“Coming out,” says Vikram Sundarraman, an LGBTQ activist at Nirangal, popularly known to friends and family as Delfina, “is constructed as one particular event in a person’s life as if there exists a defining point of ‘coming out’, while in truth, it is actually a process of a person coming to terms with the concept of identity and sexual orientation.” Delfina, who is gender fluid, points out that the problem arises because people have been trained to think only in binaries like male and female; even the term transgender is coined in relation to the traditional sexes. “When I was in kindergarten, teachers made observations like he does not mingle or get along with other boys. From a very young age, I didn’t conform to the idea of being either masculine or feminine. I was trying to navigate through this but did not have the tools, words or terminology for it,” says Delfina. Questioning the need for gendering pronouns in the first place, Delfina says, “In Tamil, we have avan (him) or aval (her) and we also have the common avanga (them). Why do we need gendered pronouns for sexual orientation when we don’t have them for people with say, different hair or eye colour?” Namithaa Jayasankar, who is 24 years old, chooses to identify herself as pansexual and gender fluid. Asked if she always understood her sexuality, she thanks her luck for having access to all the right resources she needed to figure out what she was going through. The realisation wasn’t out of the blue, nor was it something that needed further exploration on her part. “My parents, they know, to an extent. We have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” she says. It wasn’t all a bed of roses, however. “Some of the people I came out to unfriended me or avoided me. But I wasn’t too affected. They saved me the trouble of having to unfriend them myself later, after they did any emotional damage,” she says, adding, “People who wouldn’t associate with me because of my sexuality were people whom I had no desire to be associated with.” For 22-year-old Sridhar R, a student at the Madras School of Social Work, the reason for coming out was two-fold. First, he wanted people to understand him completely and second, he felt the need to put an end to badgering questions from peers about his lack of interest in relationships and girls. “The first question they always asked once I came out to them was about my sexual life. They reduced the scope of my identity to my sexual preference,” he says. Sridhar, however, hasn’t come out to his family yet, pushing it to when he finishes his education. “There will come a time when they will want me to get married and settle down. That is probably the right time for me to come out. Hopefully by then, I will be able to support myself better, both emotionally and financially,” he says, adding that the hesitancy in coming out increases because people feel it would affect their siblings’ marriage prospects and a place in ‘accepted’ society. The recent decriminalisation of homosexuality prompted another member of the community, who wished to remain anonymous, to come out as gay on social media Soon, many people on his Facebook friends list reached out to him with their own stories and questions about coming out. So what helps is legal support. After all, it is difficult to come out if the closet seems a better place to live in.

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