Indian gay couples begin legal battle for same-sex marriage AP News https://apnews.com/article/lgbtq-people-india-marriage-688b7f42b6863d0be8e03399539c9911By SHEIKH SAALIQ
February 02, 2023 21:08:24 GMT
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NEW DELHI (AP) — Utkarsh Saxena and Ananya Kotia’s love story began just like any other college romance. Except no one else knew about the gay couple’s relationship.
It was 2008. Homosexuality was yet to gain a degree of acceptance in deeply conservative India, with many gay couples facing stigma and isolation. So Saxena and Kotia took their time, watching from a distance how people’s acceptance of homosexuality was changing.
Over the years, as Indian society became more accepting of homosexuality and much of the country’s LGBTQ community began celebrating their sexuality openly, the couple decided to make their relationship known to their friends and family. Most of them were accepting.
Legal rights for LGBTQ people in India have been expanding over the past decade, and most of these changes have come through the Supreme Court’s intervention.
In 2014, the court legally recognized non-binary or transgender persons as a “third gender” and three years later made an individual’s sexual orientation an essential attribute of their privacy. The historic ruling in 2018 that struck down a colonial-era law that had made gay sex punishable by up to 10 years in prison expanded constitutional rights for the gay community.
