In Bangladesh, intimacy between women has long occupied a curious social middle ground: deeply visible, emotionally intense, and yet rarely read as sexual. Two young women walking arm in arm, sharing a bed on a hot night, finishing each other’s sentences, calling each other সখী (sokhi, close female confidante) or প্রিয় বন্ধু (priyo bondhu, dear friend) do not necessarily raise eyebrows. This everyday closeness—female homosociality—has cultural permission. It is stitched into school hostels, factory dorms, university halls, and extended-family homes. For many lesbian and bisexual women, that permission has also been a shield.
The shield works because Bangladeshi respectability is gendered. Women are expected to be emotionally bonded to other women. Constant companionship reads as safety, not suspicion. In middle-class neighborhoods, a “best friend” who is always present can be explained as exam stress support or a shared commute. In working-class settings, co-residence is often a matter of necessity. The language does the rest. সেরা বন্ধু (sera bondhu, best friend) is elastic enough to carry devotion without inviting questions. Gifts, promises, even jealousy can be absorbed into the grammar of friendship.
This cultural grammar matters because public lesbian discourse remains fragile. Same-sex intimacy is criminalised under a colonial-era law that is rarely enforced in court but often felt in daily life through fear, gossip, and the possibility of harassment. After the murders of LGBTQ activists in 2016, visibility contracted. Community life shifted online or into private rooms. What survived most robustly was not a public movement but a practice: living one’s relationship inside the socially acceptable frame of female closeness.
Listen to how women describe it. “We are like sisters,” one might say, using বোনের মতো (boner moto, like sisters) to calm a curious aunt. Another reaches for kinship metaphors—খালাতো (khalato, cousin)—that pre-empt sexual readings. These phrases are not lies so much as translations. They render a relationship legible in a society that lacks widely accepted words for women loving women. Bangla has terms for friendship that are warm and poetic; it has far fewer everyday terms for lesbian love that do not sound medical, foreign, or scandalous.
Female homosociality also has a rhythm shaped by age and class. Adolescence and early adulthood offer the widest cover. Hostel life normalises shared beds; the factory floor normalises paired survival. Trouble often arrives with marriage. Families read intense friendship as a phase, something to be outgrown. When a woman resists marriage or delays it too long, the same behaviors that once looked wholesome can be reread as deviance. The switch can be brutal. What was “best friendship” becomes “bad influence.” Phones are checked. Mobility shrinks. In some cases, police and religious leaders are invited to intervene, reframing intimacy as immorality.
This is why the “hidden in plain sight” strategy carries both protection and precarity. It allows love to exist without confrontation, but it depends on silence. It also places a heavy emotional tax on partners who must constantly manage the gaze of others. Affection is rationed. Language is policed. A slip—an endearment overheard, a photo saved—can unravel years of careful translation.
Public lesbian discourse does exist, but it has been episodic. Bangladesh’s first and only LGBTQ magazine, launched in the mid-2010s, briefly opened a window for lesbian voices before violence shut it. Since then, discussion has moved to encrypted chats, invite-only reading circles, and diaspora-linked online spaces. Small informal groups—often unnamed for safety—organise mental health support, share legal information, and circulate writing by South Asian lesbian authors. Some women find language through literature rather than activism, borrowing metaphors from poetry to say what cannot be said aloud.
What is striking is how often these spaces return to friendship as a theme, not as denial but as history. In South Asia, women’s emotional worlds have long been built with other women. That history is not erased by lesbian existence; it is repurposed. The line between friendship and romance has always been negotiated, and in Bangladesh it remains deliberately blurred. The blur is not confusion; it is strategy.
There are limits to that strategy. Homosocial cover does not equal equality. Women still face curtailed autonomy, economic dependence, and relentless marriage pressure. Nor does friendship framing protect everyone equally. Masculine-presenting women and gender-nonconforming people are more visible targets. Rural settings can be less forgiving than urban ones. Class can buy privacy, but it can also intensify surveillance in “respectable” families.
Yet the persistence of female homosociality also offers a quiet counter-narrative to claims that lesbian lives are foreign imports. Intimacy between women is not new here; only the names for it are contested. When two women call each other সখী, they are drawing on a local archive of closeness that predates modern identity labels. That archive has kept many relationships alive.
The future of lesbian visibility in Bangladesh will likely hinge on whether public language can expand without endangering lives. Until then, “best friendship” will continue to do double duty—both mask and mirror. It hides love from a hostile world, and it reflects a cultural truth: that women’s bonds have always been central, intense, and meaningful. In a society that grants those bonds legitimacy, even if conditionally, love has learned to pass as friendship and survive.
Once, when I was younger and thought time was something you could borrow against the future, I fell in love with a Bangladeshi girl. It wasn’t dramatic in the way movies like to sell love. No declarations shouted into the rain. No running away. It was quieter than that. Softer. And because it was quiet, it lasted exactly as long as it was allowed to.
We met in the ordinary spaces where women’s lives overlap: shared rooms, shared secrets, shared exhaustion. She had the kind of beauty that doesn’t announce itself—dark eyes that listened more than they spoke, a laugh she tried to keep small. We learned each other through gestures rather than words. A hand reaching for another hand in the dark. A head resting on a shoulder when the power cut again. We never needed to name what we were. Naming would have made it dangerous.
In Bangladesh, women can be close. Very close. You can sleep side by side, braid each other’s hair, memorize the sound of another woman breathing. All of this can exist inside the safe, respectable container called “friendship.” That container is both a gift and a cage. It protects you—until it doesn’t. It lets love live—so long as love agrees to stay quiet.
Life, of course, had other plans. Family expectations arrived on schedule. Geography intervened. Courage faltered where it usually does: at the point where love demands a public future. We didn’t fight. We didn’t betray each other. We simply stepped back into the roles prepared for us. Sensible women. Good daughters. Friends.
Years later, we are still in touch. We message about work, about health, about the small absurdities of daily life. We wish each other happy birthdays. When something really bad happens, we are still the first people the other thinks of. To the world, we are “close friends.” And that is not a lie. It’s just not the whole truth.
Sometimes people ask me if I regret it. If I regret not being braver, louder, more reckless. I don’t answer immediately. Because regret assumes there was a clear alternative. There wasn’t. There was love, and there was survival, and we chose a version of both that allowed us to keep breathing.
What stays with me is not the loss, but the tenderness of that in-between space—the way female intimacy can hold so much without ever being acknowledged. Our story is not unique. It is repeated quietly across Bangladesh, and across much of Asia, wherever women learn early that love must sometimes disguise itself as friendship to endure.
We will always be close friends. And somewhere beneath that careful, respectable phrase lives a history that mattered. That still does.