Beyond the LGBTQIA+ stereotypes

Over the years, concrete efforts to publish LGBTQIA+ voices have resulted in a vast, res­ourceful body of work that helps people — queer or cishet, someone who is cisgender and heterosexual — understand and relate to experiences unique to queer individuals. One is tempted to call it mainstreaming of queer subculture. But representation within the LGBTQIA+ spectrum is skewed and, therefore, the notion of queer becoming mainstream remains in the realm of wishful thinking.
 

For one, there’s a flood of narratives by gay men for a variety of reasons. For ano­ther, select books and scholarship have un­knowingly created an environment where everything queer is reduced to sexuality. And further, it is hard to deny the fact many books pander to the cishet gaze – they provide what straight people need: a victim story, a sob story, a story that seeks their help and doesn’t challenge or dismantle their closely held binary worldview.
 

K Vaishali’s Homeless: Growing up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India doesn’t fit any of these stereotypes.  It is at once a humorous and deeply moving book in which truths are told with the abandon of a novelist. Working in a tech company, the author has written a novella before, and her literary works have been shortlisted and longlisted for the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize 2021 and the 2021 Disquiet International Literary Prize.
 

Her memoir begins with the chapter titled “Coming Out”. This process is considered quintessential for a queer person, or so we’re made to believe — though it must be noted that cishet people are not required to come out as straight. But Homeless is not your run-of-the-mill sob story; Vaishali’s coming-out narrative is tragicomic. Though she was disowned by her mother when she informed her that she is a lesbian, she kept wondering if she “even [qualifies] as a lesbian anymore”. As she writes, “I wouldn’t have come out to my mother if I had known my ‘homosexual tendencies’ would regress. I had a comfortable life till I came out to her.”
 

Reading this chapter closely, it is possible to conclude that the book isn’t written to seek acceptance. It was approached with a desire to locate a place that the author could call home. It is not about the label of her sexual orientation but the ingredients of life that make it worth living: love, loss, success, defeat, and, in the face of adversity, hope.
 

This me­m­oir initially started out differently. The author was trying to write a novel, she confesses in the first few chapters. But, she writes, most publishers weren’t interested in a “writer with a writing disorder” beca­use not only is Vaishali a lesbian, she’s also dyslexic. Publishing wasn’t the only institution that disappointed Vaishali. She was often perplexed by the medical fraternity, too.

As she notes, “Funny, the doctor would share the misconception that dyslexics can’t be intelligent, just like when I tell people I have dyslexia and they say — but you are so intelligent — like they are mutually exclusive things.”  She also criticises  Taare Zameen Par for creating a false notion about dyslexia, urging a better way for the creative

industry to engage with the lives of people with both visible and invisible forms of disabilities.
 

A combination of these factors — the (metaphorical) failure to either be a lesbian or become a writer whom publishers were willing to entertain — compelled the author to choose “the convenience of blaming dyslexia and dysgraphia” for her “failures” and begin writing a novel so that it could provide an “effective distraction”.
 

Despite the wry and self-deprecating humour, the family drama that unfolds in this book is far from amusing. Vaishali writes about leaving home 15 times, coping with a relationship where her partner would eventually choose a cishet marriage setup and dealing with an alcoholic parent. All this and much more gives this book a complexity that’s missing in personal narratives by queer people.
 

Note this confession: “I was the peacemaker; everybody liked me because I made everybody like me because I was too scared to throw a punch.” Vaishali is essentially und­erlining the fact that des­pite everything, she tried to assimilate. But that nev­er helps someone who is wired differently in a society that’s built on their erasure.
 

As noted previously, the book progresses as though the author is on a journey to find herself home. She is so intent on telling this story — which includes caste privileges, cities and what makes them likeable, gendered movements and displacements, learning how to wash one’s clothes, living in unhygienic places, and learning about one’s own gaydar — that there app­ears to be no central arg­ument to the book. That’s precisely why it wo­rks: it’s a deliberate critique of a life that cannot choose to exclude diverse viewpoints, different voi­ces, and a variety of experie­nces. If it’s life, then it must encompass everything.
 

In one chapter the author notes that she wants “to write about a character who chooses her own destiny; that’s more interesting and I’d actually want to write about it.” With this book she not only creates that character, but she also manifests everything she wants for the character to materialise for herself. The book is not so much of a celebration of movement as it is about transitioning and identity.  Homeless celebrates all such identities in transition.

The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer