Between Liberation And Loneliness: Queer Life In The City

💃I call myself a ‘city person’, having lived in megacities all my life. I love what cities have to offer—opportunity, vibrancy, diversity, a transitory population that never stands still. But I also love living in cities because it affords me a kind of anonymity that smaller places wouldn’t, where I’d know everyone and they’d know me, where a monoculture would stamp out diversity, and where I’d feel too exposed as a queer person. In a city, I can be anyone, I can choose whom to be friends with, I can co-opt myself into communities and drop out when it stops working for me. There is something harshly transactional about a city that makes you believe that you hold the key to your life, and that sense of choice is fundamental to the queer existence.

For much too long, queer people𒉰 have fled their smaller towns and villages to massive megapolises, in the quest for this anonymity. Closed communities are good at picking on those who stand out from their idea of ‘normal’—it could be something as minor as a high-pitched male voice, or as major as wanting to settle down with someone of the same sex, queer people have been put on trial and burnt at the stake for generations. Cities then have become our safe havens—eye contact with a stranger in a local train, an underground pub, parties and baths, the options are all there for us to curate our own versions of queerness, and discard them when we’re ready to move on.

♐I always say that my ‘life’, as it were, started when I moved out of home. In a major city, I was at liberty to choose my friends, my activities, my sexual encounters. I didn’t know any of my neighbours, they didn’t ask me questions, and I wouldn’t need to reply even if they did. After a childhood of homophobic classmates, I came across people who were genuinely open-minded and kind. I have never looked back and reminisced about my school days. When I hear people wax eloquent about how great their younger years were, I can’t relate. For me, it all began as an adult. So much of a queer person’s life is about the lack of choice; when you’ve lived like that, you know that choice is power, and that’s what cities are all about.

But with the years, I began to see that there were limits to this choice, that the power I was so headily celebrating might have been an illusion. Before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, which happened in 2018, one had to keep one’s sexual preferences well-hidden in the closet. There were things a queer person could not do in public, such as talking about their date, or bringing a romantic partner to an office party, or asking to dance with someone of the same sex at a friend’s sangeet🌊. If we opened up to someone inadvertently, we’d obsess about whether it was the right thing to do, whether we’d be outed, whether we were safe. Even today, although I acknowledge that things have got better and Section 377 isn’t a threat anymore, every such act of asserting one’s queerness in the mainstream heterosexual world is no less a battle.

🦹This constant act of self-censorship, this calibration of one’s safeties and freedoms manifests itself as a void within us. I began to realise that maybe I’d celebrated the city much too quickly, that the little freedoms I’d thought of as liberation were perhaps mere momentary distractions. The prejudice against people like us is so deep-seated and inter-generational that we can never truly escape it, no matter how far away from home and family we fling ourselves. For those of us who were living a life that our families had no inkling of, a sense of alienation was starting to take hold. While the world seemed to move forward, straight friends and colleagues getting married, having children, setting up home and speaking rapturously about the joys and problems of their lives, we were left to internalise our silences. Even as full-grown adults, our lives felt juvenile and stultified. We were angry, bitter, or just defeated. Friendships started to cave under the pressures of this existence, and a strange loneliness took hold.

This sense of alienation has only been exacerbated with the apps that reign over our lives. We can go through our days now without needing to have a conversation—groceries , food ꦚand clothes delivered at our doorstep. There is no need to smile at a stranger anymore, no need to ask how one is doing, no accountability towards people we know. After all, aren’t we updated by their social media feeds? Apps for dating and sex, while increasing access and legitimising our desires, have also minimised chances of companionship. All it takes to block someone out is a single tap. In the queer world, where relationships had higher barriers and needed more concerted effort anyway, apps have turned us into commodities of momentary pleasure. I’m not moralising, everyone should enjoy good sex! But we do also need to stand back and ask, what comes after the ejaculation? What remains once we’ve left the bed?

𝕴Queer people have always been at the risk of mental health and wellbeing. Shame, self-doubt, childhood trauma, family disappointments, social erasure —it’s a lot for a little life to take. People love a happy ending, but I’m not going to give them that here. Our challenges to place ourselves in this world continue, regardless of laws or generations or movements. But perhaps what has changed the most is that we now have language—the vocabulary to describe who we are, to articulate our needs, and most importantly, the golden word of them all—“no”. So much of the queer experience through the ages has been the inability to say “no”, and I see more and more of us standing up for ourselves and refusing to take insults and ostracisation. And even though a lot of this language is in vogue in urban spaces and in English, the beauty of that little word “no” is that it exists in all languages; all one needs to do is to say it more often. And maybe from those series of “no’s” will one day emerge a “yes”. That’s the hope, at least.

(Views expressed are personal)

Santanu Bhattacharya is the author of the novels one small voice and Deviants

(This article appeared in Outlook’s Valentine’s Day 2025 special issue on love and loneliness in the era of technology. It was published in print as 'Big City Blues')

(This appeared in print as 'Big city blues')