‘Let Us Hold Hands’: Lived Practices of Intimacy Among Gay Youth in Urban India

Abstract

This article contributes to the growing literature on youth sexualities and intimacy, by centring the lived experiences of self-identified gay youth in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata. It draws on interview narratives of thirteen gay youth between the ages of 19 and 26, living in Kolkata, to unpack two inter-locking ways in which these sexual minority youth co-construct intimacy within the urban space: (a) intimacy as verbal and non-verbal disclosure and (b) embodied intimacy. The findings underline how studying gay youth’s practices of intimacy offer a unique window into sexual politics and urban life in twenty-first-century India.