Not all queerness is loud. Quiet queerness has always been here.
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From the fateful day in 2002 when a shimmery white-gowned Mahima Chaudhary in Dhadkan stirred up a revolution in my still developing 11-year-old prefrontal cortex, my queerness has always lived a quiet life.
So, in 2018, when comedian Hannah Gadsby asked “Where do the quiet gays go?” in their Netflix special Nanette, I experienced the joyous disaster of feeling seen.
Gadsby watched a Pride parade on TV—what they believed to be the epitome of queer expression through the "metaphor of party.” Their reaction was an urgent need to express their identity through the “metaphor of a nap.” With each punchline in the roughly hourlong special, Gadsby spoke into my quietness—of not coming out, of not announcing myself at queer meetups, of feeling out of place at Pride.
I confessed to several people at Namma Pride, Bengaluru 2017 that it was my first time at a Pride march. Many told my then 27-year-old carcass that it was “extremely late to Pride.” I wondered how to break it to them that not only was I quite late to exploring what kinda gay I was, but also that I was terrible at staying gay, especially if that involved announcing my gayness to the world - or worse, at house parties that play techno. Over time, I gave up trying to live out my queerness at Pride.
Every year, rainbow washing reaches its annual peak during Pride. Across the world, the parades are becoming more and more consumerist, less an echo of their protest origins. This creates an environment of feeling othered within a community of one’s own.
Quiet queerness then is the refuge for queers whose activism lies in simply existing, in taking up space without announcement, in non-declarative identity, in label confusion, in struggling with consumerist queerness or the need to adopt latest queer aesthetics, and in building a rich inner life that asserts its queering to an audience of one(self).
Quiet queering demands removing heterosexual perception and a sex-based outlook from the centre of how we live out our queer lives. How one expresses one’s queerness doesn’t have to help the heteros or even other queers understand them better.
In a memorable 2022 essay in The Swaddle, writer Rohitha Naraharisetty made a case for asexuality being the quiet queer revolution: “What if we start decentering sex? This is the radical question we are forced to confront once we start recognising asexuality as a real identity deserving of space in this world – one that makes it queer for how it subverts normative sexuality, and dares to imagine a world where we free ourselves of its baggage entirely.”
This is not to say quiet queerness is strictly asexual, but it borrows from asexuality the power of queer assertion through decentering sex. It challenges notions of how we queers “should” occupy space in the world.
As Gadsby points out in Nanette, the metaphor of party weighs far too heavily on the expression of queer identity. Quiet queerness demands moving away from all us gays being stereotyped as party people.
Being a loud queer or a quiet queer can both be natural states, a loving choice. It could also be a forced one. The forced choice of being a quiet queer can sometimes be a consequence of being afraid to be the “wrong kind of queer.” In a queerbeat story about the rise of chemsex in the gay community in India, Esthappen, a playwright, said, “The big hope of making the bold choice of coming out is that there is a community out there, and once you find them you’re going to find your home and chosen family.” But the danger of being funnelled out by/within the queer community when one displays that they are not the ‘perfect queer’ may force some into quiet queerness.
Unnati, a 21-year-old college student in Delhi felt othered by her queer peers on campus because she “doesn’t look a certain way.” She said, “I don’t accessorise as much as they do, and I don’t dress like them. I don’t colour my hair. These may sound silly but I get the impression they think I am not ‘queer enough’ when I make attempts to hang out with them.”
For young queers like Unnati, the pressure to be a loud queer can come from a scarcity mindset. Prarthana Sham, a queer therapist based in Bengaluru, told me last week over coffee, “There’s an expectation of perfection from queer persons in outward expressions of their queerness. That pressure to not make mistakes comes from a scarcity of not having [queer] spaces.”
The lack of physical spaces that allow queerness to thrive in all its versions contributes to why events like Pride can be exhausting for many.
Firstly, Pride is a once in a year event, restricted mostly to big cities. Many queer persons from small towns have to wait an entire year to be a part of it. “If you get just three hours in a year to be queer in a way that you don't get to be otherwise, that's a lot of pressure on those three hours,” said Prarthana.“For example, a lot of trans people have to change on the road or in metro stations, to go back home to whatever identity that they must have. It creates whiplash.”
There are few public spaces in India that are exclusive — or even friendly — to LGBTQIA+ folks. The lack of community spaces stifles personal expression and forces interactions to rest heavy on connection through romantic interest, leaving little room for intimacy outside sex.
It is in wanting to plug this gap that Prarthana and fellow therapist Deeksha Bala started The Quiet Queerness Project (TQQP) in April 2023 in Bengaluru. TQQP aims to create events that simply aim to provide and facilitate for queer people to be. No agenda, no pop-ups, no stalls. Their event in Bengaluru in the month of May 2023 aimed to be a mixer for queer persons, but with a code of conduct. As mental health professionals, they felt the need to create a structure where queer persons could mingle, be respectful of identity, create room for disagreement through professional facilitation, and just be. Prarthana said, "Family, heteronormativity, romance, monogamy culture, all of these have very specific structures. In queerness, there’s no script.”
TQQP invites quietness in by creating rooms away from consumerist spaces. It stays away from performance mediums (slam poetry, dance etc). It steps away from the pressure to show the world that you’re queer. Rather, it hopes to explore what it means to be queer without the pressure of constantly performing the identity.
Creating queer spaces of quiet assertion welcomes queer abundance everywhere.
It’s important to differentiate quiet queerness from introversion.
A quiet queer can be extroverted, a loud queer can be introverted. Merriam-Webster defines introversion as “the state of being turned inward or upon oneself or itself” while quiet is “the state of being calm and without much noise or activity.” Introversion or extroversion points to how you absorb the world around you; loudness and quietness is how you express to it.
A quiet queer may still require the validation of seeing others and to talk to them in order to form themselves.
Dr Lauren Bloom (played by Janet Montgomery) from the medical drama New Amsterdam is a strong example of an extroverted quiet queer. For four seasons of the show there isn’t a squeak of her being queer, as opposed to Dr Iggy Frome (Tyler Labine) a lovely, intense, extroverted loud queer in the same show. When Lauren meets Dr Leyla Shinwari, an undocumented Pakistani doctor played by Shiva Kalaiselvan, they develop a friendship that turns into a romantic relationship. Lauren’s queer world is contained to herself and Leyla; there is no backstory to convince the audience that she was queer all along. She is a woman who found herself in love with another woman. Her queering sits in that space quietly—in love, with no emotional Instagram.
The rich don’t justify their furniture. Creating an inner queer life that does not answer to anyone or rely on outwardly expressing itself comes from a place of privilege. I never had to come out to anyone. At 29, I simply informed my mother that I am attracted to the person in front of me, not their gender. She asked me if I expected her to approve of “all this.” I smiled, looked at her humanity, and told her I’m not looking for approval or acceptance, just stating something to be true.
Expressions of queerness often depend on social context. Unlike most transpersons in India, I did not have the threat of having to leave home for who I am. In her decades-long fight for horizontal reservation for transpersons, trans rights activist Grace Banu has often reiterated how Dalit transpersons in India struggle with the double marginalisation of being trans and being Dalit. She said, “Caste is everywhere.”
Loud queerness in most queer circles is often a necessity, not a choice. My and other quiet queers’ comfortably not-coming out is a result of decades of queer folks fighting hard to take up space in the world, often discarding their own security by coming out.
As Robert Eichberg, co-founder of National Coming Out Day said, “Most people think they don't know anyone gay or lesbian, and in fact everybody does. It is imperative that we come out and let people know who we are and disabuse them of their fears and stereotypes.” But a quiet queer can also be an activist. Quiet queerness is not about what you’re expressing, it’s about what you’re embodying.
As Nigerian feminist writer Olu Timehin Kukoyi points out, “We’re not defined by our ability to come out – of our homes, or the closet. We’re here. We’re queer. That has always been enough.”
In possibly the best embodiment of quiet queerness on screen in Indian cinema, veteran Malayalam actor Mammootty’s character Mathew Devassy in Kaathal (2023) quietly suffers the suffocation of spending decades without being able to live his truth as a gay man in a small town in Kerala. His wife, Omana Mathew (played by the effervescent Jyothika) trapped in this loveless marriage for decades suffers just as much till she decides to divorce him. Mathew quietly endures, and quietly loves a driving school instructor named Thankan from afar. The end of the movie hints at him driving away with Thankan, another moment of his queerness marking a quiet victory. Mathew did not choose the silence of his sorrows, but he chose the quietness of his queer tenderness, even in celebration.
If heterosexual friendships and relationships can lead quiet rich inner lives with no pressure for outward loud expression of it every minute, queer quietness can also burn its rap sheet of justifications after reading. We want to enjoy the same nonsense in peace.
The case for delinking friendships and love from heterosexual narratives is not just an advocacy for queerness but an invitation to observe queerness from a quieter lens.
The vantage point of quiet queerness is all queer liberation.
Six years since Nanette, I do know where the quiet gays go. It’s just none of anybody's business.
From the fateful day in 2002 when a shimmery white-gowned Mahima Chaudhary in Dhadkan stirred up a revolution in my still developing 11-year-old prefrontal cortex, my queerness has always lived a quiet life.
So, in 2018, when comedian Hannah Gadsby asked “Where do the quiet gays go?” in their Netflix special Nanette, I experienced the joyous disaster of feeling seen.
Gadsby watched a Pride parade on TV—what they believed to be the epitome of queer expression through the "metaphor of party.” Their reaction was an urgent need to express their identity through the “metaphor of a nap.” With each punchline in the roughly hourlong special, Gadsby spoke into my quietness—of not coming out, of not announcing myself at queer meetups, of feeling out of place at Pride.
I confessed to several people at Namma Pride, Bengaluru 2017 that it was my first time at a Pride march. Many told my then 27-year-old carcass that it was “extremely late to Pride.” I wondered how to break it to them that not only was I quite late to exploring what kinda gay I was, but also that I was terrible at staying gay, especially if that involved announcing my gayness to the world - or worse, at house parties that play techno. Over time, I gave up trying to live out my queerness at Pride.
Every year, rainbow washing reaches its annual peak during Pride. Across the world, the parades are becoming more and more consumerist, less an echo of their protest origins. This creates an environment of feeling othered within a community of one’s own.
Quiet queerness then is the refuge for queers whose activism lies in simply existing, in taking up space without announcement, in non-declarative identity, in label confusion, in struggling with consumerist queerness or the need to adopt latest queer aesthetics, and in building a rich inner life that asserts its queering to an audience of one(self).
Quiet queering demands removing heterosexual perception and a sex-based outlook from the centre of how we live out our queer lives. How one expresses one’s queerness doesn’t have to help the heteros or even other queers understand them better.
In a memorable 2022 essay in The Swaddle, writer Rohitha Naraharisetty made a case for asexuality being the quiet queer revolution: “What if we start decentering sex? This is the radical question we are forced to confront once we start recognising asexuality as a real identity deserving of space in this world – one that makes it queer for how it subverts normative sexuality, and dares to imagine a world where we free ourselves of its baggage entirely.”
This is not to say quiet queerness is strictly asexual, but it borrows from asexuality the power of queer assertion through decentering sex. It challenges notions of how we queers “should” occupy space in the world.
As Gadsby points out in Nanette, the metaphor of party weighs far too heavily on the expression of queer identity. Quiet queerness demands moving away from all us gays being stereotyped as party people.
Being a loud queer or a quiet queer can both be natural states, a loving choice. It could also be a forced one. The forced choice of being a quiet queer can sometimes be a consequence of being afraid to be the “wrong kind of queer.” In a queerbeat story about the rise of chemsex in the gay community in India, Esthappen, a playwright, said, “The big hope of making the bold choice of coming out is that there is a community out there, and once you find them you’re going to find your home and chosen family.” But the danger of being funnelled out by/within the queer community when one displays that they are not the ‘perfect queer’ may force some into quiet queerness.
Unnati, a 21-year-old college student in Delhi felt othered by her queer peers on campus because she “doesn’t look a certain way.” She said, “I don’t accessorise as much as they do, and I don’t dress like them. I don’t colour my hair. These may sound silly but I get the impression they think I am not ‘queer enough’ when I make attempts to hang out with them.”
For young queers like Unnati, the pressure to be a loud queer can come from a scarcity mindset. Prarthana Sham, a queer therapist based in Bengaluru, told me last week over coffee, “There’s an expectation of perfection from queer persons in outward expressions of their queerness. That pressure to not make mistakes comes from a scarcity of not having [queer] spaces.”
The lack of physical spaces that allow queerness to thrive in all its versions contributes to why events like Pride can be exhausting for many.
Firstly, Pride is a once in a year event, restricted mostly to big cities. Many queer persons from small towns have to wait an entire year to be a part of it. “If you get just three hours in a year to be queer in a way that you don't get to be otherwise, that's a lot of pressure on those three hours,” said Prarthana.“For example, a lot of trans people have to change on the road or in metro stations, to go back home to whatever identity that they must have. It creates whiplash.”
There are few public spaces in India that are exclusive — or even friendly — to LGBTQIA+ folks. The lack of community spaces stifles personal expression and forces interactions to rest heavy on connection through romantic interest, leaving little room for intimacy outside sex.
It is in wanting to plug this gap that Prarthana and fellow therapist Deeksha Bala started The Quiet Queerness Project (TQQP) in April 2023 in Bengaluru. TQQP aims to create events that simply aim to provide and facilitate for queer people to be. No agenda, no pop-ups, no stalls. Their event in Bengaluru in the month of May 2023 aimed to be a mixer for queer persons, but with a code of conduct. As mental health professionals, they felt the need to create a structure where queer persons could mingle, be respectful of identity, create room for disagreement through professional facilitation, and just be. Prarthana said, "Family, heteronormativity, romance, monogamy culture, all of these have very specific structures. In queerness, there’s no script.”
TQQP invites quietness in by creating rooms away from consumerist spaces. It stays away from performance mediums (slam poetry, dance etc). It steps away from the pressure to show the world that you’re queer. Rather, it hopes to explore what it means to be queer without the pressure of constantly performing the identity.
Creating queer spaces of quiet assertion welcomes queer abundance everywhere.
It’s important to differentiate quiet queerness from introversion.
A quiet queer can be extroverted, a loud queer can be introverted. Merriam-Webster defines introversion as “the state of being turned inward or upon oneself or itself” while quiet is “the state of being calm and without much noise or activity.” Introversion or extroversion points to how you absorb the world around you; loudness and quietness is how you express to it.
A quiet queer may still require the validation of seeing others and to talk to them in order to form themselves.
Dr Lauren Bloom (played by Janet Montgomery) from the medical drama New Amsterdam is a strong example of an extroverted quiet queer. For four seasons of the show there isn’t a squeak of her being queer, as opposed to Dr Iggy Frome (Tyler Labine) a lovely, intense, extroverted loud queer in the same show. When Lauren meets Dr Leyla Shinwari, an undocumented Pakistani doctor played by Shiva Kalaiselvan, they develop a friendship that turns into a romantic relationship. Lauren’s queer world is contained to herself and Leyla; there is no backstory to convince the audience that she was queer all along. She is a woman who found herself in love with another woman. Her queering sits in that space quietly—in love, with no emotional Instagram.
The rich don’t justify their furniture. Creating an inner queer life that does not answer to anyone or rely on outwardly expressing itself comes from a place of privilege. I never had to come out to anyone. At 29, I simply informed my mother that I am attracted to the person in front of me, not their gender. She asked me if I expected her to approve of “all this.” I smiled, looked at her humanity, and told her I’m not looking for approval or acceptance, just stating something to be true.
Expressions of queerness often depend on social context. Unlike most transpersons in India, I did not have the threat of having to leave home for who I am. In her decades-long fight for horizontal reservation for transpersons, trans rights activist Grace Banu has often reiterated how Dalit transpersons in India struggle with the double marginalisation of being trans and being Dalit. She said, “Caste is everywhere.”
Loud queerness in most queer circles is often a necessity, not a choice. My and other quiet queers’ comfortably not-coming out is a result of decades of queer folks fighting hard to take up space in the world, often discarding their own security by coming out.
As Robert Eichberg, co-founder of National Coming Out Day said, “Most people think they don't know anyone gay or lesbian, and in fact everybody does. It is imperative that we come out and let people know who we are and disabuse them of their fears and stereotypes.” But a quiet queer can also be an activist. Quiet queerness is not about what you’re expressing, it’s about what you’re embodying.
As Nigerian feminist writer Olu Timehin Kukoyi points out, “We’re not defined by our ability to come out – of our homes, or the closet. We’re here. We’re queer. That has always been enough.”
In possibly the best embodiment of quiet queerness on screen in Indian cinema, veteran Malayalam actor Mammootty’s character Mathew Devassy in Kaathal (2023) quietly suffers the suffocation of spending decades without being able to live his truth as a gay man in a small town in Kerala. His wife, Omana Mathew (played by the effervescent Jyothika) trapped in this loveless marriage for decades suffers just as much till she decides to divorce him. Mathew quietly endures, and quietly loves a driving school instructor named Thankan from afar. The end of the movie hints at him driving away with Thankan, another moment of his queerness marking a quiet victory. Mathew did not choose the silence of his sorrows, but he chose the quietness of his queer tenderness, even in celebration.
If heterosexual friendships and relationships can lead quiet rich inner lives with no pressure for outward loud expression of it every minute, queer quietness can also burn its rap sheet of justifications after reading. We want to enjoy the same nonsense in peace.
The case for delinking friendships and love from heterosexual narratives is not just an advocacy for queerness but an invitation to observe queerness from a quieter lens.
The vantage point of quiet queerness is all queer liberation.
Six years since Nanette, I do know where the quiet gays go. It’s just none of anybody's business.
Shruti Sunderraman (she/her) is a journalist, writer, editor and strategist who splits her time between Bombay and Bangalore. She’s worked in culture, health, gender and science across publications over the last 10 years.
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.
Editor
Visvak (he/him) is a writer, editor, and teacher based in Goa.
Ankur Paliwal (he/they) is a queer journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
