It was October 2020. I don’t know how I made it onto orthodox Hindu TikTok. Perhaps my ethnicity joined forces with my For You Page and worked against me, or I liked too many videos of cute old ladies frying pakoras in their Delhi apartment kitchens. Regardless, I remember distinctly when my feed suddenly filled with young Hindus, all around my age, preaching long sermons about Hinduism being accepting of queerness to justify their notion that Hinduism is objectively the best religion in the world. Their soliloquies were often punctuated by remarks about how gay people have been an essential part of Indian culture for millennia, and their comment sections were filled with angry retorts at anyone who dared to question their gospel.

Fast-forward to last week, when India’s highest court refused to recognize same-sex marriage as legal marriage. People were justifiably outraged and, perhaps less justifiably, shocked. Once again, my social media channels were filled with memes and posts detailing how gayness is so integral to Indian culture, and how a ruling opposing that is absolutely ludicrous. Many of these posts shared photos of homoerotic statues on thousand-year-old temple walls, citing the existence of gender-fluid deities in the Hindu pantheon and the sacred nature of Hijra transgender communities as evidence for the entwinement of Indian culture and queerness over time. These posts were almost always tinged with a vein of superiority, a notion of India’s exemplary nature because it is so pro-queer. And as the posts piled up, so did a sort of déjà vu to my accidental foray into the world of Hindu supremacist TikTok—and during neither occasion did I buy into any of these arguments.

Perhaps this belief stemmed from my experiences as a queer South Asian person who never felt comfortable in any desi space, or the rampant heteronormativity in every aspect of the culture I was told was my own—from the over-the-top love stories of Bollywood films to the lackluster and heavily gendered choreography of the desi fusion dance teams I was told to idolize. But I did not, and do not, agree with the argument that queerness is revered in Indian culture, and that homophobia is against our heritage.

In fact, I find desi culture—if we attempt to shamefully distill a subcontinent with hundreds of ethnic groups and thousands of dialects into a single culture—one of the most heteronormative and anti-queer that I have experienced. Or at least, the imagined Indian-American idea of what desi culture is, which is what the slew of social justice warriors on TikTok and Instagram were referencing. 

Cinema, a cornerstone of this imagined cultural experience, is just about as hetero-centered as it gets. The first major Bollywood film that centered around a queer couple was released within the last five years. Before that, the best representation we got on the silver screen was the 2008 comedy “Dostana,” which takes two hours and 30 minutes of a viewer’s time to feed them a host of punchlines about gay male stereotypes as audiences painfully watch two aggressively straight characters attempt to act like gay lovers to win the love of a woman. Was it funny? Unfortunately, yes. Does it simultaneously represent the rampant homophobia present in desi communities? Also yes.

Dance and music are also key elements of this notion of a unified desi culture, and even in the United States, desi dance is about as heteronormative as art gets. Bollywood fusion dance teams are at the core of the archetypical Indian American youth experience, and these dance teams reinforce anti-queer ideas of living in every aspect of their existence: Auditions are split by gender, choreography is split by gender, costumes are divided by gender, and storylines feature heterosexual love stories 99% of the time. It is baked into the culture of these teams, and thus a large percentage of desi youth, that heterosexuality is normal and deviance is not tolerated, or will at least be masked by an outwardly heterosexual visage. 

And I could go on about classical arts, reality TV, classic amateur-comic punch lines, love song lyrics, gender divisions during religious ceremonies, weddings, or any number of things, but no one will ever read an article that long. So what does all of this have to do with TikTok and marriage equality in India? It demonstrates hypocrisy: the externally promoted notion that Indian culture is queer-friendly versus the continuous reproduction of anti-queer values within the culture, by the people who create and sustain the culture that they so love to preach about. 

First off, this myth of pro-queerness isn’t true. I think I have made it abundantly clear that heteronormativity is the assumption in South Asian spaces as much as it is in others. Beyond this, India’s majority political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is outwardly homophobic, and millions of members of our so-called culture support the party’s rhetoric. Queer communities in India like hijras, kinnars, and many others are marginalized and forced into begging or sex work to sustain themselves due to employment discrimination. Symbols of gender fluidity, like the multi-gender religious figure of Ardhanarishvara, have been co-opted by the right to justify binary notions of gender. Clearly, our culture, religion, and political environment is not truly queer-friendly, despite what many preach.

But second of all, our collective failure to acknowledge the homophobia that festers in our communities allows this hate to survive, thrive, and be reproduced by generation after generation. If we choose to live and believe the myth that Indian culture is decidedly pro-queerness, then we resign ourselves to the notion that the anti-queer nature of our communities is the best we can do. And perhaps I am too optimistic, but I would like to believe that we can do better.

I want my kids to experience a South Asian culture that will accept them for whomever they may be. I want to be able to live within a South Asian culture that makes me feel truly loved, accepted, and normal. But that is not what our communities are right now, and we must begin acknowledging this fact, rather than hiding behind temple sculptures and photographs of hijra women. Perhaps if we all stopped attempting to assert our superiority or plead our innocence, we would all be better off.

So stop and think, before you post your next little infographic from Brown Girl Magazine on your story, about if you really believe that our culture isn’t homophobic, or believe that it does not need interrogating and reforming. Before you like that TikTok about the god Vishnu changing genders to become the seductress Mohini, take a moment to ponder how maybe your culture needs internal surgery before its strength and superiority is presented to the outside world. And before you act shocked that desi people can be rampantly homophobic, remember that India’s Supreme Court, with the support of the country’s ruling political party, just refused to legalize gay marriage.

Akhil Joondeph is a member of the class of 2026 can be reached at ajoondeph@wesleyan.edu.