When these incidents happened, my partner either wasn’t around or didn’t realise they upset me until I explained. I was left disillusioned and wondered what living with my partner and his family might mean for me. I worried that such incidents would keep happening again and again if I did not say something. So, I came out to my sister-in-law.

Horrified by her faux pas, she apologised, saying, "Mujhe actually in sab cheezon ke baare mei nahi pata. [I don't understand or know about these things]," an answer that made the experience worse. Her prejudice wasn't rooted in malice but in an almost casual ignorance—a willingness to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and narratives without knowing why or caring who they truly harm.

My position as a queer person in a straight-passing relationship gave me a unique vantage point to witness this form of queerphobia—both the extent of it, which left me disillusioned about whether it would ever change, and its startling meaninglessness. It wasn't just hateful; it was empty, built on apathy and unchallenged biases.

After coming out to my sister-in-law, with the encouragement of my partner, I came out to everyone else in the family (of my generation; my partner’s parents are too old and set in their ways for me to even consider having the conversation). At that time, they looked horrified that they had been making queerphobic comments around me all this while. But I realised over time that my coming out had not really changed their perspective in any way.

Today, my family masks their queerphobia but hasn’t tried to learn or become more accepting. They only hold back some of their thoughts because saying them out loud might lead to a lecture from me.

“See how badly that bowler is throwing, like, is he gay?” I heard my sister-in-law say while watching a cricket match one day. She noticed me entering the room at the same time and quickly went quiet. 

My sister-in-law looked at me and I could see that she was braced, waiting for me to launch into a lecture she didn’t want to hear. Her eyes were begging me not to ruin her cricket match just because she said something I perceived as wrong. 

Contrary to what my family might believe, I don’t enjoy conflict. But I could never just ignore these remarks and move on. I know that casual queerphobia isn’t just harmless banter—it is the foundation of a culture that dehumanises queer folks, making it easier for people to justify that they can strip away our rights or even commit violence against us. Determined to make my sister-in-law’s comment into a teachable moment, I pulled out my phone and Googled: “How many male professional cricketers are openly gay?”

I wanted to show her that being gay and throwing well aren’t mutually exclusive and that queer people can be great at sports too. Google led me to an article that spoke about the heteronormativity and queerphobia that permeates men’s cricket, which might be preventing people from coming out. “It might be career suicide,” it mentioned, proving my point that the culture of making these throwaway remarks was having real consequences on people.

I just sighed and walked away without engaging.

Queerness isn’t just about sex

When I eventually came out to a number of people in my marital home, I received a whole bunch of mixed reactions. But one stood out the most. It was that of my brother-in-law turning to his wife and saying, “Maybe you two shouldn’t hang out that much anymore.” The comment left me speechless.

Eventually, I forgave him for this transgression, just like I did with every other instance of queerphobia from my family. Later, I even joked about it with my partner who quipped, “Well, you should have said ‘Don’t worry, I only like gorgeous women.” But my brother-in-law’s comment made it obvious to me that straight people often view queerness through an unnecessarily sexual lens.

When I had come out to my partner in the early stages of our relationship, he had asked me, “Now that you are seeing me, a man, why do you have to keep saying you are pansexual? Won’t it let others think you’re still sexually available?” 

Back then, I was outraged that my partner had misunderstood my identity and assumed that I would be seeing multiple people just because I am pansexual. I have now come to understand that it is a commonly held belief. 

Recently, I posted on Instagram asking queer individuals in straight-passing relationships to share their experiences for this article. Among the responses, a straight friend messaged me privately, asking: “Is it okay to call yourself pansexual if you’re married? Are you in a happy, sexually satisfying relationship?”

Incidents like these, where queerness is somehow conflated with sexual availability, are not a one-off but a pattern.

At a Christmas party three years ago, when I was 26, I had mentioned in passing to a few female friends and acquaintances that I was bisexual (that’s what I had believed about myself at the time.)

As we got more and more drunk on homemade mulled wine, one of the women approached me. “You’re bisexual, right? I’m bi-curious,” she said. The next thing I knew, I was being groped and manhandled. I tried to push her off when she yanked my hair, her weight pressing against me, forcing my head to collide with the wall—hard.

I was in a monogamous, committed relationship at the time, with no intention of engaging with anyone else. But as the party wound down, I added the incident to the growing list of times I had been treated as an experiment—an option for women to explore their sexuality without my consent. My bisexuality was not an identity but an opportunity for them. They seemed to be acting on the highly prevalent misconception that bi and pan individuals are inherently promiscuous and always ready to swing both ways.

It wasn’t just strangers or acquaintances who saw me this way. Once, a female friend visited me when I was living in a college hostel. She was expecting to stay in my room for the night. But when my boyfriend, at the time, heard of the plan, he warned me against it: “Don’t share a room with your female friend.” Unable to find a last-minute hotel for her, I scrambled to procure a mattress for myself and slept on the floor while she took my bed. The paranoia wasn’t mine—it was his, shaped by the same tired stereotype that made me feel disrespected in every other space.

These experiences reinforced a painful truth—I was often seen not as a person with boundaries and agency, but as an object of curiosity, a placeholder for someone else’s exploration. Time and again, my bisexuality and pansexuality were either dismissed as a phase or treated as an open invitation, as if my identity existed for the convenience of others. And when I wasn’t being fetishised, I was being erased altogether.

Coming out as pansexual made me stick out like a sore thumb, especially within social circles from my straight-passing relationship. I no longer received casual invitations from the other women in my apartment complex to join them for parlour visits. Female colleagues who once invited me for post-work drinks stopped doing so. And now, I hesitate before mentioning anything about my queerness in front of my partner’s best friends’ wives, fearing that it might cost me my sense of community with them too.

Too often, my coming out to female friends has been met not with understanding but with quiet distance. It’s as if they perceive my coming out as an unspoken advance on them rather than an attempt to share something personal and meaningful about myself.

My invisibility in a straight-passing relationship has meant that even my closest friends had only ever known me as the version of myself that fit neatly into their cis-het assumptions of what a person should be like. And when I didn’t, they drifted away—leaving me wondering if they were truly my friends. 

‍Pushed back into the closet

While I have faced hurdles in navigating my queerness with my marital family, my situation remains better than that of many other queer individuals who have to hide parts of themselves to maintain their straight-passing romantic relationships.

A 2019 study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, which looked into the experiences of 50 bisexual men in Mumbai, found that some men who were in a romantic partnership with a woman couldn’t tell her about their bisexual identity. While the men did not say whether or not that affected the quality of their relationship, the authors of the study surmised that hiding vital parts of oneself can lead to poorer mental health outcomes and loneliness for them.

The study also pointed out a critical detail—that many of these men did not have words that explained their orientation in their regional language and did not have the knowledge of the English word ‘bisexual’. Throughout the study, the researchers noticed that the men kept referring to sexual acts rather than sexual orientation. For example, terms for sexual roles such as top, bottom, vers, etc were known and used more widely as compared to the words describing a person who likes both men and women. 

According to the researchers, this linguistic gap likely reinforced the idea that their relationships with men could never be as legitimate as their relationships with women—male partners were for sex, while female partners were for love and family. 

“We have to perform our duty to our families by getting married and having children. If, beyond that, we have a desire for male partners, we can indulge in that secretively once in a while,” said one of the interviewees quoted in the study.

When I was preparing to come out to my partner, I sought advice from a bisexual friend. She warned me against it. “A partner might not understand," she said. When I pressed further, she confided that her own serious relationship with a man had ended the day she came out as bisexual. He shut down completely, broke up with her over text, and never spoke to her again.

This kind of romantic vulnerability is a constant risk for queer individuals in straight-passing relationships. Many feel pressured to stay in the closet to protect not just their own stability, but their partner’s social reputation and validity.

Even though I am openly queer, I still feel as though I have been pushed back into the closet since marrying my cisgender male partner. Moving through his social circles requires me to constantly filter how I speak and act. I remind myself that my words can affect him. Sometimes, I stay silent when I hear a queerphobic comment—even when it makes my blood boil.

I still think many times before posting or saying something online fearing that people who know my partner may see the post. I do not know what conclusions they will draw from it. But I do not want him to be perceived negatively or judged because of his association with me.

This pressure to suppress one’s queerness extends to how we navigate the world and shapes everything from the way we speak to the spaces we occupy.

This year, after having battled with myself for years as to whether I am ‘queer enough’, I attended my first Pride Parade in Guwahati.  I dressed in the colours of the bisexual flag (the yellow in the pansexual flag doesn’t quite translate well into an outfit, in my opinion) and added a touch of sparkle– a beaded hip ornament I bought in Thailand.

But before stepping out, I had to cover my face with a ghunghat [a head covering worn by married women in some North Indian communities]. A death in our apartment building the night before had drawn a large gathering downstairs, and my parents-in-law didn’t want their bahu [daughter-in-law] to be seen by the neighbours. 

I arrived at Pride—a celebration of visibility, courage, and self-expression—with my face hidden behind a veil. The irony was not lost on me.

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