ABSTRACT The Supreme Court of India's ruling against legalizing same‐sex marriage, despite decriminalizing homosexuality, underscores the reluctance of predominantly heteronormative and homophobic Indian society to accommodate and integrate homosexual relationships culturally. This article endeavors to analyze how contemporary Bollywood movies based on LGBTQIA+ issues, like Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019) and Badhaai Do (2022), are projecting such interstitial status of homosexual adults in Indian society. Undertaking a thematic analysis, the article divides the trajectory of representations of homosexuality in these films into three stages: firstly, homosexuality is framed as a deviant choice of individual protagonists, closeted away from their families, simmering with heteronormative expectations; secondly, homosexual protagonists become affect aliens when they voluntarily come out or their desires are inadvertently revealed amidst the heterosexual fetishes of their homophobic families; finally, consecrating Bollywood's happy ending tradition, the homosexual protagonists reconcile with their families when their choices of same‐sex partners are acknowledged, but such relationships remain as open secrets, instead of being culturally validated within the mainstream heteronormative society. This article posits that Bollywood LGBTQIA+ films, rather than liberating homosexual individuals from heteronormativity and everyday sexism, encourage complacency, portraying them as affect aliens perpetually traversing concentric closets of shifting contours.
Das et al. (Wed,) studied this question.