The paradoxical need for queer death

It has been over two years since Arvey Malhotra’s death by suicide – after rampant bullying and sexual abuse at an elite high school in Delhi’s suburbs went unchecked by school authorities even after being reported. It has been several months since Pranshu Yadav’s untimely death after being severely trolled and harassed on the Internet over dressing up in a saree. However, unlike in earlier cases of death by suicide among queer youth – I’m referring here to Avinashu Patel (who died by suicide in Chennai in 2019 after homophobic abuse at his workplace) and to Anjana Harish (who took her life after being forced into conversion therapy by her family in Goa) – both Arvey and Pranshu are unique in that their deaths are still very much alive in queer memory.

The extremely high prevalence of deaths by suicide among queer individuals means that grieving becomes transient, and memories of people fleeting – how many dead will you care to keep holding in your heart till you are overcome by the pain? But this survival, with no small thanks to Aarti Malhotra (Arvey’s mother) who has tried to keep her son’s memory alive by creating community spaces for queer youth to engage with and find support in – like a mother figure – has tied into transnational reckonings that could stand to become cornerstones for a new future.

Similarly, the murder of Nex Benedict in the USA (ruled as a suicide though queer activists allege issues with the autopsy) and Brianna Ghey in the UK, both of whom were killed for being transgender, have become catalysts for a renewed focus on the safety of queer youth and a return to discourses of rights and protections among liberal communities as they reckon with the fallouts of ‘gender critical’ movements (many of which have liberal support) and explicitly-defended transphobia. The unwilling martyrdom of Nex and Brianna – like Matthew Shepard in 1998 – have rejuvenated what was a movement on the defensive against encroaching conservative radicalisation. It has always been easier to identify with the dead than to sympathize with the living, and that is precisely what I would like to draw attention to.

Suicide among queer youth is a widespread issue across the world. The Trevor Project’s youth mental health survey of 2023 suggests up to 41 percent of queer youth in the USA are suicidal, and up to 14 percent have attempted suicide at some point in the past. Those numbers rise to 58 percent and 25 percent, respectively, in the case of trans youth. Values in India are difficult to predict in the absence of recorded surveys, but anecdotal experience suggests a mental health crisis on largely the same levels. Yet, in spite of this knowledge of crisis of mental health among queer communities, there is little response from the axes of power till they reach breaking point.

While a lack of sensitization to the unique facets of queer suffering is true, there is also an individualist belief that the suffering of marginalised communities is of their own doing. There is little effort undertaken in creating the kind of institutional or social reform necessary to make queer lives easier – rather it is posited that queer individuals must change their ways and become more palatable to a hateful majority in order to make their lives easier. To the therapeutic and the political, queerness is still a ‘choice’ – a choice to be a ‘good queer’ or a ‘bad queer’, and that harm as a result of being a ‘bad queer’ is thus not the fault of the society but that of the individual. The stigmatization of marginality is thus, turned inward onto the individual – the marginalised person becomes a repository of failure.

While in psychological healthcare, some self-reflection is necessary in order to get better and to protect oneself from the constant reinforcement of stigma, the privileging and centring of mental health discourses – that one is merely not thinking right – over and above fundamental questions of social failure, results in a scenario where suffering as a result of being queer is repressed.

The repression of this queer sense of indignation does not and cannot allow for a solution to issues presented by marginality. No amount of restructuring thought processes can overcome the trauma of living queerly in a heterosexist, cisgendered society – rather what it does is that it (sometimes inadvertently) places the blame for that suffering on the selfhood of the individual. By reinforcing a sense of individual failure and silencing or quietening discourses of environmental and societal marginalization, we risk subjecting more queer youth and even adults at large into believing that their queerness is a form of punishment and an inherent inadequacy of being, rather than a way of being unaccounted for by the strictures of power. The only scenario that allows for this sense of hurt to be expressed is in the act of dying.

Suicide is more than an act of dying. It is an action that intimately embodies consistent violence meted out to an individual, without means of response. In the case of queer death, especially among queer youth, the person’s marginality is reaffirmed in both medical and social forums. This leaves the person with only one way of expressing their suffering – in the form of death. Arvey, Pranshu, Avinashu and Anjana’s deaths were avoidable under every circumstance possible, had they received from educational and societal institutions the kind of affirmatory support to their selfhood that could have allowed them to continue living, even if they received hate.

Death though holds within itself a possibility.

The act of dying is a means of saying what has remained unsaid. Arvey and Pranshu, like Nex and Brianna, are sites of potential catalysation for a renewed urgency in responding to the global mental health crisis, which is now reaching breaking point. This needs martyrs who can grab an unseeing society’s attention. Both Arvey and Pranshu were youthful, innocent, showed evidence of growth and positive potentiality, and also superficially, male- assigned. The innocence that their death entails – loss of teenage, inexperienced bodies to hatred – has the potential to reify support for a renewed focus on the suffering of queer youth, and a potential means of creating a language of resistance that questions or opposes the logic of repression.

Arvey and Pranshu’s own calls to personal failures as responsible for their death is also crucial. Arvey’s suicide note speaks of his inability to survive his school, and internalises the fallout of his death to himself and himself alone with a bittersweet message to his family. This reiteration of their own internalised suffering as being responsible for their fate allows for their bodies to become sites that embody the repression of queerness. Their deaths make them empathetic; their suffering makes them sites of potential power – and it is this power that needs to be harnessed to make their deaths at least worth something in a world where lives are prized by the value they produce.

We are at a crossroads that straddles the globe – how many more Arveys and Pranshus we are willing to endure? But Arvey and Pranshu, no small thanks to Aarti’s mobilization, are the perfect stepping stones to create a coherent logic of queer response that centres stigmatization and marginality, and how apart from individual support, systemic change is necessary to bring about a future in which ‘innocent’ bodies do not need to die to produce an adequately loud response to the suffering they face.

Youth suffering should not, under any circumstances, end in death. If it does, the dead have to be instrumentalised to force the hands of power, and this is an outcome that queer and mental health activists across India need to be ready to work towards.

Main image credit: @rimupanda on Instagram. Sweet Soul, We Are All Sorry. Accessed March 28, 2024. With edits by the author