She was made to accept shame and silence. Queerness gave me the tools to understand desire and intimacy on my own terms.
In 2011, a girl I used to go to tuition with in my then-quaint hometown of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu told me she had feelings for me. I will call her Diya in this story to protect her real name. We were 17 years old and had been close friends for nearly a year. That particular Sunday morning, as we sat side by side on a bench, pretending to focus on our math coursework, Diya leaned in and said, “I have something to tell you.” Her fingertips brushed mine as she stuttered, “I usually don’t like women, but I have fallen for you.”
It was the first time anyone had expressed romantic interest in me. As Diya spoke, I felt butterflies flutter behind my ribcage, a blush threatening to rise. I liked hearing her say she liked me. What it might feel like to be her girlfriend, I wondered. But these feelings were new and I did not know what to do with them. I lowered my eyes and said nothing.
That was the beginning of a quiet unraveling. Over the following years I would realise how shame could shape a life—and how queerness might offer a way out. The expansive nature of queerness allowed me to experiment. To be fluid and honour how I felt sexually at different stages of my life. To move through labels– lesbian, bisexual, asexual, demisexual and pansexual, without feeling shame.
But most importantly queerness gave me permission to reject the life I thought I would inherit from my mother.
That Sunday, when I got back home, Diya’s words looped in my head. I did not know how to process what had happened.
With no one else to turn to, I decided to talk to my mother.
My mother had begun confiding in me during a brief lull in her turbulent marriage, always insisting I keep her secrets to protect the family’s reputation. I would later learn this was called parentification—a dysfunctional coping mechanism where a child is made to hold emotional space for a parent. But back then, it made me feel close to her.
So, I told her that a girl in school likes me. My mother’s response was instant: "Tell me who it is, we will go tell her off. Doesn’t she know you come from a ‘good’ family?"
She never asked if I liked the girl back. Her face was tense, her eyes pleading with me not to bring chaos in her already burdened world. At that moment, I understood that choosing my feelings that didn’t appear ‘normal’ was not an option. Desire was dangerous. So I did the only thing I felt I could. I sent Diya a text saying I wasn’t interested and never spoke to her again, even though we saw each other every day.
The shame was immediate. It came from turning away from something tender—because I didn’t have the tools to understand or hold it.
That moment on the bench with Diya didn’t fade. It lodged itself in me like a seed—one that would later bloom. Shortly after her confession, I came across the word “lesbian”. It appeared in church literature, always framed as sin, and in mainstream media narratives talking about ‘man-hating lesbians.’ But the description that truly spoke to me was that of a woman having feelings for another woman—that is what I had felt with Diya.
But at 17 my mother’s influence and experience of sexuality dominated my understanding of sex, desire, and belonging.
My mother told me that she had not felt any sexual attraction to anyone her entire life. She said she had romantically loved my father but did not desire him sexually. She also confided that she never initiated sex.
My father used that against her, she said. In fights, he accused her of being frigid, abnormal, and not fulfilling her duties. She told me once, "He said most women wake up their sleeping husbands at night to ask for sex, and here you are not even cooperating when I feel the need. There must be something wrong with you." She knew that my father had many extra-marital affairs. But when she called him out, she told me, he justified his affairs saying she is the one who is “broken” and needs to be fixed.
I watched her internalise this shame. The shame that came from not wanting sex and being punished for it.
Although I was too young to make full meaning of it all, I began to understand that what was being done to my mother had something to do with policing female sexuality. I experienced it firsthand too. My parents put me in an all-girls school, and tried to arrange my marriage before college—all so that I wouldn’t discover sex on my own, I think.
These were not isolated actions. As feminist scholar Nivedita Menon wrote in Seeing Like a Feminist, “The idea of controlling women’s sexuality is central to patriarchal power. The family, the community, and the state are all invested in ensuring that women’s sexual behaviour is monitored and regulated, as it is tied to notions of honour, purity, and lineage.”
In 2011, a girl I used to go to tuition with in my then-quaint hometown of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu told me she had feelings for me. I will call her Diya in this story to protect her real name. We were 17 years old and had been close friends for nearly a year. That particular Sunday morning, as we sat side by side on a bench, pretending to focus on our math coursework, Diya leaned in and said, “I have something to tell you.” Her fingertips brushed mine as she stuttered, “I usually don’t like women, but I have fallen for you.”
It was the first time anyone had expressed romantic interest in me. As Diya spoke, I felt butterflies flutter behind my ribcage, a blush threatening to rise. I liked hearing her say she liked me. What it might feel like to be her girlfriend, I wondered. But these feelings were new and I did not know what to do with them. I lowered my eyes and said nothing.
That was the beginning of a quiet unraveling. Over the following years I would realise how shame could shape a life—and how queerness might offer a way out. The expansive nature of queerness allowed me to experiment. To be fluid and honour how I felt sexually at different stages of my life. To move through labels– lesbian, bisexual, asexual, demisexual and pansexual, without feeling shame.
But most importantly queerness gave me permission to reject the life I thought I would inherit from my mother.
That Sunday, when I got back home, Diya’s words looped in my head. I did not know how to process what had happened.
With no one else to turn to, I decided to talk to my mother.
My mother had begun confiding in me during a brief lull in her turbulent marriage, always insisting I keep her secrets to protect the family’s reputation. I would later learn this was called parentification—a dysfunctional coping mechanism where a child is made to hold emotional space for a parent. But back then, it made me feel close to her.
So, I told her that a girl in school likes me. My mother’s response was instant: "Tell me who it is, we will go tell her off. Doesn’t she know you come from a ‘good’ family?"
She never asked if I liked the girl back. Her face was tense, her eyes pleading with me not to bring chaos in her already burdened world. At that moment, I understood that choosing my feelings that didn’t appear ‘normal’ was not an option. Desire was dangerous. So I did the only thing I felt I could. I sent Diya a text saying I wasn’t interested and never spoke to her again, even though we saw each other every day.
The shame was immediate. It came from turning away from something tender—because I didn’t have the tools to understand or hold it.
That moment on the bench with Diya didn’t fade. It lodged itself in me like a seed—one that would later bloom. Shortly after her confession, I came across the word “lesbian”. It appeared in church literature, always framed as sin, and in mainstream media narratives talking about ‘man-hating lesbians.’ But the description that truly spoke to me was that of a woman having feelings for another woman—that is what I had felt with Diya.
But at 17 my mother’s influence and experience of sexuality dominated my understanding of sex, desire, and belonging.
My mother told me that she had not felt any sexual attraction to anyone her entire life. She said she had romantically loved my father but did not desire him sexually. She also confided that she never initiated sex.
My father used that against her, she said. In fights, he accused her of being frigid, abnormal, and not fulfilling her duties. She told me once, "He said most women wake up their sleeping husbands at night to ask for sex, and here you are not even cooperating when I feel the need. There must be something wrong with you." She knew that my father had many extra-marital affairs. But when she called him out, she told me, he justified his affairs saying she is the one who is “broken” and needs to be fixed.
I watched her internalise this shame. The shame that came from not wanting sex and being punished for it.
Although I was too young to make full meaning of it all, I began to understand that what was being done to my mother had something to do with policing female sexuality. I experienced it firsthand too. My parents put me in an all-girls school, and tried to arrange my marriage before college—all so that I wouldn’t discover sex on my own, I think.
These were not isolated actions. As feminist scholar Nivedita Menon wrote in Seeing Like a Feminist, “The idea of controlling women’s sexuality is central to patriarchal power. The family, the community, and the state are all invested in ensuring that women’s sexual behaviour is monitored and regulated, as it is tied to notions of honour, purity, and lineage.”
By the time I entered college, I had made a quiet pact with myself. I will not be like my mother. I will not be the woman who gets cheated on. I will embrace sex and sexuality fully, become “so good at sex” that nobody can leave me, I told myself.
Much later I’d learn that I was fooling myself.
By this time had had quiet crushes on both boys and girls in college. I thought maybe I am bisexual, and that felt good. That label led me to queer content online—forums, essays, videos. I started identifying as bisexual and came out to some close friends. Being bisexual made it easier for me to embark on my sexual journey.
The very first time I kissed someone, a man, in college—a pre-arranged moment in a darkened stairwell above a classroom—I felt nothing. I had pressured myself into it—years were passing, and it felt shameful to be 22 and never been kissed.
I’d spent years reading romance fiction, imagining toe-curling kisses that would set off fireworks. But when the moment finally arrived, I stood there with open eyes, staring at the wall, wondering if this was all it was.
I had nurtured enough crushes and consumed enough erotica to believe I’d be “naturally good at sex.” I hadn’t considered that I might not want it—that I might feel no pleasure at all in sex.
After that stairwell kiss, I tried again. A few more attempts with the same person, and then others—with the same flat, unsatisfying result. I kissed women, men, anyone I liked at parties where I drank just enough to push myself into it.
I tried everything I thought would make me sexual. I kissed and performed and dissociated, believing that if I could just get it right, something would awaken in me. That if I kept trying, I could fix what felt “broken”.
But then something happened that forced me to stop.
One night, after a drunken makeout session with a man who crossed every boundary I tried to hold, I was left feeling violated. Empty and dissociated, again. But I’d had enough.
I finally asked myself: Is this what I’ve been chasing? As I paused to honestly reflect on my sexual experiences, a thought I’d avoided for years took hold.
What if I wasn’t failing at desire? What if I was like my mother? That sex was not for me.
I thought if asexuality was true for me, I had to find a way to live with it. At first, it terrified me. Everything I had been taught—explicitly and implicitly—linked womanhood to sexual desirability. To be asexual, I feared, was to be unwanted. And if I was unwanted, didn’t that mean I was unlovable?
But through many online forums and research on asexuality, I learnt that asexuality wasn’t repression. It wasn’t something to fix.
Around that time, Western media had started portraying asexual characters with nuance. For example, in BoJack Horseman, a character quietly explains that he doesn’t feel sexual desire. The sitcom doesn’t frame that as a loss or lack of something. Depictions like these were rare, but they mattered. None of this was reflected in Indian media. There was no language around this in the spaces I occupied. But even these fragmented, distant representations helped me imagine that what I was feeling wasn’t a problem—it just needed a different framework; that pleasure and partnership could look different—and still be real.
Scholar Ela Przybylo, in her 2019 book Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality, argued that asexuality invites us to rethink intimacy altogether. It disrupts the cultural script that positions sex as central to selfhood and relationships, allowing space for other forms of closeness, connection, and care.
I realised that my mother’s lack of interest in sex wasn’t why she felt lonely in her marriage. My parents’ relationship lacked much more than just sexual chemistry—it lacked companionship, communication, respect. Sex became just one more burden for my mother to carry.
With that, I finally accepted that I might be asexual. I began to unlearn urgency. I stopped chasing desire.
Having worn and left a few labels–lesbians, bisexual and asexual–by now, another realisation dawned on me. An understanding of queerness that liberated me– a label is not a box. It is a bridge.
After college, around 23, I began to find joy in other parts of my life—solo travel, long hikes, deep conversations with friends, building a meaningful career. And over time the desire stirred. Quietly, and on its own terms.
It first surprised me with a longtime female best friend from college. Our Sunday breakfasts together turned into evenings of political debate, and familiar, gentle touch. I wanted to be closer. I wanted to kiss her. After our first kiss, she pulled back, smiling and said, “That was a long time coming, don’t you think?” I felt a rush of happiness I hadn’t known before.
Queerness, in those moments, didn’t feel like a question. It felt like freedom. I wasn’t measuring intimacy against someone else’s script. I was letting myself feel.
Later, desire surfaced again with a fellow solo traveller. We spent the day climbing rocks, swimming, and watching dolphins. That night, under a moonlit sky, I kissed him. We went to new places. I felt drawn to him sexually. Satisfying sex, I realised, was possible—for me.
Desire didn’t feel confusing anymore. It felt rooted in connection, in meaning.
I began to understand: my desire wasn’t absent, it was particular. It needed trust. It needed depth.
That’s when I found another label —demisexual. Someone who experiences sexual attraction only after forming emotional bonds. The label felt like a solid ground under my feet.
Queerness gave me the language, and the freedom, to explore my sexuality without shame.
I began to communicate more honestly with partners. I knew what I needed. I knew what I wanted to avoid. Soon, I met someone who listened. Who cared. Who wanted to know how to make pleasure mutual.
He became my husband.
My husband was everything my father wasn’t—curious, emotionally open, willing to learn about who I was, including my queerness and sexuality.
From the beginning, our intimacy was shaped by conversation, curiosity, and consent. I told him I was demisexual. He didn’t flinch. Although he described himself as hypersexual, he prioritised my pleasure, asked what worked for me, and met my honesty with his own.
We read books, listened to podcasts, experimented, and made connection—not performance—the centre of our sex life. Our desire felt collaborative, not compulsory.
A year into our relationship, though, we hit a rough patch: my libido dropped off completely. For months, I felt nothing. And this time, the test wasn’t whether I would feel desire, but how we would respond to its absence.
In my mother’s marriage, any shift in desire was met with blame—either directed inward, or imposed from her husband. But in mine, we were free from any blame. We didn't panic. We paused. We talked.
We looked at the full picture: my smoking habit, a flare-up of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), the side effects of antidepressants. We acknowledged how these factors, together, might be creating a negative feedback loop with my desire. We sought help.
We also realised we’d stopped dating each other—stopped investing in shared joy, in play, in time spent without goals. So we made changes. Not to fix me, or save the relationship, but because our connection mattered to both of us.
The kind of support that was decidedly absent from my mother’s marriage was now possible for me.
As we put in the work, my orgasms returned. But even in their absence, I had learned something important: that a temporary loss of libido—something I had already navigated with my partner—didn’t undo who I was. Every experience was an expansion of my sexuality–my queerness.
With my husband’s support, I began stepping into physical queer spaces in Guwahati, Assam, where I currently live. I attended meetups by Xomonnoy —a local queer collective—and found myself surrounded by stories, identities, and lives that expanded what queerness could mean. I met people at book clubs, bonding over literature and the quiet thrill of recognising ourselves in each other. I also attended Guwahati Pride! In all this kinship, noise, and colour, I felt something shift again. But, thanks to queerness, I was no longer afraid of such shifts.
As I built friendships with gender-diverse people, I noticed passing crushes towards them—flickers of attraction I hadn’t expected. I didn’t feel the need to act on them. I was in love, monogamous by choice. But these feelings showed me something about myself I hadn’t named before. I am pansexual–capable of forming deep connections, sexual or otherwise, across the spectrum of gender. I shared this with my husband. He affirmed me.
For a long time, I thought queerness was something that described who I loved, or how I felt desire. But over time, I began to understand that queerness wasn’t just about who I was—it was about how I lived. It helped me unlearn the scripts I had inherited: that sex was duty, that pleasure was indulgent, that silence was noble. It helped me see that partnership didn’t have to be a site of sacrifice. That intimacy could be negotiated, built, and reimagined.
My mother never got that space. Her desires—whether too much, too little, or simply different—were treated as failures. She was never taught that her body could speak its own language, or that her silence didn’t have to be a proof of goodness. I think she endured, because she was expected to.
Back when my parents were trying to find a groom for me, I had tried to tell my mother that an arranged marriage might not be a good fit for me. “I do not feel any sexual desire I think amma, how will I survive being married?” I told her. “You have no other options, darling,” my mother had replied. “A woman has to have sex to give her husband children and after that, you just have to close your eyes and cooperate whenever he asks for it. That’s how things are done.”
Queerness allowed me to escape that inheritance. It rescued me. Not just from the sexual poverty and violence that folks who are assigned female at birth (AFAB) sometimes face in heterosexual partnerships, but also from the shame, guilt, and sense of brokenness they are made to carry about every aspect of their sexuality.
Years later, I found myself searching for Diya online. I found her articles, travel photos, a picture of her son, and the court record from her divorce. I don’t know what I was looking for exactly. Maybe some proof that she turned out okay. Maybe I was trying to undo the self-erasure I had performed at that time because of the guilt of throwing away a beautiful friendship out of fear. Back then, I didn’t know how to hold that kind of desire without shame. I know now.
Growing up I’d heard queerness framed as an aberration, but it became the very thing that has allowed for my self-determination and healing.
This story is supported by Mariwala Health Initiative.
Writer
Christianez Ratna Kiruba (She/Her) is a pansexual medical doctor and a freelance health journalist currently based in Guwahati. She is interested in viewing public health problems through the gender lens and bringing diverse perspectives to the discourse on health.
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.
Editor
Shruti Sunderraman (she/her) is a writer, editor, and strategist who splits her time between Bangalore, Bombay, and Goa.
Producer
Ankur Paliwal (he/him) is an independent journalist and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
