LGBTQI Indian’s Discuss India’s Changing Queer Movement
by Heather Cassell
Queer life in India is shifting into high gear creating a new class of LGBTQI Indians for the 21st century.
“It’s kind of an amazing moment” for India’s LGBTQI community because of the public dialogue about homosexuality and nonconforming gender is “really alive right now,” Minal Hajratwala, a Fulbright Scholar and author of award-winning “ Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents
Audience members packed the small meeting room at the Commonwealth Club of California eager to learn about queer South Asian’s experience from four of San Francisco Bay Area’s prominent South Asian queer activists Dipti Gosh, Hajratwala, Devesh Khatu, and Rakesh Modi.
The program, “Spice of Life: Growing Up Queer in India,” was spearheaded by Julian Chang, co-chair of the LGBTQI member-led forum, was a part of the club’s month-long series “India Now.” Julian moderated the discussion that was being recorded for public television and DiyaTV, a new 24/7 South Asia network.
The newfound public interest in India’s LGBTQI community within India and the US stems from when the Delhi High Court struck down Section 377, a sodomy law from 1881 enacted during British rule of India, in 2009 and 25 years of activism among queer South Asians globally and within India. [Editor’s note: India’s Supreme Court reinstated Section 377 in 2013. The Supreme Court announced it will reconsider Section 377 in 2018.]
Queer India Today
India is seeing its LGBTQI children, many who lied and dodged questions about their relationships and sexuality in the past, beginning to stand up proud and show their true colors within the past two years since the court’s ruling.
“The biggest thing that I see really happening in India now [is that] there is a public dialogue where before in there was a vast public silence,” said Minal, fresh from a 10-month sojourn in India. “That’s really exciting to see.”
Minal, who was in India researching her next book and edited a forthcoming anthology of Indian coming out stories while she was living in the country, noted several significant trends occurring in India’s LGBTQI community.
For the first time India’s transgender community is being counted and securing rights, she said. This year was the first time the government provided the option of “male, female, and other” on the census. Transgender individuals in Tamil Nadu, India’s most urban state, secured a “special status” that provides government benefits and protections to transgender individuals. Trans men are also increasingly becoming more visible, where historically trans women were commonly seen in public, Minal said.
Gay and lesbian Indians are now beginning to live out loud and proud to a certain extent and queer student groups are popping up on college campuses within the past couple of years. Rather than hiding behind the guise of heterosexual relationships conducting covert affairs or registering at the bottom of self-identification, queer Indians are beginning to consider sexuality as a part of their self-identity, she said.
“That is a fairly new phenomenon,” that is happening mostly among young middle and upper middle class individuals in urban areas, said Minal, about queer Indians who are making their queerness a part of their personal identity and “structure[ing] their lives around their sexual orientation.”
Minal observed that the shift is due to more than simply legal gains and public awareness of homosexuality. It’s also due to a new influx of financial freedom created by new job opportunities. This has led to newly acquired disposable income and increased freedom away from the watchful eye of family members, she said.
Businesses in urban centers are catching on and going after the “Pink Rupee,”she pointed to Mumbai Time Out Magazine’s newly launched Q-Card, a subscriber-based discount card consumers can use at queer or ally membership businesses.
Lotus Awakening
The new climate gave Devesh his “big break” to come out to his mother, he said. Out and very active in the Desi queer community in the US, the Pune native, was presented by his mother with a Times of India article about two gay men’s commitment ceremony in Mumbai during one of his visits home, he said.
Seizing the cue, Devesh, 40-years old at the time, said, “by the way I’m sure that you know that I’m also gay.”
His mother acted “shocked” about the news, which Devesh found hard to believe, but it opened up a small window for a one-time conversation about his gayness, before moving on with their lives as before the revelation.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell might be dead in the military,” said Devesh, “it still lives on as far as me and my mom is concerned.”
Today’s queer India is a far cry from the recent past where sexuality was never spoken about, gender nonconformity was publicly ridiculed, and there was only one publicly out gay man, Ashok Row Kavi.
For the longest time Indian’s joked that Ashok was the only gay man Indian as he was the media darling when it came to anything queer in India, Rakesh said, as the audience and panelists laughed.
Three of the panelists, who grew up in India, and Minal, who was born in San Francisco, but raised in New Zealand and Michigan, weren’t aware of sexuality or homosexuality until their teens and early 20s they said.
Dipti, a tomboy, welled up with tears describing the pain she endured due to public intolerance once she hit her adolescents and didn’t conform like other girls. The daughter of an officer in the Indian Air Force, it didn’t matter where her family lived in India, she ran into the same harsh ridicule. She was accepted and safe within the confines of her liberal family and eventually at an all-girls boarding school, until her first teenage crush when the taunting started again for another two years, she said.
Dipti’s adolescence “colored everything that I do to this day” and “shaped a lot of where I spend my time today doing my activism,” she says.
“This whole experience of mine made me realize how important it is that we accept each other for who we are. So, my whole adult life has been fighting for making sure not only as queer people, but as South Asians, as people of color, as people who don’t have as much access, that there is a place for all of us,” continued Dipti, who today is, vice president of investments at a major financial institution and serves on community and foundation boards.
Like Dipti, the silence of homosexuality in India and the Diaspora Indian community galvanized Minal, Devesh, and Rakesh into action to build community, provide services, and stand up for LGBTQI South Asian rights, they told the audience.
Rakesh discovered India’s first gay and lesbian publication, Bombay Dost, and sought out the publishers, gay activists Ashok and filmmaker Sridhar Rangayan, who he later founded national community services for India’s LGBTQI community before immigrating to the US.
In the US, Modi continued his activism with Trikone, the oldest LGBTQI South Asian organization in the world, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2011. He is now a co-chair person of the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, a federation of LGBTQI organizations.
All four panelists are members and at various times have served as leaders of Trikone.
Eye Of The Tiger
Away from his family as a graduate student in the US, Devesh found freedom to discover his sexuality. He also found his activist voice during his quest to find community and a social outlet, said the former technology professional turned nonprofit professional.
Dipti also found freedom in immigrating to the US with her mother in her late teens changing her visions of a “pretty traumatic” life to having a “chance … to do something different and maybe have a different life.”
During her first day of school in America, she realized that no one cared or asked about her appearance, “I thought, ‘Oh my, I reached the place where I can live and be myself’,” she said.
“I had no desire to go back to India,” Dipti said. A few years later, she recalled the phone call in college that she received from her father after her mother informed him that she was a lesbian, “Okay, I know that you are a lesbian, but please don’t let that interfere with your studies.”
Dipti promptly spend a year discovering bars and staying up all night, “that year [I] don’t think that I went to class,” she said, laughing saying that her father’s support inspired her to be out and proud as a South Asian lesbian.
“I don’t think that lots of my friends have that same support,” said Dipti. “I want to be there and be able to let other parents know that it’s okay if your kid is gay.”
Minal, who was outed to her parents during college and spent years disengaged from her family found her way home again along with a new understanding of her own queerness during the process of writing her first book. Queerness is “another kind of migration” a migration away from the “structured traditional world” of her family to a “new and unbounded world in which a lot seems possible,” she said.
But it’s the stories of a new generation of LGBTQI Indian’s that is inspiring the writer who for more than 20 years has read everything that she could get her hands on that “seemed like it had a little bit of Indian and a little bit of gay in it,” she said.
“I’ve been very hungry for that and I’ve read everything there is to read out there,” said Minal, who is simply “blown away” by the coming out stories by Indian’s that she’s recently edited. “These were stories that I’d never seen anywhere. They are incredible.”
The panelists were optimistic about the future of India’s LGBTQI community in light of recent progress and recent protests against India’s Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, who propagated the belief that homosexuality is a disease and a foreign import in early July. His statements garnered global outcry from queer South Asians and HIV/AIDS organizations.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a lot of like arranged same-sex marriages that start happening,” Rakesh added, joking about the importance of family and marriage in Indian culture. “Okay, you’re gay, so now let’s find a partner for you.”
Find out what is happening in the LGBTQI movement globally at the Commonwealth Club of California’s LGBTQI forum, visit www.commonwealthclub.org/events/member-led-forums/LGBTQI.
Book your next LGBT Indian vacation with Girls That Roam Travel. Contact Heather Cassell at Girls That Roam Travel at 415-517-7239 or at .
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