At a memorial held for a queer person we lost to an instance of homophobic and transphobic violence in Pune last year, a close friend of the deceased while addressing a roomful of grieving folks asked, “Where was the queer community when he needed us? Does the queer community really even exist?”
Indeed, given the historical deprivation, does a queer community really exist as a material, social, and psychological support system beyond a common identification based solely on gender and sexual identity?
Kinship, which subsumes marriage and family organisation, provides the language for entitlements to various kinds of resources including food, shelter, health, security, support and companionship, and the obligations and responsibilities of the members of the group in the business of living.
As is amply evident from the submissions made in the Centre’s response, marriage has historically been imagined as a heterosexual union between a “biological" man and a woman. Queer people have, thus, been excluded from these networks of organising resources and responsibilities for centuries. While the Centre gravitates towards looking at this systematic exclusion and erasure as natural as well as utilitarian, we must ask what the costs of securing such a system are.