Tag: homosexuality

The Nature of Homophobia

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

We often talk about homophobia as a form of hate directed at queer people. But it’s more than slurs or discrimination—it’s a system. A mindset. A control mechanism. And like all systems of control, it does more than hurt the visible target; it quietly damages everyone.

Here are five insights about homophobia we rarely say out loud—but should.

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  1. Homophobia doesn’t just harm queer people—it limits everyone

Most people assume that if you’re straight, homophobia doesn’t touch your life. That’s a lie. Because homophobia is what tells straight men they can’t cry or hold their male friends too long. It’s what forces women to perform femininity in a way that pleases the male gaze. It’s what turns love into a cage of rules. If queerness were allowed to breathe freely, so would everyone else.

Homophobia is the reason intimacy and vulnerability feel dangerous—even for those who claim they’re not affected.

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  1. It’s not innate—it’s learned, imposed, and policed

No child is born homophobic. Look at history. Look at indigenous cultures, ancient civilisations, or even pre-colonial societies. Queer relationships were present, accepted, sometimes revered. It was colonialism, religion, and politics that began to weaponise sexuality.

What’s sold as “tradition” is often just trauma dressed up in ritual. The fact that homophobia looks different in different places—and changes over time—tells you everything. It isn’t natural. It’s curated.

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  1. The fear of queerness often reveals a fear of the self

There’s a reason some of the loudest anti-LGBTQ+ voices crumble under scandal. Homophobia can be projection. A desperate attempt to silence the parts of ourselves we’re too afraid to face. Society teaches us to repress desire, to hide softness, to punish difference.

So many people fight queerness not because they truly hate it, but because they’re terrified it lives inside them. That’s the quiet tragedy at the heart of this hatred—it’s often self-directed.

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  1. ‘Tolerance’ is not kindness—it’s control

“I don’t mind gay people, as long as they don’t shove it in my face.” How many times have we heard that? What they’re really saying is: “You can exist, but only on my terms.” Tolerance is the cousin of condescension. It assumes superiority. It keeps power in the hands of those doing the ‘tolerating.’

Queer people don’t need tolerance. They need equity. They need liberation. Tolerance is a ceiling—acceptance is when you tear the roof off.

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  1. Homophobia isn’t about sex. It’s about power

What scares people isn’t just who we love—it’s what our love disrupts. Queer people break the mould. We expose how flimsy the rules are. Patriarchy depends on obedience, on rigid roles, on the illusion of “normal.” Queerness dissolves all that.

This is why homophobia exists: to keep the world in its old shape. Not because queer love is unnatural, but because it is radically, beautifully ungovernable.

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To truly understand homophobia is to see it not as a personal failing or an ugly opinion—but as a system designed to control how all of us live, love, and express who we are.

And the more we dismantle it, the more room we create for everyone to breathe.

Intimacy

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

Growing up, I received a lot of physical affection from my grandmother and one of my aunts, on a daily basis. My father was an alcoholic and from the age of 13-18, I lived in absolute terror of his presence. Long story short, he was abusive. My mom was a single parent for all aims and purposes and she was too independent and driven to pay much attention to physical intimacy. She herself came from a home where her childhood was not a very affectionate one.

I realised I was homosexual at the age of 12. I craved for affection from another man. It wasn’t the fact that I lacked love. The complexity of emotion was far deep-seated and interwoven with pathology. I wanted the care and affection of another man – especially since I was gay. It was something as slight as putting his arm around my shoulders or holding my hand as a sign of bestowing importance and love.

It is somewhat tragic that I belong to a generation where I didn’t grow up too fast but learnt faster. Through my formative years, technology’s advancement was progressive and not radical, so I always felt out of place and alienated. I fought for my place in the world, and it feels like I am still fighting a losing battle against a backward mindset. I fell in love with men whose languages of love were no where close to intimate gestures – and the ones who were intimate ended up breaking my heart abruptly in a matter of years. The devastation that the latter inflicted left even deeper scars than those left by my father.

Relationships can be exacting, because they evolve, too. The tragic part is this: during the romantic phase where the other is trying to impress and gain my love, the affection and the intimacy pours out in a flood. It is my foolhardiness encased in romanticism that make me believe that this is not a phase. That this will not change in time. There are moments that bring in undiluted bliss and security. That is how I get pulled into the world that I wanted, because that is all I can see at that given moment in time.

Yesterday, conversing with my lover, I mentioned to him how he appeared to me in chats during the initial phases of our relationship. I said jokingly, this is how you sucked me in. He retorted, you should then have had sense to see how any relationship would start. You should not have allowed yourself to get sucked in. That struck home. There are glimpses of people we see, that they do not realise they are showing. Again, the romantic in me looks at the larger picture. There is of course the fear of abandonment and separation anxiety, because I love forever. It gets hard to be exacting.

So I step back and I sacrifice. I am the first to make my fear and desire known. However, I also realise that the cycle of any relationship is thus… Or are there truly relationships which remain steeped in the romance that they were born into? It is a complicated question. A woke Gen-z would state that I need to put my own needs first. But I also realise that any relationship is made up of at least two people. I have learnt through learning, understanding and observing that relationships should last even through things when they aren’t fun or easy.

Being an out gay man since the age of 16, I must also point out one thing that happens particularly with homosexual men. Since my family knows about me and has come to accept me completely over the years (I wouldn’t have it any other way, much to the chagrin of my sister), the men I fall in love with see me in my home. They see all my moods, my highs, my lows and my outbursts. And with me being me, quintessentially, I make no compunctions to hide who I am right from the start. So all my lovers see what they will get.

I, on the other hand, only see the best of them for the initial months. They enter my personal spaces. I never enter into theirs. So I never get the chance to see them lose their cool with their family members. I never see the way they interact with the people they profess to love and who are linked to them by blood. This happens very gradually for me. All I get to see is the excess of their love. When that thaws, I have already been drawn in, hook, line and sinker. So when they actually start treating me as family, I realise how they actually interact when the romance dies down.

My lover said one thing to me some time back. “I am not afraid of you anymore.” He comes from a patriarchal mind-set and his earlier partners have all been authority figures, who placed him in the back seat. So, when I love him wholly and completely, he sees me as an equal. It is ironic, yes. I would like all the woke people out there to read ‘afraid’ as ‘in awe’. All our illusions dwindle away, in the second year of the relationship.

How many of us make it through the third, without recrimination and with the realisation that the person we are in love with is human, and not Eros, we all set out to be initially?

A Lover vs A Friend

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

There’s a syntax that happens when people fall in love. Their friends feel like subordinate clauses. As it should happen when people fall in love, their lovers become a priority. Most friends feel alienated.

In the modern world, where the need for self worth is all consuming, the necessity for the Self to feel secure and by default the friendships one already has an extension to the Self, become paramount. The love relationship then becomes of second nature. Something that is breakable and by default is transitory and thus needs secondary attention.

However, when marriage is in the picture all the other priorities become less significant – to a degree and for a certain period of time. Because marriage involves society and other relationships. In a gay relationship, where marriage isn’t the be all and end all, the validity of love becomes subservient to time and other human equations. And in a country where there are no gay marriages, gay relationships become temporary even in the eyes of the gay vox populi.

Gay friends speak of the love between two queer people frivolously. There are aspersions to the validity of the love itself, considering the amount of sex that is available out there in the community. Hurrah, for the sex. But the point I try to make is that sex is often seen as the be all and end all of a love relationship. Most people forget about the word “love” itself.

I will be the first to admit that love is a complicated emotion. Understanding it is probably futile. Thus, one can only feel it and the abstraction that it creates is inexplicable. One of the reasons why it’s so easy to think of it as not worth the bother. Sex is simpler. Easier. And people who have not felt the abstraction can only equate it to what is practical and attainable.

This I find bothersome.

What one must remember is that romance doesn’t last. Love does. Sex may or may not last. Love does. There are no two ways about it. When one feels, and when one feels deeply, the emotion penetrates the tangible heart. It manifests therein like a living, breathing thing. And as the passion and the romance wanes, the friendships return to their own spaces. They may come in a bit singed, if they don’t understand what love is. And if they themselves have loved, the singe heals. Love finds its own grooves and alcoves.

If only friends understood this. Friends and lovers. Each have their own spaces. Their own gardens. Their own gazebos. In the same heart.