JOIN USBeing us, unapologetically!
As I pen down this piece, I am rather poetic recalling the great visionary Faiz who once said, Hum Dekhenge, Lazim haike hum bhi dekhenge. Woh Din ke jiska wada hai?
Over the last decade and a half, I have seen the LGBTQIA community in India coming out of the shadows. The landscape has changed so much since the mid-2000s. I was a teenager in the mid-2000s and had no idea what it meant to be gay and if there were any other people like me on the planet. Lucky for me, that was the time when the Internet was on the rise and it was literally my portal to the wonderland where I typed my feelings and discovered there was a term to express that.
Slowly, I found that there were some social public events taking place in New Delhi — such as Fridays at Nigah — organised by some queer folks at Connaught Place where people would drop by after work or watch a movie together. Those were some of the first safe spaces for the community I can recall. Soon after I started as a volunteer with that group and we created some incredible events to mobilise the community using multimedia and art forms as a conversation starter. Through these events, I had the good fortune of meeting the people who were having conversations about LGBTQIA activism in India; Lesley Esteves had played a big part in those years and is one of the unsung silent heroes that has always stayed behind the scenes. This is also where I was first introduced to some LGBTQIA lawyers like Saurabh Kirpal and Menaka Guruswamy. A lesser-known fact is that many lawyers have supported our community’s movement to the best of their ability, mostly pro-bono including the lawyers collective.
We have seen the ups and down in the courtroom and in the everyday lives of the Queer Community starting from Delhi High Courts’ first judgement in 2009 to read down Section 377 to the apex court taking it away in 2015 and the final verdict in 2018. Even as the law of the land changes, there is still much to be done to deal with the mindset at the grass-root level. Our challenge has been to get housing, to get entry into a nightclub with a same-sex partner, to get healthcare without discrimination, to not be bullied and blackmailed for being different, to have the right to freedom, and to choose who we love. As I applaud the SC collegium’s recommendation on Saurabh Kirpal’s elevation to be India’s first openly gay judge, I am also reminded of this very mindset that every gay person has to deal with in India. The silent discrimination and bullying that is often covered by stupid remarks and hate: at the core of those remarks is this very mindset that the government has demonstrated so far in Saurabh’s case. Right to true freedom, beyond the idea of public morality, has to include every single solitary LGBTQIA person and it still seems like a long way to go. We the different citizens of India demand equal rights that are guaranteed in the Constitution. Saurabh Kirpal’s recommendation is one of the first steps in that direction of true freedom. Now is the time to have that. Here’s to hoping for that different future and celebrating Being Us, unapologetically. My hum continues to these words of Leonard, Democracy (comes from the ashes of Gay).
It’s coming through a hole in the air, from those nights in Tiananmen Square. It’s coming from the feel that this ain’t exactly real, or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there.
(The author is an activist and life coach.)