The Right to be Public: India’s LGBT Movement Builds an Argument about Privacy

Abstract

The 2018 India Supreme Court judgment that decriminalised consensual homosexual sexual behaviour was not a product of single petition; nor were the arguments presented to the courts the creation of individual lawyers. The judgment and the constitutional arguments that were presented were produced by the LGBT movement. The LGBT movement was a jurisgenerative community that, in arguing that s. 377 was unconstitutional, produced constitutional arguments. One of these arguments was the right to privacy. This position has been criticised by critics within the LGBT movement as being one that is elitist and male – the demographic that most likely have access to physical private spaces. Instead, this article argues, what the LGBT movement actually produced was a right to be public. The right to privacy was not aimed at separating one’s space from society. It was to stake a claim to live a full life, within the public sphere.