In desi porn as in real life, caste often determines which bodies are considered sexy and worthy of pride.
“He is dark, hairy and has a sexy toned body. The sight of him in a white veshti/mundu and bare chest (with a janoi/thread worn by brahmins) used to drive me crazy.”
These lines appear in the opening paragraph of the story “Indian Gay Erotica of Wild Night with Hairy Uncle,” which was posted on Indian Gay Site in February 2020. It has been read over 8000 times since. The story features the writer-protagonist Akshit, a 35-year-old man, recollecting a fateful night from the time he was “barely 21” and had the “hots for [his] maasi’s [aunt’s] husband.”
One summer day, as the story goes, when the temperature was soaring and the aunt was away, the uncle invited Akshit to sleep in his bedroom—the only one with an air conditioner. As they lay in bed together, both pretending to be asleep, our protagonist nervously made a move, to which the uncle responded favourably. Within a few minutes, the uncle—bare-chested, apart from the sacred thread that hung across his torso—had climbed atop Akshit. Passionate kisses were exchanged, and their “d*cks touched and throbbed together.”
The uncle, having undressed Akshit, was readying to take off his sacred thread when Akshit stopped him: “I oddly have a fetish for janois [or janeu] and men wearing rudraksh maalas [beaded necklace] or any unique trinkets,” Akshit wrote.
In a story titled “Indian Gay Sex Story: My Widowed Uncle,” uploaded on the same website in 2018, the anonymous writer spoke of seducing their uncle, Manoj, a 34-year-old widower from Rajasthan. In introducing this steamy tale of seduction, the author dwells on one detail about Manoj: “his weakness is the cunt.” “Everybody knows in the village that Manoj has fu**ed almost all the girls and women of the village, doesn’t matter how old they are,” wrote Naughty Baba.
In the next sentence, the writer mentions that “Manoj has fu**ed even a 70-year-old scheduled caste woman.” While Manoj’s caste is not revealed in the story, the emphasis on the woman’s “scheduled caste” status suggests that Manoj comes from a dominant caste. In the story, Manoj is the subject of gossip not only because of his voracious sex drive but also because he transgresses age and caste boundaries in his sexual encounters.
When I came across these stories on Indian Gay Site, one of the most popular desi gay porn websites, I decided to look into the connections between caste and desi gay pornography. I was particularly curious to explore what the invocation of caste in desi gay porn tells us about Indian queers’ erotic desires.
In my search for answers to these questions, I found that who and what desi queer porn sees and shows as desirable are coloured by caste-based stereotypes and notions of caste pride and shame. Even when desi queer porn transgresses some boundaries of caste, it often does so at the cost of reinforcing others.
“He is dark, hairy and has a sexy toned body. The sight of him in a white veshti/mundu and bare chest (with a janoi/thread worn by brahmins) used to drive me crazy.”
These lines appear in the opening paragraph of the story “Indian Gay Erotica of Wild Night with Hairy Uncle,” which was posted on Indian Gay Site in February 2020. It has been read over 8000 times since. The story features the writer-protagonist Akshit, a 35-year-old man, recollecting a fateful night from the time he was “barely 21” and had the “hots for [his] maasi’s [aunt’s] husband.”
One summer day, as the story goes, when the temperature was soaring and the aunt was away, the uncle invited Akshit to sleep in his bedroom—the only one with an air conditioner. As they lay in bed together, both pretending to be asleep, our protagonist nervously made a move, to which the uncle responded favourably. Within a few minutes, the uncle—bare-chested, apart from the sacred thread that hung across his torso—had climbed atop Akshit. Passionate kisses were exchanged, and their “d*cks touched and throbbed together.”
The uncle, having undressed Akshit, was readying to take off his sacred thread when Akshit stopped him: “I oddly have a fetish for janois [or janeu] and men wearing rudraksh maalas [beaded necklace] or any unique trinkets,” Akshit wrote.
In a story titled “Indian Gay Sex Story: My Widowed Uncle,” uploaded on the same website in 2018, the anonymous writer spoke of seducing their uncle, Manoj, a 34-year-old widower from Rajasthan. In introducing this steamy tale of seduction, the author dwells on one detail about Manoj: “his weakness is the cunt.” “Everybody knows in the village that Manoj has fu**ed almost all the girls and women of the village, doesn’t matter how old they are,” wrote Naughty Baba.
In the next sentence, the writer mentions that “Manoj has fu**ed even a 70-year-old scheduled caste woman.” While Manoj’s caste is not revealed in the story, the emphasis on the woman’s “scheduled caste” status suggests that Manoj comes from a dominant caste. In the story, Manoj is the subject of gossip not only because of his voracious sex drive but also because he transgresses age and caste boundaries in his sexual encounters.
When I came across these stories on Indian Gay Site, one of the most popular desi gay porn websites, I decided to look into the connections between caste and desi gay pornography. I was particularly curious to explore what the invocation of caste in desi gay porn tells us about Indian queers’ erotic desires.
In my search for answers to these questions, I found that who and what desi queer porn sees and shows as desirable are coloured by caste-based stereotypes and notions of caste pride and shame. Even when desi queer porn transgresses some boundaries of caste, it often does so at the cost of reinforcing others.
That caste appears in desi queer porn shouldn’t come as a surprise. If desi porn’s appeal lies in its “authenticity,” then a part of this authenticity likely stems from desi porn’s representation of everyday realities that shape queer intimacies among Indians.
In India, caste is an ancient, all-pervasive system of social stratification—and queerness is not beyond its ambit. In their evocative reflection titled “Caste broke our hearts and love cannot put them back together,” Dhrubo Jyoti, a Delhi-based writer, wrote about how caste shapes who and what we see as desirable within contemporary queer cultures: “caste taught me everything I know about sexuality,” they said.
Sudipta Das, previously a staff writer with queerbeat, has also written about how caste and casteism force queer people from marginalised castes to feel insecure about their bodies, make them more vulnerable to sexual violence, and deny them pleasure.
Simultaneously—and paradoxically—Dalit bodies are also fetishised in queer dating cultures. Sudipta mentions seeing dominant caste men write on Grindr, the gay dating app, that they are “Looking for SC, ST”. They also recount an instance where their date told them “Dalit and communist is [sic.] my type”. Such experiences prompt Sudipta to ask whether this is a new form of “acceptance”, where queer people from marginalised castes find intimacy but only at the cost of being fetishised.
In fact, caste might also be at the very heart of how queer people have sex. Akhil Kang, a researcher at Cornell University who studies upper-caste victimhood and woundedness, demonstrated in a provocative piece how anxieties around purity and pollution shape Brahmin men’s engagement with anilingus (colloquially, rimming). In the piece, one Brahmin interviewee told Kang, “Trust me…when two brahmins fuck, they would definitely be open to rimming / being rimmed.” The same man also said, “I know when I meet someone from Kurla, I wouldn’t be rimming them.” In this statement, Kurla, the name of a locality in Mumbai, stands in for the mostly working-class Muslim and marginalised caste men who live there. Akhil argues that this kind of decision-making is “tied to racist imaginations of which caste and religion is dirty.”
(The caste system is based on the notion of so-called ‘upper castes’ being ‘pure’ and so-called ‘lower castes’ being ‘polluting’.)
Given how queer erotic intimacies are coloured by caste, it is natural that caste shows up in queer porn too. Caste in desi queer porn is a reflection of caste in desi queer lives.
21-year-old Aman, an Uttar-Pradesh-based bisexual Brahmin man, is a student by the day and a porn curator by night. He scours the internet and Telegram channels to build collections of desi porn, which he then posts to three accounts on X (formerly Twitter). These accounts, active at the time of writing this report, featured queer as well as heterosexual content from various desi and international porn creators, and had about 150k followers combined.
Aman initially frequented X to consume porn. Eventually, he told me, he began downloading porn and building a collection for himself—and sharing it with friends. In December 2022, with the encouragement of his friends, he started three X profiles—Aman, Malik Sultan, and Johny Bhaiya. Many of his posts now contain small snippets of pornographic content with links to other websites, which charge money to access the longer videos. He did not give me his real name and asked me to refer to him by the name of one of his X profiles.
According to Aman, the most in-demand categories of desi queer porn are “Thakur Porn,” “Rajput Porn,” and “Jat Boys.”
Thakurs/Rajputs, who are associated with being warriors in the popular imagination, are generally regarded as dominant castes, although some states list them as Other Backward Classes (OBCs). The Indian government uses the term to denote socially and economically disadvantaged groups who have been historically discriminated against on the basis of caste, but have not faced untouchability or an outcaste status.
Like the Rajputs, Jats are also known to have been a land-owning caste; according to a 2016 Indian Express report, “only 10% of Jats are landless”. They are regarded as having a dominant economic and political status, although they have demanded to be listed as OBCs several times in the past decade.
Explaining the reasons for the popularity of porn associated with these castes, Aman said, “Inki diet mein non-veg hota hai, toh woh loud hote hai, lambe-chaude hote hai. Unmein desi vibe hoti hai, aur woh abusive language use karte hai. [These groups eat non-veg and are therefore loud and well-built. They have a desi vibe and use abusive language.]”
A previous edition of queerSay had highlighted that the use of abusive language is one of the main attractions of desi gay porn. But why did Aman’s customers associate this with certain groups—the Rajputs/Thakurs and Jats?
Aman’s justification relied on caste-based associations of food. Vegetarianism is commonly associated with dominant castes, particularly Brahmins. In contrast, the consumption of meat is associated with so-called low-caste groups. Ayurveda, the ancient Hindu system of alternative medicine, categorises meat as a food of “rajasik” and “tamasik” quality, i.e., foods that are associated with a host of negative emotions—but also, crucially, uncontrolled sexuality. Vegetarian food, on the other hand, is categorised as “satvik”, i.e., promoting calmness and all things saintly.
Put simply, Thakurs/Rajputs and Jats, as dominant castes that consume meat, are seen as being better “tops” or “doms” (short for ‘dominant’ or the partner who exerts more power and control in a consensual sexual scenario). At the heart of this sexual stereotype—like at the heart of most stereotypes in India—is caste.
Interestingly, Aman pointed out another popular category of desi porn: “Muslim doms/tops”. Once again, he linked this popularity to the non-vegetarian diets of Muslims, in addition to their “cut [i.e., circumcised] d*cks.”
This notional link between caste-based diets and sexual prowess begs the question, if meat-eating is associated with virility, then why is it that marginalised castes, almost all of whom consume meat, don’t enjoy the same status as Rajputs and Jats? The answer lies in the fact that some groups take pride in their position in the caste hierarchy, while others are only allowed to derive shame from it.
Thakur_ka_chora (son of a Thakur) is a desi porn profile on X with about 51k followers. In a post dated June 15, 2024, the account uploaded a nude photograph of himself. In the picture, which shows him lying on a bed, the most prominent thing is not his semi-erect penis, but the word “Thakur” inscribed right in the centre.
Similar direct declarations of caste are visible in several photo collections on Indian Gay Site. For example, several such collections refer to “Brahmin boys” or “Brahmin gays,” where one or both the partners in the pictures don the janeu—a symbolic marker of one’s Brahmin lineage.
And yet, I couldn’t find similar assertions from marginalised castes. Instead, I found indirect references: in many instances, marginalised caste status was implied in the representation of characters’ social and economic statuses. Consider, for instance, the popular trope of the “construction worker” in desi gay porn stories. These workers are commonly portrayed as living in chawls, unfinished buildings, and houses under renovation. Their bodies are tanned and sweaty, associated with dirt and grime.
One can argue that through these simultaneous references to occupation, skin colour, lack of cleanliness and absence of sophistication of language and attitude, the trope of the construction worker is implicitly coded as belonging to a marginalised caste. After all, a sizable population of migrant workers belong to marginalised castes and tribes; one estimate claims that more than 40 percent of seasonal migrants are Dalits or Adivasis. In addition, Dalit queer and transgender persons have remarked that being from a so-called lowered caste is often associated, in the popular imagination, with having a dark complexion—a stereotype that Dalit people may also internalise. Similarly, Dalit bodies are seen as “dirty,” owing to their historical relegation to occupations that are considered “impure” (for example, manual scavenging).
As Christina Thomas Dhanraj, a Christian Dalit woman, wrote in a personal essay titled “Swipe me left, I’m Dalit,” “we are also perceived relative to our non-Dalit counterparts: the lighter-skinned, savarna woman that is pure, quiet, and delicate versus the dark-skinned Dalit woman that’s polluting, loud, and tough.”
Interestingly, these characters coded as marginalised caste share tropes with the Thakur/Rajput and Jat characters. Their penises are always thick and large, they liberally pepper their sentences with abusive words/phrases, and they are often forthcoming—dominating, even—when it comes to sex.
However, unlike in the case of Thakurs/Rajputs and Jats, where caste identity is invoked with pride, the construction worker’s caste always remains unsaid.
Why do some castes find direct assertions while others are couched through “markers”? Answering this question is important as it explains why even though certain stereotypes like abusive language and forthcoming sexual behaviour are associated with both dominant and marginalised castes, it is only the former that finds direct assertion. There are, after all, two different vocabularies of desire here: while both Rajputs/Thakurs and the construction worker are fetishised in desi queer porn, there is no taboo in having sex with the former. Sex with the latter, however, is exciting largely because associating with construction workers in everyday life and outside sexual contexts is a taboo; it leads to a transgression of meticulously maintained caste-class boundaries.
One of the ways in which caste is maintained in society is through the notions of caste pride and caste shame. While people from dominant castes are supposed to be proud of their caste identity, and, therefore, display it through direct assertions of their caste, people from marginalised castes are expected to be ashamed of their caste and keep it hushed up. In Coming Out as Dalit, journalist Yashica Dutt wrote about hiding her so-called lowered caste identity to “pass” as upper caste and escape caste discrimination. For Dutt, passing as upper caste caused a “unique anxiety” —one of “giving up one’s identity to take on another that is seen as superior.” This caused her “emotional, mental and physical damage,” she wrote.
By forcing people from marginalised castes to feel humiliated about their caste identity, the caste system bolsters the dominance of the so-called upper castes. In desi queer porn, referring to marginalised castes only implicitly when dominant castes are referred to explicitly carries this notion of caste pride and shame into queer erotic worlds. In this world too, you can claim your caste, but only if you are from a dominant one.
Despite reinforcing conventional notions of caste, desi queer porn may also hold the possibility of queering caste, said Patruni Chidananda Sastry and Anamika*. Patruni is a Hyderabad-based bisexual drag artist who comes from a Brahmin caste and Anamika is a transgender woman and a researcher of gender, sexuality, and caste who comes from a Bahujan background.
Patruni told me about their complex relationship with the janeu: “While I am personally anti-janeu, I am aroused by its erotic possibilities.”
For them, the janeu can double up as a sex toy during foreplay and a leash during a kinky session. When they see the janeu in desi queer porn and fantasise about these erotic possibilities, their fantasies take away the notion of sanctity that is associated with a sacred thread. Patruni believes that in this way, a caste signifier can be robbed of at least some of its power.
Anamika also talks about liberatory possibilities when she says that desi queer porn was, for the longest time, the only avenue where she saw bodies bearing markers of different castes coming together in erotic contexts. “This is very queer, albeit in a caste context,” she says.
However, her optimism is not without caution: “Should this be done only in private?” she asked. That is, even though desi queer porn shows the intermingling of bodies from different castes in the privacy of one’s bedroom, is there any significance to these transgressions unless they translate to the dismantling of caste in everyday queer lives?
Anamika continues to search for desi porn that demonstrates creators’ consciousness about caste, “dethrones caste respectability”, and does not fetishise casteist notions of purity and pollution.
This search has a long way to go before it concludes.
*Name changed upon request.
If you have any feedback on the column, please write to the managing editor-- ankur.paliwal@queerbeat.org
Writer
Sayantan Datta (they/them) is a journalist and assistant professor at the Centre for Writing & Pedagogy, Krea University. They have been awarded the 13th Laadli Media & Advertising Award and the inaugural Ashoka-SAGE Prize in Critical Writing Pedagogies for their work.
Editor
Visvak is a writer and editor, mostly of narrative nonfiction.
Illustrator
Jose (she/they) is a non-binary illustrator from Kerala whose work highlights personal stories marked by gender, body experiences and their south-Indian heritage. While not lost in their sketchbook, they can be found devouring all things camp and horror.
Producer
Ankur Paliwal (he/they) is a queer journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
