The Familiar and The Familial

In the previous edition of QueerSay, authenticity in how bodies and intimacy are portrayed stood as the reason why many queer folks preferred desi gay porn over western porn. Toshi, a 32-year-old cisgender lesbian woman, and the trans women I spoke to share this experience with desi lesbian and ‘transgender’ porn. 

However, shrouding the appeal of the familiar is the familial: a specter of the heterosexual family that appears in both desi lesbian and transgender porn. According to Toshi, who co-founded the artist-activist collective Resistive Alliance for Queer Solidarity in Allahabad, desi lesbian porn is often couched within a larger heterosexual narrative of the family. This is in contrast to desi gay porn, which often relies on people spontaneously recording themselves during sex.

Family-centred porn—desi or otherwise—dominates for a reason: it has a wide audience. A 2024 analysis of PornHub statistics by BedBible stated that 50% of all PornHub content contained themes of incest. Geoffrey Celen, a porn industry expert told MEL magazine in 2020 that viewers are captivated by incest storylines because they tap into the human desire to witness taboo subjects.

So there’s little surprise to see the family obsession permeate into desi porn. But why is it so pronounced particularly in desi lesbian porn? Pushpesh Kumar, a sociology professor researching gender and sexuality at the University of Hyderabad, tells me that this obsession might stem from the historic portrayal of lesbian intimacies in Hindi cinema in India. 

For him, desi lesbian porn’s frequent reliance on the trope of the heterosexual family brings back memories of the film Fire. Released in 1996 and directed by Deepa Mehta, Fire tells the story of Sita and her sister-in-law Radha. The film depicts the blossoming of love and passion between the two women against the backdrop of a joint family and spousal neglect. Pushpesh says that the film attempted to “introduce [to the audience] lesbianism within a familial context.”

At that time, when the country was largely oblivious to lesbian intimacies, at least in the popular culture, Fire eased its audience into this reality by portraying it as “existing within Indian Hindu middle-class families,” Pushpesh added. By relying on the familiar heterosexual family as the backdrop against which lesbian intimacies could be explored, the film attributed to these intimacies a certain everyday character and provided a model for future representation of lesbian intimacies.

Toshi, however, interprets such representation as, “Ye dikha rahe hain ki gharo ke band darwaazon ke peeche ye sab hota hai, lekin baahar jaake ye sab karoge, toh it is not okay.” (The message they are sending out is that these things happen within the closed doors of the household, but you cannot do these outside.) Toshi’s own introduction to porn was through watching desi porn during her college days. 

It appears that in the imagination of desi lesbian porn makers, women can exercise their sexuality largely within the limits of the household, with members of the family, and often under the watchful eyes of the male patriarch. (I could not contact any desi lesbian porn creator while reporting this story.)

Consider, for example, a scene Toshi recollects: the sasur (father-in-law) is having sex with the bahu (daughter-in-law). After sometime, the devrani (sister-in-law) walks in on the duo, and is folded into the sex scene. Then, with the sasur present, the bahu and the devrani engage in lesbian sex acts.

It is this preoccupation that sometimes takes Toshi away from desi porn to western content where she finds more variety in the gaze through which the body is explored.

Even with all the familiarity of desi porn, “it can be dehumanizing and bad for your mental health because it is not produced for or through a woman’s gaze,” Toshi said.

‍Preserving heterosexuality

If the lack of a woman’s gaze renders the representation of queer intimacies in desi lesbian porn incomplete, then the lack of a ‘transgender gaze’ restricts what is represented as transness and how transgender persons find intimacies.

“Transgender gaze” is a term coined by University of Southern California professor Jack Halberstam, a transgender academic. According to them, transgender gaze is a view of the world that disrupts the male, female and hetero and homo binaries.

In the gaping absence of this gaze, desi ‘transgender’ porn too is shrouded by the specter of the Hindu heterosexual family. This trope, however, is accompanied by another long-standing unit: that of the Hindu marriage.

For instance, in the story titled ‘Odia sex story of a wild and horny gay man’ on Indian Gay Site, we meet Gyan, the writer-protagonist, who visits their paternal uncle for holi. After the day’s celebrations, Gyan’s cousin invites them to his house to spend the night. Gyan arrives, full of excitement, and the cousin asks them to take a bath. When Gyan exits the bathroom, waiting on the bed are a saree, a bra, a panty, and some jewelry. The cousin tells Gyan, “I want you today as my bride.”

Gyan concedes to their cousin’s wish. The cousin then takes a pinch of fagu (Odia for powder colors used in Holi) and, using it as a proxy for vermillion, applies it at the top of Gyan’s forehead. In what follows, the story describes in detail the ‘honeymoon’ between Gyan and his cousin. 

As mentioned earlier, such stories – desi ‘gay’ porn with crossdressing characters – were the only examples I could find of what might be called ‘transgender porn’ on popular desi porn websites. In such pornographic content, the additional trope of lovers imitating spousal relationships might stem from “homonormativity”, said Pushpesh, the University of Hyderabad sociologist.

“Homonormativity”, a term popularized by Lisa Duggan, a Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University, refers to the co-option of heteronormative ideals and values by queer cultures, communities, and identities. 

Gyan’s desi ‘gay’ sex story could also be read as a tale of conforming to heteronormativity even with queer-leaning attributes to his characters. In Pushpesh’s words, “the common imagination of ‘gay’ sex is penetrative, and a man penetrating another man within the heterosexual kinship structure is not so easy to imagine.” 

It is as if by transforming Gyan into a woman and his bride, Gyan’s cousin wards off any potential threat a penetrative homosexual encounter can pose to what he thinks is a heterosexual self. The erotic appeal of the story stems, then, not just from the sexual encounter between Gyan and his cousin, but also from how closely the sexual encounter mimics a more familiar sexual setting: the heterosexual family, brought to fruition through a Hindu marriage ritual.

Interestingly, characters in desi lesbian porn, which often portrays sex between women belonging to one family, are almost never depicted conducting heterosexual marriage rituals. Is it because lesbian sex is seen less as a threat to heterosexuality? Pushpesh believes that this might be because lesbian sex in the imagination of lesbian porn creators does not involve penetrative sex. 

In other words, porn appears to be gendered in more ways than one: not only in terms of the tropes invoked by particular categories, but also in what intimacies are considered queer enough to threaten heterosexuality. By imagining lesbian sex as ‘less’ queer, and therefore, less threatening, desi porn delegitimises queer women’s intimacies.

‍Homonormativity or Genderplay?

Despite desi ‘transgender’ porn casting sexual intimacy through Hindu heterosexual marriage, it makes “prominent” the possibilities of “genderplay”, says Urmi Daniella Azar, a 28-year-old West Bengal-based mathematician who is a transgender woman.

“Genderplay” broadly refers to practices that transgress traditional or conventional gender norms. In the context of sexual intimacies, “genderplay” also refers to a particular fetish where one or more partners play the role of a gender different than their own. By relegating some men in a sexual setting to ‘feminine’ roles, desi porn creates characters that not only transgress conventional notions of masculinity, but also derive pleasure from this transgression.

This genderplay in desi ‘transgender’ porn, combined with the queer sex portrayed in desi lesbian porn, shows that in some ways, they transgress some conventional notions of gender and (hetero)sexuality. And yet, amidst these transgressions, heteronormative ideals of family and marriage are  left unquestioned, and at times, celebrated.

Making sense of these contradictions is hard, but they do reflect that the conventional bleeds frequently into the queer. The question we must confront is: can the queer and the conventional co-exist?

Desi queer porn seems to think so. 

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