How queer ageing in India unsettles marriage, family, and respectability

In a culture obsessed with age-related milestones such as expecting people to be married by a certain age, have children soon after, and attain stability by midlife, ageing is often imagined as a kind of narrowing down of life’s possibilities. Given the notion that respect is earned through compliance with society, to age “well” is to age predictably.

But queer lives have always sat uneasily with such conventional timelines. With advancing age being closely tethered to marriage, reproduction, and familial duty, queer ageing in India often unfolds without recognised scripts or social reassurance. Many individuals who identify as queer grow up without roadmaps, improvising futures in the absence of visible representation, community, or language. And when those lives stretch into later decades—whether childfree, unmarried, partnered differently, or still figuring things out—the question of ageing becomes not just personal, but political. What does it mean to grow older when you haven’t taken the traditional route? What kinds of companionship sustain you? What does care look like when family, marriage, and heterosexual respectability are no longer guaranteed anchors?

For those who have lived unconventional yet deeply public lives, there is a shared refusal to reduce ageing to either some kind of a decline in aliveness or a triumph earned through survival and having done things right. 

Instead, their stories offer something quieter and more radical: ageing as an ongoing negotiation with loneliness, love, purpose, and responsibility, shaped as much by social structures as by one’s choice. 

Loneliness among ageing queer individuals

Entrepreneur Archana Trasy (she/her, 50s) works in entertainment design and is currently building the AniMela Festival in Mumbai. Across a life shaped by creative work and evolving relationships, she has come to see companionship as something fluid rather than fixed, taking different forms at different times. “Loneliness is a personal feeling,” Archana reflects. “Everyone feels lonely at some point, whether they’re with people or surrounded by them.” For her, companionship has never been a singular thread. Friends, lovers, parents, pets—each has occupied different emotional roles during different phases of her life. “The more you love,” she says simply, “the more companionship you have.”

While Archana reflects on how love and companionship can take many forms, Manvendra Singh Gohil (he/him) approaches the question from the perspective of community and queer elder care in India. As Crown Prince of the erstwhile princely state of Rajpipla and co-founder of Lakshya Trust—one of the first organisations in India to focus on senior LGBTQ+ individuals—he has witnessed how loneliness in old age is often misread as isolation. Many older queer people, he notes, still live with their families—sometimes with wives and children from earlier heterosexual marriages. What they lack is not a roof or routine, but someone from the community to talk to openly, without fear or explanation.

“Loneliness doesn’t always mean isolation,” says Manvendra. “Sometimes it just means not having anyone to speak to honestly.” As many queer people age in these changing times, this absence often manifests in subtle ways. Many have spent years fitting themselves into normative lives, which may take the form of straight-passing marriages, traditional families, or socially sanctioned routines, without fully being able to express who they are. They may live with their legally wedded partners of the ‘opposite gender’, with children, or with extended family, but still crave a space where they can be understood by others who share or validate their experiences.

“We realised that many older queer people don’t need to leave their families, but need someone from the community to talk to and to be seen,” explains Manvendra. Some reach out for companionship, to share ordinary acts like cooking or even cross-dressing in safe spaces—gestures that allow them to express parts of themselves they never had room for earlier. Some are hesitant to seek medical care, and that’s where Lakshya Trust steps in—working with doctors from within the community to ensure safety, dignity, and trust.

Loneliness, in this context, is less about being physically alone and more about the absence of recognition and emotional intimacy. The need for connection, emphasises Manvendra, does not disappear with age, but merely shifts form. Sridhar Rangayan (he/him), filmmaker, festival director, and founder of the KASHISH Pride Film Festival, puts it starkly: “Ageing has taught me that loneliness is not just about being alone—it’s about not being understood.” For decades, queer lives in India were denied compassion or complexity, leaving us with a persistent sense of erasure even in company. Over time, that isolation softened as its meaning shifted. Loneliness, he says, ebbs and flows with age and no longer defines him.

These reflections challenge the idea that loneliness is a personal failing. For ageing queer people, living in a society that still ties care, respect, and legitimacy to traditional family structures, loneliness is often shaped by the world around them, not by themselves. Companionship, understanding, and chosen family then become vital, enabling queer individuals to live fully as themselves.

The many forms of companionship among ageing queer individuals

If loneliness isn’t just the absence of people, companionship isn’t the presence of a partner. Archana is candid about this when she points out that one can feel profoundly lonely even within a relationship. “Feeling lonely in a relationship tells you exactly what it is. No matter how much you try, if the other person isn’t right for you, the connection just doesn’t fill you. You can be in the middle of a crowded room, holding hands with someone, and still feel completely on your own.”

At the same time, Archana refuses to limit companionship to romance or even human company. For decades, her two dogs have been her steadfast companions. “That kind of companionship feels eternal and heavenly—you really can’t compare it to anything human,” she shares. 

Meanwhile, for Sridhar, companionship is inseparable from continuity, shared memory, and long-term presence. His 32-year-long partnership with Saagar (he/him) reflects how ageing as a queer person can be shaped less by intensity than by endurance, by the accumulation of experiences and the depth of understanding that comes from living through decades together.

“A long-term relationship doesn’t merely offer companionship,” says Sridhar, “ but also a sense of belonging. Ageing, for him, has clarified that connection need not be constant to be meaningful. It can live in friendships, in shared work, and in quiet presence. 

The precarity and possibilities of queer ageing

In their paper Growing “Old” as Queer Women in India, scholar Anussha Murali examines how dominant ideas of ageing remain tethered to heteronormative notions of family, marriage, and filial duty, shaping the conditions under which queer ageing in India is recognised or denied. Their research shows that elder respect is often contingent upon adherence to “ideal womanhood,” while older queer women who assert their sexuality or remain outside heterosexual marriage are seen as “obscene or disruptive”. This, in turn, directly affects access to care in later life.

Anussha’s work makes it clear that ageing is shaped by factors such as gender, sexuality, caste, class, and the availability (or absence) of alternative care structures beyond the normative family or neoliberal institutions. Manvendra’s experiences underline this reality further. Loneliness, he warns, can have devastating consequences, including depression and suicidality, particularly within queer communities that lack robust support systems. His insistence on building social support networks early, long before crisis hits, is not just personal advice, but a structural critique.

Archana, too, gestures toward this precarity. “Sometimes we don’t really have a choice and have to survive, work, and build something out of our lives,” she says. Her contentment today, creating events and intellectual property, is hard-won and not the result of ticking off prescribed milestones.

If ageing is often framed as loss of self in service of the larger community or family, Sridhar, Archana, and Manvendra all speak of a shift in purpose instead. For Sridhar, his early years were about visibility and insisting that “we [the queer community] exist”. Today, that urgency has softened and he feels that his purpose lies in responsibility to preserving memory, mentoring younger voices, and creating spaces where others don’t have to begin in isolation.

His films, he reflects, have become an unintended timeline of his own life and of queer India. From moments when visibility itself felt radical, to later conversations about family, dignity, and acceptance, the work mirrors both personal and collective change. 

Manvendra’s work centring on elder care, sexual health, and mental health for older LGBTQ+ individuals challenges the idea that activism belongs only to the young. “Ageing is a reality for everyone. Empathy for older people is not charity, but preparation for one’s own future”, he insists.

Archana’s reflections bring this conversation to a full circle. “Solitude is not something to be avoided. It is essential to knowing and to placing oneself meaningfully in the world.” Age, for her, has brought not diminishment but greater adventure. “The body ages,” she laughs, “but the mind doesn’t.” If anything, confidence and clarity have expanded her sense of possibility.

What emerges from these intertwined lives is not a singular model of queer ageing, but a shared ethic that prioritises dignity over conformity, sustained through chosen family within the LGBTQ+ community. As Anussha’s research reveals, this reimagining is urgent. Without alternative frameworks of care—beyond the normative family or commodified institutions—many older queer people remain vulnerable. 

For queer individuals, ageing doesn’t need to be linear. It can be slower, messier, and more relational, holding solitude and companionship at once. It can insist—quietly but firmly—that a life lived on one’s own terms is not a deviation, but a complete story in itself.

Curated by Gaysi Family