problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
I'm pretty much your brother except I'm in accounting and am more of an autist. Grew up in the third world, thick skin, very heterosexual-passing in attitude, zero patience for flamboyant and dramatic anybody. My circumstances probably don't apply to your brother and Malaysian Chinese might actually be more chill than Indians about this, but I came out to my immediate family relatively early in life (in spite of my sister seeming to find it very weird and barely speaking to me about anything relationship-adjacent even today), and I hold my extended family at enough arms length that I don't really have to tell them honestly what I'm up to. I could not be more happy to not have to deal with female bullshit in dating, and am currently in a very committed long distance relationship with a bisexual guy (note I've already met his mother, it's a serious thing, there is a plan down the line to actually move in together).
In other words, it's possible to actually make this work. I second the advice of expanding his social circle into countries that are more accepting of these things, the more widespread buy-in there is to the idea of the Rainbow Identities, ironically enough the more normal the open homosexuals become. It's a consequence of social pressure that only the people who are super comfortable being openly gay in places like India are also probably not the kinds of people you would want to partner up with ever, virtually everyone else that's more normal is also less likely to be contrarian and radical for the sheer sake of it and as a result more susceptible to the pressure to conform. But don't rush into anything after a breakup. It's a recipe for bad decisions you'll just end up regretting. And bars dedicated to the Rainbow Community are never good places for finding long-term commitment.
Ultimately though, there's an inherent tradeoff between staying in India and being close to one's same-sex partner. You can't have it all in that regard. And keeping a relationship under wraps while pretending to be asexual or having a lavender marriage is a half-measure that's likely to involve a lot of deception and will probably be ridiculously exhausting after a while. I'm not sure how easy it is for him to keep his extended family at length in the same way I do, or to fail to inform them of goings on in his life. But in my experience being overseas makes the act of deflection way easier. I just lie to my extended family about my life every now and then, and barely think about them again. He's got you and your mother to back him up, which also makes any spiel he spins more convincing.
As an aside, you should not feel that bad about making gay jokes. You've been supportive, and if he tells you it's fine I see no reason to disbelieve him. I make quite extreme and very slur-filled jokes in that caliber all the time with close company, and can relate to seriously not wanting someone I know to tiptoe around me for fear of hurting my feelings. It can be very condescending to feel like you're being coddled or unintentionally forcing someone to self-censor when you would just prefer they be themselves, to the point that every time I get a sense that any of my friends are doing that I sometimes push them in the direction of making these jokes. Probably not a good time at the moment since he may be going through a breakup soon, but just thought I would add that.
It's always been a trait that people consider positive, but there are tradeoffs and at least to my recollection, there was a time when a lower relative value was placed on its importance (specifically a certain era when a lot of story-based games came out, indie and triple-A alike). There's inherent tension between many of the goals a game can aspire to, and at the moment more emphasis seems to be placed on conceptual ideas based around "player agency", "nonlinearity", "replayability", and other such concepts that actively interfere with the ability to satisfyingly curate and pace a game. Rare is the game that actually manages to balance these goals.
I do agree that replayability makes a bit more sense for those time-rich and money-poor. But it's also somewhat dependent on whether you're personally receptive to the addiction-adjacent feedback loops that these games actively try to foster. I've been in this situation before, and still would not buy a game like that, my preference ranking tends to prioritise ephemeral but memorable experiences over less impactful experiences that can be stretched for longer. It doesn't take long for my enjoyment level of a game to hit the point where I have better things to look at and read and do, rather than play it for the 116th time. Your mileage may vary though.
In general, I have never understood this fixation on "content" and "replayability" in games and this denigration of linearity, which ends up being reflected in every new game trend ranging from roguelikes to open-world games to (most recently) immersive sims. It always just ends up feeling like yes, there's theoretically massive or even unbounded replayability, but in practice almost none of this variation is meaningful; it's the game equivalent of finding variation in a pine forest, ceaseless randomly-generated content featuring all of the same building blocks. Unless you're treating the game just as a tool to occupy your fingers, one's actual interest in it wanes very fast, and the prioritisation of endless "player agency" and endless "replayability" often means that you have to sacrifice any sense of satisfying pacing and progression. Don't even get me started on the de-prioritisation of meaningful narrative as a casualty of this focus. It's an approach that reduces games to absolute brainrot.
I really hate all of these terms that games get judged by now. It's almost as if we were having the whole Games As Art thing a while back where a lot of developers briefly tried to make games indistinguishable from movies with extra interactivity, and then we overcorrected quickly and basically treated games as glorified content farms, which we still haven't come back from after years and years of genericised slop. A lot of players have a serious problem with viewing games like a product, as if the measuring stick for a game's quality is how many hours one could theoretically get out of it, and this really fucks up how games get designed.
Same here; I come from a relatively liberal, atheistic family, though the same thing could not necessarily be said about the extended family. My immediate family have basically agreed it's a good idea not to tell them lest they Actually Die.
It's good he has supportive people like you helping him along.
It has less to do with life and limb (I didn't perceive that as anything other than a remote risk) and more to do with my uncertainty about how sustainable the situation really was in the long run; for example whether the extended family would ever seriously pressure him to get a wife and child or something similar. Extricating yourself from pointed questions about that is a bit more difficult when you regularly see them, and there's less of an excuse to not show proof of whatever you lie to them about. Admittedly this was also based on a bunch of stereotypes about the extremely close-knit and privacyless nature of Indian extended families which I imagined would have made it harder. Or maybe that's just representative of the type of Indian who chooses to migrate to Malaysia.
But if the family situation is such that you can indefinitely deflect it and get away with not telling your extended family anything, then yes, ignore that part of the comment; the calculus changes significantly. Though the ban on commercial surrogacy is definitely still a consideration.
I think this is one of these attitudes that's very common among gay people who don't centre their identity around being gay or relish using it as a social bludgeon against others, the type that doesn't care about being an Activist and mainly wants to live undisturbed as you've stated your brother does. The converse is depressingly common in some circles though - I was once in a friend group with a "non-binary" woman who compulsively engaged in such tactics to police people's behaviour, and it took a herculean effort for me to contain my disgust. I find myself so estranged from these people, it's almost as if I'm looking at a different species entirely.
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