[ A Disabling Disability And Delayed Dating ]
for Gaysi Family
"I exited the ‘warm’ womb of my mother with partial blindness. But it was only after years of experiencing my disability that I grew alive to the phenomenon of ‘delayed experiences’. For example, I obtained my knowledge about and experience of queer dating much later than when I deserved to. Culpable here is not my disability however, it has been the lack of appropriate infrastructure that gave my disability a disabling character.
I was in sixth standard when I accepted my homosexual self. Sometime later, I felt the need to feel the male sex and eventually that for a romantic emotional partner. But this need had to be ignored because I was quick to realise the non-existence of queerness/queer dating in my social landscape, a realisation that let my mind perpetuate the absence more generally and universally. When I was taught sex, it was only in its reproductive manifestation and hence heteronormative. No story in English and Hindi literature had a queer character or couple. I could not use the internet because there always remained the possibility that the option to delete search history would be too small to be visible to my limited vision. On top of this, I had developed a haunting memory of an afternoon when I zoomed in on a man’s picture on Facebook assuming I was alone but soon I identified my brother furtively observing me from a distance. Something like a social gap accompanied partial blindness and hence no friendships for a discussion of what I was understanding as ‘a different sexual urge’.
Later on, at St Stephen’s College, I suddenly became one amongst people that embraced different sexual and gender identities. But it took more than 2 years to be able to talk about my own even here."
Written by: Rakshit Malik
Illustrated by: Jishnu Bandyopadhyay
Read the full article on Gaysi Family here.
