Excerpt: Unashamed: Notes From the Diary of a Sex Therapist

‘I want to tell our son that I’m gay and

that my wife knows.’

On coming out to the family as a sixty-year-old queer Indian man

An Indian father’s love isn’t something that’s easily translatable to words. Our urban Indian cultural mainstream is not a very verbose setting, unlike the white American TV sitcoms that so many of us have grown up watching. Even though young Indian people are increasingly seeking out the language for expressing emotional care and sorting out conflict, this is not really a society where we’ve been taught to sit at dinner tables and express, dissect or even process our innermost feelings for each other, especially when those feelings might be about our own biological family.

Familial love here is assumed, expected and required—and is demonstrated in non-verbal ways in most normative Indian families. Many generations of Indians accept this unspoken rule without challenge. It is considered common knowledge that you aren’t supposed to question what is culturally assumed to be obviously given to you by your family. It is common to hear statements such as ‘Of course your mother loves you—how can you even doubt that?

And why would she ever need to say it to you? You should already know it.’ And if, for whatever reason, you do happen to question this assumption—especially if, unfortunately, you were born to a not very loving Indian mother or father—you should expect to be seen as the problem for even daring to want more. ‘How dare you be so ungrateful?’ is a very common statement in many Indian families. Let’s look at it from the other side for a minute. Parenting in India, unlike its white-Western counterpart, is a socially approved twenty- five-year project. Culturally, Indian parents experience immense social ostracization and gossip, classism, caste-based oppression and more if their children don’t turn out to be successful in socially approved ways. Here, parents don’t expect that their children would move out of the family home at eighteen and then see them only once or twice a year. Nor is there an expectation that adult children would never take a loan from their families again. Instead, in India, parents—and in particular fathers—are expected to, and often do, express their love through a series of lifelong actions and cumulative acts of service for their children, even when they become legal adults. While buying school textbooks and financing other expenses for children below the age of eighteen is a parental expectation common around the world, in India this often extends to fathers buying college textbooks, the child’s first mobile phone and computer and perhaps even their first car. He may also file his children’s first tax returns and manage their first investments and bank accounts. The responsibility extends to even finding suitable marriage partners.

These are some expected ways in which Indian fathers are expected to display love to their adult children. A statement like ‘I love you and I’m here for you’ is not commonly heard in this cultural context, simply because this is not a culture with a verbal orientation for emotional expression. Every culture has its normative ‘love language’—the primary way one is comfortable receiving or giving love—and ours doesn’t feature words of affirmation … yet.

Many of us adult Indian ‘children’ are often starved of hearing the simple but loaded sentence: ‘I love you, I’m proud of you and I’m here for you.’ People are diverse in their needs, but more often than not adults like to hear expressions of vulnerability from their parents. ‘Beta, I’m struggling. I’m sad that I won’t be able to help you with money this month’—a statement that seems simple to one generation often creates anxiety, discomfort and shame for another generation.

So, when Mr J—who was tall, lean, Maharashtrian and almost sixty—filled his nearly hour-long first therapy session with a monologue about his son, Rohan, his sadness and their disconnection, I could tell that he was slightly different from the average Indian man. Rohan was all Mr J spoke about during our first several sessions—he described him as a sweet boy in need of rescuing, or rather, his father’s help—despite me using all sorts of therapy tools to move his focus away from his son and towards himself.

I tried active listening, passive listening, imagery, confrontation, the dramaturgical ‘empty chair’ technique and even invited him to use some art tools as a way for him to go deeper beyond his surface- level narratives, but to no avail. It seemed like he wanted to do his best to convince me that he was a very doting father, and it was really Rohan, the struggling twenty-something son, that we needed to analyse. Mr J absolutely would not and could not talk about his own self in those first sessions.

Underneath Mr J’s strict control of his therapy narrative, the anxiety was palatable. He came across as a strict but kind-hearted gentleman and had come into therapy expressing disappointment over the lack of connection he felt with his twenty-six-year-old son, who was studying in an engineering college in Maharashtra. Mr J said that he felt sad Rohan was away from home and that he missed him.

This wasn’t my typical distressed parent complaining about their son’s life choices. Even under severe mental distress, rarely do Indian parents of Mr J’s generation show up for therapy on their own— and that too with a queer Indian woman much younger than them. Something was unique about him, and I had to allow him to retain control until he felt safe enough to relax in my presence.

At his eleventh therapy session, I placed a handheld mirror in front of Mr J and said, ‘Please look at your face in this mirror when you say your son’s name.’

He looked shocked and said, ‘Huh?’

I repeated, ‘Look at your face in this mirror when you say your son’s name. What do you see? Tell me.’

‘Umm … I don’t know … I just see my face.’ ‘Say your son’s name slowly, please.’

Mr J mouthed ‘Rohan’ in the mirror. There was an awkward silence between us for a moment.

‘So, Rohan feels sad that his father is so far away from him,’ said Mr J, shifting to verbal processing. ‘And I need to tell Rohan that…’ The shock of looking at himself had been distressing.

‘J, let’s relax into this silence that is hanging between us. Please close your eyes with me and imagine your son’s face right now in your mind.’

I gave him a minute to settle in. He seemed uncomfortable yet eager to take my instruction. ‘When you open your eyes, look at your face in the mirror and tell me exactly what you see. Don’t worry about being right or wrong—just observe.’

Eventually, he said, ‘I see a person who looks just like Rohan, but not as young, not as agile, not as … honest.’

‘Honest?’

‘Yes, honest. I have not been honest.’ Mr J slowly looked away from his own mirror image and stared at me with a deadpan expression. We spent the next fifteen minutes in a comfortable, almost meditative quietude. He knew that I was waiting for him to share more about what he had just revealed. It was the first thing he had chosen to share about himself in eleven therapy sessions. My pauses helped affirm to him that he was still in control. I would not force him to tell me what was waiting to be told.

‘I am a gay man,’ he finally said. ‘I have a wife, I have a son, and I am a disappointment to them both. I had been dishonest with Ratna, my wife, for many, many years, but right from our wedding day, she knew that I was not fully interested in her. I was always a bright student and studied at the top engineering and management institutes of the country. Even though my father encouraged me to study, I had a big responsibility to provide for my family, because we did not come from money. Ratna is the one who pushed me to see a counsellor, because she knew. I have never said this out loud to anyone but her and my sister: I am gay. I am gay. I am gay. It is Rohan who does not deserve this.’

‘What does Rohan not deserve, J?’ ‘A sick baba like me.’

The session ended abruptly there. He left with a quick nod. I wondered if he would return to therapy.

Like every therapist, I believe that healing is inherently painful, but starting one’s healing journey without addressing the wound is often more traumatizing over time. Sometimes what surfaces in therapy with a safe, trusted and liked professional is so intense that the light is too blinding, and people retreat into the darkness. It is safer there, in the second identity that us queer people create to keep us accepted by wider society.

Excerpted with permission from Unashamed: Notes From the Diary of a Sex Therapist by Neha Bhat to be published by HarperCollins.