Legal sanctions permit little, if any, breathing room for queer intimacies. And yet, such experiences of desire survive in silos, real-world or digital. Cybercafes, anonymous chat rooms, and dimly-lit apartments are all witness to the loneliness epidemic — exacerbated all the more for queer folks despite recent protections. Taking us through his own closed-door experiences with sexuality as a gay Dalit man, Gowthaman mediates on what it means for the law to respond to loneliness on a collective scale, an inexorable thing which must not — and cannot — always end in tragedy.
Dear Justices of the Supreme Court of India,
It is not unprecedented for Your Lordships to receive letters. Through epistolary jurisdiction in the 1970s and 1980s, this court opened its doors to the most marginalised citizens, considering their letters as petitions. Today, I write in that tradition, knowing that even if my letter has no procedural future, it may still have a life in the Court’s archives.
In this letter, I testify to loneliness; mine and that of other men like me.
Even as loneliness causes despair, it gently pushes us to imagine other worlds — in which we delight in the company of others. While some have succumbed to loneliness, others have tended to it by creating precarious, fragile, fleeting, cruising moments, or made it ecstatic by walking together through hostile streets.
This court has affirmed the right to love, but what of our loneliness?
The petitioner’s lawyer in Navtej Johar v Union of India, challenging India’s anti-sodomy law, asked this court, “How strongly must we love, knowing we are unconvicted felons under section 377?” In response, this court has declared us — sexual dissidents — as equal subjects, affirming our right to love.
Perhaps this court hoped that love would conquer our loneliness.
Yet, seven years after the Navtej Johar case, queer people in India remain in its grip. Love conquers all, they say, but loneliness lingers, teases and torments. It is the ultimate lover. The question, then, is this: How strongly must we feel lonely, in order to imagine our world differently?
Your Lordships, as a gay Dalit man, I am intimately familiar with how caste and sexuality shape loneliness. I grew up in the 1990s, without a vocabulary to describe my sexuality. I sought others like me through anonymous chat rooms on grainy computer screens at local cyber cafes. My queerness was forged in the emptiness of endless scrolls through chat rooms, punctuated by the fleeting thrill of meeting someone else like myself.
Flickering computer screens were not my only companions through adolescence. There were the small corners of newspapers that carried men’s underwear ads. Later, there were the sexpert columns that gave me the word ‘gay’.
Eventually, I met strangers through online websites, for fleeting sexual encounters. These meetings were a heady mix of pleasure and danger, and when my body stopped tingling with these sensations, loneliness returned. It formed me; how could I cast it away? What would be left of me?
My experience of caste made my intimacy with loneliness stronger. In school, even as I was making sense of my unrequited feelings for a boy in my class, another boy’s derisive ‘chhee’ on finding out that I was from a scheduled caste, covered my fearful, lonely body in shame. Perhaps the chhee stayed in my body to make me believe that I was dirty and ugly. I learned to pull my sleeves down to hide my dark-skinned, hairy arms.
I easily disliked my body and am learning to love it now. It’s hard.
Years after the chhee, when I entered gay parties, I felt my undesirability. The dance floor in a gay club is supposed to be liberatory, but when I saw sexy men make out in the middle of it, I was reminded of my perceived undesirability. Wouldn’t that make one feel lonely? I stayed away from the parties. It would be many more years before I understood that desirability seems to be a stand-in for caste
Loneliness, Your Lordships, is not mine alone. It moves between and beyond bodies, across time. It has travelled through
men cruising in public spaces, knowing each other only by their initials,
Professor Siras, found dead after a television crew intruded and filmed him with his saathi in 2010,
Pushkin Chandra and Kuldeep Singh, whose murders in 2004 were framed by the media as a clandestine affair,
a gay man awaiting Bombay Dost, a 1990s magazine, at a PO box away from his house,
men arrested for desiring other men in Hassan, Karnataka, in 2013,
those seeking love online, ensnared in the ‘Boyfriend Scam’, losing money and dignity to scamsters masquerading as lovers stuck at Indian airports, in 2021.
Loneliness shifts shape.
It is
of the closet
and of not having a closet
of borders
and border crossings
of prison cells
and crowded streets
of togetherness
and separation
and the loneliness of waiting —
always waiting — before the law.
We wait to be free — free from our loneliness, despite the Delhi High court’s decision in Naz Foundation v NCT of Delhi that decriminalised homosexuality. We waited through this court’s 2013 decision in Suresh Kumar Koushal that recriminalised homosexuality. We wait despite this court’s recognition of the right to love in Navtej Johar in 2018.
Loneliness will outwait love; it outweighs the law. And yet, I thought that the law could heal my loneliness. People walked in pride marches, sought legal reforms and created queer art and literature. I participated in all this, hoping that my fearful, lonely, shameful self would heal.
What if it is not love that brings us together, but loneliness?
And loneliness must be heard. It is full of potential even as it holds the power to destroy. So, I listened to it. In one instance, this meant attending to a recurring dream: one set in the modest Mumbai apartment where my queerness emerged in the late 1990s. The place shapeshifted in my dreams, but when I woke up, I knew where it was. I wanted to see it one last time — I wanted the dream to stop.
It was a pilgrimage of sorts. I took the Mumbai local and landed at Mulund station. After a glass of sugarcane juice and vada pao near the now-dilapidated Mehul Talkies, I made my way to the apartment. Most of the modest neighbouring buildings had been replaced by high rises and my small, three-storied apartment complex would most likely not be able to withstand the might of the Mumbai builders much longer. I sat at the water tank, the rhythmic whirring of which was my childhood’s soundscape. I walked through the dark corridors of the building to the third floor, past electricity meters and a handwritten nameboard from 20 years ago.
I left after a short walk in the neighbourhood. I don’t know what I was seeking but when I left, I felt free. It felt like my broken queer heart had reconstituted itself into a kaleidoscope. I gathered the courage to pacify the young, femme queer boy with a twinkle in his eye, who once lived here. The dreams stopped.
The trip moved me to write two short stories. One story is set in the suburban Mumbai neighbourhood I describe here, and the other in a monsoon-stained apartment, late at night, with the radio playing.
I have begun repair by weaving stories. But what of those who are still living these feelings? As people with desires that they are told to keep at bay, what of our collective loneliness?
This Court has understood love and extended protections for it, but can it understand the loneliness of those who carry ‘dangerous’ desires?
More recently, petitioners approached this Court seeking the right to marry for same-sex couples. The hope was that marriage would be the ultimate escape from loneliness. I am not here to ask you to not allow marriage for everyone. That is something this Court has decided in the negative in Supriyo v Union of India and the tide might turn on it in the future.
But can you write a judgment that can wish away our collective loneliness?
Can your ink heal the heartbreak of those whose partners were killed in honour killings?
Even if we navigate caste and overcome legality to build a loving relationship, loneliness does not vanish. I met my boyfriend six years ago at an intersection of seven roads, in a foreign land; we almost missed each other due to a failed internet connection. Recently, while writing this piece, I asked him whether he feels lonely. “Of course, I do,” he said. We both do.
But what I have learnt is to not expect another person to erase my loneliness.
We have created space for loneliness to exist in our relationship. Perhaps I owe this to the Gibran poem I once read repeatedly, trying to unlearn from the all-consuming relationships of my past: let there be spaces in your togetherness.
Loneliness will exist as long as humans exist. It will hopefully urge us towards building worlds where we nurture and care for others. It will push us towards horizons we haven’t reached — better, more utopian ones.
And for this Court to attend to loneliness seriously would mean many things — it could be to take suffering seriously, as it has done in the past, or to attend to letters from prisoners and bonded labourers, offering glimpses of justice that outweigh the law.
But it could also mean reckoning with this Court’s limitations.
May this testimony remain in the Court’s record, marking both — what the law can hold of loneliness and what it cannot.
Yours truly,
A Lonely Petitioner
19/01/2026
Acknowledgements: I thank Shabani, Juhi and Ishani from The Third Eye for outstanding editorial direction. I thank Ashwini and Srikara from the Dhwani Legal Trust, who invited me to speak on law and loneliness for their Valentine’s Day series in 2025; the talk has now taken the form of this piece. Thanks to Julie Scesney, Kalie Jamieson and Sarah Han for engaging with earlier drafts of this piece.
References:
Articles and Books
- Ambedkar, B. R. The Annihilation of Caste. New York: Columbia University, 2004.
- Baxi, Upendra. ‘Taking Suffering Seriously: Social Action Litigation in the Supreme Court of India.’ Third World Legal Studies 4 (1985): Article 6.
- Chaudhary, Shraddha. ‘Navtej Johar v. Union of India: Love in Legal Reasoning.’ NUJS Law Review 12, no. 3–4 (2019): 3–4.
- Cvetkovich, Ann. ‘Billy‑Ray Belcourt’s Loneliness as the Affective Life of Settler Colonialism.’ Feminist Theory 23, no. 1 (2022): 93–108.
- Mandal, S. (2023). The Supreme Court’s Marriage Equality Verdict. Economic and Political Weekly, 58(43), 8-9.
- Mosley, William H. ‘Ecstatic Loneliness: Black genders and the politics of affect in Mykki Blanco’s ‘Loner’.’ Feminist Theory 23, no. 1 (2022): 76–92.
- Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
- Narrain, Arvind and Alok Gupta, eds. Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011.
- Orr, Celeste E and Shoshana Magnet. ‘Feminist Loneliness Studies: An Introduction.’ Feminist Theory 23, no. 1 (2022): 3–22.
- Pattanaik, Devdutt. ‘Death of the Gay Man.’ In Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India, edited by Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005.
- Wilkinson, Eleanor. ‘Loneliness Is a Feminist Issue’. Feminist Theory 23, no. 1 (2022): 23–38.
Cases
- Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India, 1984 AIR 802.
- Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi, 2009 (6) SCC 712.
- Suresh Kumar Koushal v. Naz Foundation, (2014) 1 SCC 1.
- Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, AIR 2018 SC 1601.
- Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, (2018) 10 SCC 1.
- Supriyo @ Supriya Chakraborty & Anr. v. Union of India, 2023 INSC 920.
Online articles/news
- Doctor, Vikram. ‘How two events in Delhi and Mumbai helped gay men realise the law on homosexuality had to change.’ Scroll.in, August 21, 2024.
- Hobbes, Michael. ‘The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness.’ Highline – The Huffington Post, March 02, 2017.
- Jyoti, Dhrubo. ‘Protest In Bangalore Against Arrest of 13 Gay Men Under Sec 377.’ Gaylaxy Magazine, November 15, 2013.
- Manivannan, Srivatsan. ‘Who is the lonely queer Indian?’ DailyO, July 04, 2017.
- Miller, Ben. ‘Gay Loneliness Is Real—but “Bitchy, Toxic” Culture Isn’t the Full Story.’ Slate, March 7, 2017.
- Shahani, Parmesh. 2020. ‘The Prehistory of the Queer Internet: Queerness and Technology Have Such an Exciting Relationship.’ Scroll, May 21, 2020.
- Tiwari, Aditya. ‘A loneliness epidemic is taking over queer lives in semi‑urban India.’ The News Minute, September 26, 2022.
- Ranganathan, Gowthaman Saroja. ‘Re-imagining LGBT Futures: Can Marriage Be Reclaimed to Annihilate Caste?’ In Plainspeak (blog), TARSHI. Accessed December 10, 2025.
- Chandran, Vinay. ‘My Boyfriend is a Scam.’ Orinam, April 7, 2010.
- Bombay Dost. ‘History.’ Bombay Dost. Accessed November 26, 2025.
Poetry and Fiction
- ‘Before the Law.’ Kafka‑online.info. Accessed November 26, 2025.
- Gibran, Kahlil. ‘On Marriage.’ Poetry Foundation. Accessed November 26, 2025.
- Ranganathan, Gowthaman. ‘Cane Juice.’ ASAP Connect, December 30, 2022.
- Ranganathan, Gowthaman. ‘On the Radio.’ Orinam, November 17, 2024.
