Since the lockdown, queer individuals have expressed concern over their safety. This concern is not unfounded. Several queer individuals are quarantining with their families of origin, or other invalidating families/roommates and are experiencing higher levels of harassment, invisibility and dysphoria. Physical spaces of safety and solidarity with the community have not been accessible due to the lockdown.
Even in “normal” times, members of the queer community experience a higher rate of health and mental health concerns than their heterosexual counterparts, due to a kind of stress known as ‘minority stress’. One of the ways minority stress is experienced is because one’s lived experience contrasts with cis-gendered heterosexual value system. This value system often leaves queer people on the margins, with hardly any access to healthcare, education and other important institutions like education or banking and financial systems.
The queer community, however, has been resisting systemic discrimination in many ways. Many experts draw parallels between the HIV AIDS epidemic and COVID-19 pandemic, for the manner in which health crises amplify and exacerbate existing inequalities.
The 1980s AIDS crisis first disproportionately affected gay men, and then persons of colour and the transgender community. In response to the government inaction, the queer community developed their own parallel healthcare and support organizations. The queer community also challenged the manner in which drugs were developed and procured. The community also united and challenged existing healthcare systems by engaging in sustained action.
Coping mechanisms are conscious efforts that people take with the purpose of dealing with a problem. Coping hence comes from the position of individual responsibility.
For example, when one goes for a walk when feeling stressed or when one smokes before an important meeting, both of these are coping mechanisms. Coping mechanisms, however, completely ignore the context of the person and resources available to them. These resources could be social, mental, economic and political support, skills, strengths that assist the person’s/ community’s well-being.
What one does to survive in the face of oppression, however, cannot be
called coping.
bell hooks, in her book (which is based on the Sojourner Truth’s speech of the same name) ‘Ain’t I a woman‘, said that, “Usually when people talk about the strength of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that coping in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.”
Overcoming oppression by its very nature means understanding who caused the oppression, for what purpose and who maintains the power. The suffering caused by oppressive structures affects large groups of people at once; hence, the suffering is collective. Therefore, the solutions need to be collective as well. In his book ‘McMindfulness‘, Ronald Pursuer talks about how corporations have coopted mindfulness to make employees “live in the moment” and not question their bosses.
This has erased the Buddhist idea of collective suffering and “sangha” or one’s friends on the journey to emancipation. He states “Unless it raises awareness of the social origin of suffering, mindfulness is merely self-management, locating problems in the heads of the individual. This makes the collective solution we need a lot less likely.”
Thus, capitalism has taken a collective idea of solidarity in suffering and twisted it such that mindfulness becomes yet another tool to make people keep quiet in the face of oppression.
Often we see parallels of this, especially in mental health care or while referring to queer peoples’ suffering in times of lockdown. The tonality conveys that queer people suffer more because they are queer when the truth is that they suffer because the world is biased. The responsibility of the suffering is on the biased system and not on the individual’s queerness.
In speaking to six queer people, we realized that isolation is not actually a very new experience for them. One of our participants, Shruta, 34, cis bisexual, a research manager working with Humsafar Trust, said “Our lockdown is worse but our resilience is also higher, which is why we are less affected than cishet people”.
“Systems have intentions – for example, police will call us out more often, systems are just meant for certain people, certain genders, certain sexualities – it is so much more and beyond this particular isolation experience, it just more and more visibilizes the wrong, the ignorance, the subjugation”, this was echoed by two of our participants.
Also one participant R, 33, identifying as cis queer, said that, “Oppression is so big and I don’t even know how much I am oppressed to see a life away from it. Just the term Queer has been such a journey to my experiences of who I am. But I have to use words to express my feelings and my experiences need to be visibly politicized so that I can access something that I don’t even know and then someone tells you this is what you are is an exhausting experience.“
The participants also spoke of some reflections that the lockdown has made them have. “I think I always know that I have all the rights. Everyone around me has it. It was when they were taken away that it made me feel I was different and that there will be discrimination and I have to fight for it”, said Aditi, a cis lesbian woman.
“I realized I deserve every right when I fell in love with a woman. Before that, I was like I don’t have to worry because I am a bisexual, but later I know I have some privileges at one end and on the other, there is a fight. I learnt this and it was a great experience to realize this. I am since then taking smaller steps like the decision to be a therapist, opening up conversations, deconditioning, reaching out to more and more queer people to contribute to the movement”, said Lajya, 23, cis- queer.
Lastly, Shruta also spoke of some hopeful observations. In her work with the community, she has observed that online spaces like TikTok and Grindr are doubling up as safe spaces for young queer and trans people. Gay men’s WhatsApp groups that would earlier be useful only for dating are turning into spaces where people are checking in on each other, sharing recipes and just simply helping each other hold on.
The narrative of the people of the community shows that while the oppression has multiplied, the resistance towards it has also been old and well known. A huge part of the problem comes from being on the margin because even in the times of lockdown, the service providers still prefer cis-het people. Ways of overcoming that were available before the lockdown have now been taken away, and so people from the community are going back to the ways of resisting that they used before coming out or before having community support.
By Aryan Somaiya