ABSTRACT This article interrogates an archetype it terms the “palatable queer subject” in post-Section 377 Bollywood cinema. It advances that the production of this subject reflects and reifies India’s emergent homonationalism in the wake of the 2018 decriminalization of homosexual relations. The palatable queer upholds nationalism while enabling India to present itself on the global stage as a progressive nation state. In the Indian context, decriminalization granted this particular subject access to a newly sedimented norm of queerness predicated on the exclusion of more marginalized queer communities. This article strives to excavate this archetype in Hitesh Kewalya’s Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (Be particularly careful of marriage). It extends Jasbir Puar’s framework of homonationalism in new geographic and conceptual directions, arguing that the palatable queer subject in Bollywood cinema reveals that certain queer people – namely, cisgender upper-caste, upper-class men – have been folded into the nation state, at the expense of more vulnerable queer people.