New Delhi.– Trapped between the rejection of homosexuality in her environment and her family’s insistence on seeing her married, Asha, a young lesbian from southern India, found an escape route in an Instagram ad by agreeing to a marriage of convenience with a gay student willing to keep up appearances before society.
«Gay man, 23 years old, medical student (…) I am looking for a lesbian or asexual girl who can wait five or six years to get married (…) Marriage is for my parents and society; but we can be good friends and you can be in a relationship with someone else», read the post.
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The proposal sought to seal what is popularly known as a “lavender marriage,” a union in which two people agree to marry to protect their orientation in private while simultaneously fulfilling their families’ mandate, in a country that decriminalized homosexual relationships in 2018 but where the Supreme Court rejected legalizing same-sex marriage in 2023.
For Asha, also a medical student in a rural area, replying to the message was the only alternative to the lack of understanding in her environment, where, as she explained to EFE, “(being LGBTIQ+) is not accepted and they think it is a choice. They love their pride more than their children.”
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A refuge on social media
Asha’s experience reflects a booming practice in which young people in the LGBTQ+ community use platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, and Reddit as anonymous classified boards.
In many of these ads, applicants are not only looking to bypass family pressure, but are forced to replicate the filters of traditional arranged marriage, seeking compatibility in caste, religion, language, and educational level so that the marital farce appears credible to their parents.
‘Lavender marriages’, portrayed in Indian cinema in 2022 through the comedy ‘Badhaai Do’, where a gay police officer and a lesbian teacher get married after discovering each other’s orientation by accident, have found a more transparent way of coordination in the digital space.
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While there are no official records on the scale of the phenomenon, Naz Foundation lawyer Abhay Shukla emphasizes that platforms have transformed these arrangements, noting that “nowadays it is very easy for a queer man and woman to meet and decide to get married so that their families stop bothering them. But before, it wasn’t that simple: it was mainly gay men who married women without informing them about their sexual orientation.”
The need for intermediation led Thanima, a 25-year-old asexual woman from the south of the country, to create her own page after suffering family pressure to get married, having managed over 400 anonymous ads since then.
“I support same-sex marriage but right now in India it is not a reality (…) Queer people do not feel safe coming out of the closet. So, they end up getting married under pressure. I think it is better if two queer people get married knowing each other’s sexual orientation and with mutual agreement,” explains Thanima to EFE.
The risk of the farce
Despite being consensual unions, the Naz Foundation warns that maintaining a double life often leads to emotional distress, anxiety, and identity crises.
The hostility surrounding sexual diversity in the country, where a 2024 BMC Public Health study found that more than 60% of gay or bisexual men in six Indian cities had experienced violence, is reflected in Thanima’s own project, whose account garnered more than 3.7 million views in one month but has barely 6,500 public followers due to fear of being exposed.
«It’s good to be anonymous. If they were near me, they would probably kill me», she recounts while showing the hate messages and direct threats that her posts receive.
Still unaware of the outcome of their agreement, Asha and her virtual fiancé continue chatting daily about family secrets and future plans without ever having met in person, convinced that they will meet in a few years to seal their wedding once they finish their degree.
“We are made for each other in another universe,” jokes the young woman about a marriage meticulously designed not to share love, but to buy before the world the right to live their true lives in secret.
