Being bisexual in India is still surprisingly complicated

There is a peculiar administrative burden to being bisexual. You tell someone you’re bisexual and, almost immediately, they want supplementary documentation. But which do you prefer?Are you sure you’re not gay? Are you sure you’re not straight?It is remarkable how quickly a statement about your sexuality becomes a customer-service enquiry.In India in 2026, bisexuality is more visible than it has ever been. Dating apps have given people the vocabulary, popular culture has become more willing to acknowledge sexual fluidity, and younger Indians seem considerably less attached to the idea that attraction must behave itself inside one of two boxes. Tinder’s 2023 India research, based on a survey of 1,000 young Indian daters aged 18–25, found that 33% said their sexual orientation was more fluid than it had been three years earlier, while 56% said they were open to dating people with diverse gender identities, sexual orientations and gender expressions.That does not mean 33% of young Indians are bisexual. Fluidity and bisexuality aren’t interchangeable. But the number does suggest something has shifted: young people are becoming less convinced that attraction needs to come with a permanent Government-issued certificate.A friend of mine has identified as bisexual for as long as I’ve known him. He isn’t someone who “discovered” bisexuality after a particularly confusing Saturday night. He has always known. What he has discovered, repeatedly, is that other people find the concept considerably more confusing than he does. representative image | Photo Credit: Frazao Studio Latino “With women, there’s always this question of whether I’m actually bi,” he tells me. “They want to know if I’m secretly gay, or if I’m eventually going to leave them for a man.”With men, he says, the suspicion can go in the other direction. “Some gay men think you’re just not ready to admit you’re gay. And some men hear bisexual and think you’re automatically sexually adventurous.”His problem isn’t necessarily rejection but the interrogation before the relationship can even begin. “I’m not confused,” he says. “I’m attracted to people.”Proof in the researchIndian research has been documenting versions of this for years. A 2018 study, Humanizing an Invisible Population in India: Voices from Bisexual Men Concerning Identity, Life Experiences, and Sexual Health, published in the January 2019 issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, drew on four focus groups involving 22 men and 50 in-depth interviews with self-identified bisexual men in Mumbai. Researchers found secrecy, discretion, family expectations and social pressure shaping how men understood and disclosed their sexuality. Crucially, participants described experiencing stigma from both heterosexual and gay communities.One participant’s observation about the Bollywood film Dostana was particularly telling: John Abraham’s character could be read as bisexual, but audiences conveniently categorised the two men as gay. It was easier to understand “gay” than to entertain the possibility that attraction might not come with a single destination.Which is rather the Indian problem in miniature. We are quite happy with categories, but are less comfortable with ambiguity.Indian cinema has occasionally done better. Margarita with a Straw gave us Laila, played by Kalki Koechlin, a young woman with cerebral palsy who is attracted to both men and women. Academic analyses have specifically examined the film’s bisexuality, disability and challenge to heteronormative ideas about desire.But bisexuality in popular culture still tends to be presented as a plot point. Real bisexual people are much less cinematic.My friend in Bengaluru has had longer-term relationships with women but says she has often felt more inclined to hook up with men while having deeper emotional relationships with women. She doesn’t experience this as some internal parliamentary debate about where her sexuality stands this week. It is how attraction has happened for her.Dating men, however, comes with its own peculiar hazards. “I’m always fetishised,” she tells me. She has repeatedly been propositioned for threesomes. “I’m not open to that,” she says. She says this hasn’t changed much for her “in over a decade”. representative image | Photo Credit: whitebalance.space You would imagine that bisexuality would make the dating pool enormous. More genders, more possibilities, and more people. Mathematics would appear to be on your side. Apparently not. A 2022 study, published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Gendered Anti-Bisexual Bias: Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Gay/Lesbian People’s Willingness to Date Sexual Orientation Ingroup and Outgroup Members, surveyed 1,823 participants. Researchers found that heterosexual and gay/lesbian people were less willing to date bisexual people than bisexual people were to date them. The reluctance was particularly strong towards bisexual men, and, notably, even bisexual women showed a preference against dating bisexual men.My friend has therefore developed his own theory. “Dating bisexual women is easier.” Not necessarily better but more sexually compatible. “There is less explaining,” he says.A bisexual woman, he believes, already understands that attraction to one gender does not cancel attraction to another. She is less likely to regard a boyfriend’s attraction to men as evidence that he is secretly waiting to leave her. She understands that bisexuality doesn’t mean wanting everyone in the room.“It’s almost cultish,” he jokes about the little bi-for-bi dating ecosystem that seems to have developed around him.It is, admittedly, a very niche cult. The initiation ritual is having to explain that bisexual doesn’t mean promiscuous. The secret handshake is comparing notes about the time somebody asked, “But would you actually marry a man?” The central doctrine is simply: please believe me when I tell you who I am.And there is research to suggest why that relief can matter. A 2020 longitudinal study, Bisexual Men’s Experiences with Discrimination, Internalized Binegativity, and Identity Affirmation: Differences by Partner Gender, followed 180 young bisexual men. The researchers found that bisexual men experienced more interpersonal hostility from heterosexual and gay/lesbian people when their serious partner was a woman. Men with only female sexual partners also encountered more assumptions of sexual irresponsibility from heterosexual people; those with only male partners encountered more assumptions that their sexual orientation was unstable.Then there is the 50-year-old woman in Kolkata who discovered bisexuality after her marriage dissolved in 2022. She has enjoyed the company of men and women, but rejects the idea that she woke up one morning and selected a new orientation from a dropdown menu. representative image | Photo Credit: pixdeluxe “It’s not that you wake up choosing one gender over the other one fine day,” she says. “It’s a basic human connection.” She says she can gravitate towards a man or a woman depending on the person.“A lot of people think we wake up choosing to like a specific gender,” she says. “I don’t particularly like that.” Her siblings know about her “newfound orientation”. Friends can be another matter.Not as simpleThere is an important difference between being able to say “I’m bisexual” and being able to find other bisexual people. Mainstream apps don’t simply offer a magic show me bisexuals button. Tinder’s orientation information can influence who is surfaced, and Bumble lets you choose the genders you want to date, but neither is quite the bisexual dating concierge one might imagine.Which means the offline infrastructure matters. And here, things become considerably more scrappy. Delhi has had Bi Collective Delhi, an independent voluntary collective for bisexual, bi+, bi-curious and pansexual people, explicitly designed as a support group and safe space for people attracted to people of their own and other genders.Mumbai has Umang, the LBT support group of The Humsafar Trust, which includes bisexual women and trans people and has historically run workshops, social events and informal chill outs — gatherings with games and no agenda.But a dedicated, nationwide offline bisexual social infrastructure is hardly flourishing.Ask bisexual people in Mumbai where the bisexual events are and the answer can be remarkably bleak. In a 2025 Reddit thread asking specifically about a Mumbai bisexual community and events, commenters said there were no bi-specific events; by February 2026, one commenter described the local scene as “dead”. That’s Reddit, obviously, not a national social survey. But it is a useful little glimpse into the gap between being represented on an app and actually having somewhere to go.The research on dating bias tells us that bisexual people are still negotiating a world where their sexuality can itself be a disadvantage in the dating market.A fortnightly guide to love in the age of bare minimum