This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center
Maya Sharma, a gender rights activist and writer, visited many old age homes in Gujarat and New Delhi but did not find one that suits her needs. Some were not clean enough, others were too expensive or expected residents to follow religious rituals. But the biggest hurdle was that none of them felt safe enough to let her live her life as a queer person.
Now 71 years old, Maya has been thinking of moving to an old age home for more than five years. Since 2020, her search has become more urgent, hastened by some experiences during the pandemic—when she and her partner shivered with high fevers due to COVID-19, when she slipped in her bathroom and bruised her foot, and when she could not recall the names of close friends she met after a of couple years. The lapse of memory was “embarrassing,” Maya told me.
Although Maya currently lives with her partner in Vadodara, she anticipates spending later years of her life by herself in an old age home. For her this would be a place that can care for her, where she can read and write quietly, and where she does not have to hide her queer identity. So far, this idyll exists only in her imagination. She has found no place which would “validate us,” she told me.
Maya’s siblings are scattered across the world, and her son from an earlier marriage lives in Delhi. Maya knows that these family members will take care of her but she is reluctant to be a burden on them. Moreover, she does not feel comfortable returning to heterosexual systems of living. She thinks that these systems may still not accept her and might be too rigid for her to be and express herself. “I chose a different path earlier on,” she said. In the 90s, Maya walked out of her marriage with a cis-man in Rajasthan. She described the marriage as “cloistered and closeted.” She turned to the women’s movement to find her community and a little later fell in love with a woman.
Queer persons who leave or are forced out of their parental homes at an early age, or walk out of non-queer marriages, leave behind the conventional support systems. Their lives can become more uncertain when it comes to forming relationships and finding communities that will last into sunset years.
Maya said that just being queer could sometimes limit their support options as they plan their future. “Jo heterosexual log hain, unke liye aisa deewar hai jo woh pakad ke khade ho sakte hai. Bahut thos hai, bahut nazar mein aati hai. Humare jo saharein hain woh thos nahi hai.” (Heterosexual people have some sort of a visible support system around them, like a solid wall, which they can hold on to. Our support systems are not as sturdy.)
I spoke to many queer people, most of whom were 50-years-old or above. Many of them said that anxiety about personal and institutional support structures, failing health, shrinking livelihood options, imminent loneliness and the feeling of being invisible in India’s LGBTQIA+ community, largely perceived as young, were some of their common concerns about aging in the country.
In 2020, a study was published on the mental health of middle-aged and older queer men in India. The study is an outlier in academic research. Social science research about queer people in India is rare and older queer persons remain underrepresented in this small universe. The study said that more than 60% of the participants reported feeling lonely. “A feeling of alienation, particularly from the heterosexual universe, was very common,” the study stated.
That feeling of alienation can persist in old age homes as well. These institutions tend to follow culturally normative societal standards, said Raj Mariwala, director of Mariwala Health Initiative in Mumbai, which provides accessible mental health services to marginalised communities including LGBTQIA+ persons. This default mode of operation forces some queer persons to grapple with questions that heterosexual people would not have to ask themselves. Can they access these homes based on their gender? Can they live there with their partner? Can they expect privacy? Can trans women access cis-women’s shelters? “A shelter home can itself be a hostile space,” Raj said.
Sometimes this hostility takes the form of probing questions. In 2015, the organisation LABIA—short for Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action, a collective of lesbians, bisexuals and trans men—published an anthology of stories called Labia Presents: Bees Saal Baad: Sangam Se Subversion Tak. One chapter narrates an uncomfortable interaction between two queer women in their 70s and the residents of an old age home they were considering moving into. The women wrote, “While screening us, they are most interested in how we are related to each other. So starts a barrage of questions.
Are you sisters? No.
So then you must be cousins? No.
Distant relatives? No, we are not related in any way, we are friends.
For how long have you been friends? Since a long time, we have been working together.
You must be living with your families? No.
Do you live close to each other? Exasperated, our curt reply comes — We live together — abruptly putting an end to the conversation.”
That single incident, they said, brought up all their anxieties related to the life they had chosen to live.
I spoke to a queer couple who moved into a senior citizen home run by a religious charity on the outskirts of Pune in 2016. They were in their mid-70s. One of the women, who asked to stay anonymous because the couple is not out to their families, told me that although they feel safe in the home, they are not prepared to reveal their sexuality. Residents and staff at the shelter home do not seem open to accepting queer couples, she said.
After joining the women’s movement, Maya became associated with Vikalp Women’s Group, a non-profit organisation that works in western India advocating for the rights of marginalised women and sexual minorities. She became its programme director, conducting workshops in rural Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
“You know I love my work,” she energetically declared once while on a phone call with me. She would sometimes be in the middle of her workshops when I called her. I would see her on Zoom, sitting on the threshold of her house or her office. As she spoke to me, she would sometimes look away from the screen to smile at or speak to her younger colleagues, mostly trans men. She would flick her cropped white hair and laugh at how carefree they were and then would return to our conversation. On my computer screen, her eyes would sometimes appear slightly cloudy behind the iridescence of her glasses. Her voice would choke intermittently due to chronic asthma. “I am scared,” she said. “What if I get bedridden? Will I be taken care of?”