But in their village, tradition still dictates that a girl must marry a boy chosen by her family. With longing in her heart, Kiran refrains from expressing her love. However, one day her neighbor Rajan comes to Kiran and asks her to help him compose love letters to Delilah. Thinking this will serve as an outlet for her feelings Kiran agrees and writes passionate, poetic love letters to Delilah in Rajan’s name. Delilah, however, suspects that Rajan might not be the author. She soon discovers her friend’s secret.

Kiran fears that this will end their friendship, but Delilah thrills her by confessing similar feelings. They somewhat recklessly begin a lesbian relationship. As their deep emotion soon becomes obvious to their families, whispering begins in town. Delilah’s mother confronts her and demands that the relationship end.

Worse, to save her reputation, she quickly arranges a marriage for her daughter. Kiran is devastated. She tries to convince Delilah to run away with her. When she realizes that Delilah isn’t going to defy her mother, Kiran is literally driven to a precipice where she must decide her fate.

The post The Journey first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Photo: TheJournalist.ie

BY ZACK FORD
Think Progress

The Supreme Court of India issued a brief ruling Tuesday stating that it will not reconsider the case in which it recently upheld the country’s law criminalizing gay sex.

The ruling is a response to what’s called a review petition, a motion that asks the same judges that originally heard the case to reconsider it. Lawmakers could attempt to repeal the law, but with an election coming up in May and a backlash expected from socially conservative Hindu nationalists, the political climate is not currently very accommodating for that change.

One last option remains, which is called a curative petition. That motion asks senior judges of the full Indian Supreme Court to intervene for the sake of protecting basic rights. Still, the rejection of the review petition does not bode well for a curative petition’s fate.

Read more at ThinkProgress.org

The post India upholds gay sex ban first appeared on Lesbian.com.

An image posted by Godawari Singh on Facebook.

BY JAMES NICHOLS
Huffington Post Gay Voices

Last week, India reinforced its institutionalized discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals when the country’s Supreme Court upheld a colonial-era law, previously struck down by the High Court in 2009, that criminalizes homosexuality.

In response, LGBT Indians and their allies are protesting the court’s decision and expressing support for the community. Through a Facebook group called “Gay for a day!” users are changing their profile pictures “to one in which you are kissing someone from your gender in protest of the Supreme Court of India’s ruling that criminalizes homosexuality.”

Read more at Huffington Post Gay Voices

The post Facebook users ‘go gay’ in solidarity with LGBT Indians first appeared on Lesbian.com.

The Supreme Court of India shocked the world on Wednesday by reinstating an old law banning sex between two men.

In 2009, a lower court struck down section 377 of the 1861 law, which states, “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”

Read more at dot429.com

The post Indian Supreme Court issues stunning ruling first appeared on Lesbian.com.

LGBT activists dancing in the streets of New Delhi, India for Pride on November 13, 2013. (Photo: Tsering Topgyal/Associated Press)

BY ERIN HIGGINS
dot429

On Sunday, November 24, hundreds gathered to march through New Delhi’s streets as a symbol of pride and a call to end discrimination. It was a day of singing, rainbow flags, and balloons, culminated by a public meeting at Jantar Mantar, the capital’s main protest area. Activists could be seen happily dancing with friends and family, and several made speeches regarding the LGBT struggle in India. However, some participants covered their faces with masks and scarves to conceal their identity since LGBT acceptance is still limited in the principally conservative country.

Just four years ago in July of 2009, the Delhi High Court finally overturned India’s colonial era law (in place since 1860) criminalizing homosexuality. While still considered disreputable in many areas of the country, the LGBT community has made much improvement within the last decade. It wasn’t until 2013 that India launched its first LGBT radio station, QRadio, and the country’s first candidate for general secretary, Gourab Ghosh, called attention to campus discrimination.

Read more at dot429.com

The post LGBT Pride comes alive in the streets of New Delhi first appeared on Lesbian.com.

BY HASSINA OBAIDY

You don’t become India’s first openly gay comic, if you are afraid to ruffle a few feathers. So it’s no surprise that Vasu Ritu Primlani isn’t afraid to skewer, deconstruct and find the funny in any topic, whether it be gender politics, climate change or even rape — all of which could easily fall flat in the hands of a less clever comic. When Primlani isn’t blazing punch line trails on stage she’s pursuing her other passion: the environment. Or more specifically, working to make restaurants and hotels more green. And now Primlani is bringing her special brand of courageous comedy our way with a U.S. tour early next year.

How have people responded to you being openly gay?
I have been disbelieved. “She can’t really mean that!” or “What is that?” Openly ridiculed, no. I am very kind through it, and carry my dignity with me. I don’t draw swords unless absolutely necessary. Men have been drunk in the shows, yes. I have put them in their place, yes. They have never heard anyone say that to them in their lives “I’m gay,” and I get them to laugh with me about it.

Read the rest of the interview at Curve

Curve, the nation’s best-selling lesbian magazine, spotlights all that is fresh, funny, exciting, controversial and cutting-edge in our community.

The post Introducing India’s first openly lesbian comic first appeared on Lesbian.com.

On September 10 at midnight, India’s first LGBT community radio station was launched in Bangalore. Qradio, an online station designed to “create awareness and acceptance about alternate sexualities,” is a breakthrough for the country’s estimated two million LGBT citizens.

Anil Srivatsa, CEO and cofounder of host Radiowall.in, said she created Qradio in order to provide a mainstream media platform for the LGBT people of India.

Read more at dot429.com

The post First LGBT radio station launches in India first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Photo by Steph Grant

BY CHRISTOPHER RUDOLPH
Huffington Post Gay Voices

Photographer Steph Grant recently had the honor of capturing a spectacular lesbian Indian wedding, a first for the seasoned photographer.

“I have photographed Indian weddings before and I have photographed gay and lesbian weddings before, but never have I ever shot an Indian lesbian wedding,” she wrote in a post on her website on July 9.

Read more at Huffington Post Gay Voices

The post Behind the scenes: A lesbian wedding in India first appeared on Lesbian.com.

(Photo: Showkat Shafi/Al Jazeera)

BY HEATHER CASSELL
Girls That Roam

Queer life in India is shifting into high gear creating a new class of LGBT Indians for the 21st century.

“It’s kind of an amazing moment” for India’s LGBTQ community because of the public dialogue about homosexuality and nonconforming gender is “really alive right now,” says Minal Hajratwala, a Fulbright Scholar and author of award-winning “Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents,” told a crowded room two summers ago.

This past weekend, Desi queers gathered in San Francisco to discuss the momentum gained and maintaining it.

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 Desi queer activists Dipti Gosh, Minal, Devesh Khatu, and Rakesh Modi.

The program, “Spice of Life: Growing Up Queer in India,” was spearheaded by Julian Chang, co-chair of the LGBT member-led forum, as a part of the club’s month long series “India Now.” Julian moderated the discussion that was being recorded for DiyaTV, a new 24/7 South Asia network.

The new found public interest in India’s LGBT community within India and the U.S. stems from when the Delhi High Court invalidated Section 377, a sodomy law from 1881 enacted during British rule of India, and 25 years of activism among queer South Asians globally and within India.

Queer India today

India is seeing its LGBT 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 four years since the court’s ruling. The ruling is being challenged, but LGBT South Asians continue to march out of the closet in India and around the world.

“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,” says Minal, fresh from a 10-month sojourn in India at the time. Minal splits her time between India and San Francisco. “That’s really exciting to see.”

Minal, who was in India researching her book and editing an anthology of Indian coming out stories, noted several significant trends occurring in India’s LGBT community.

For the first time India’s transgender community is being counted and securing rights, she says. In 2011, marked 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 says.

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 few years. Rather than hiding behind the guise of heterosexual relationships, 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 says.

“That is a fairly new phenomenon,” that is happening mostly among young middle and upper middle class individuals in urban areas, says 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 observes 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 says.

Businesses in urban centers are catching on and going after the “Pink Rupee,” she points to Mumbai Time Out Magazine’s newly launched Q-Card, a subscriber-based discount card consumers can use at queer or ally membership businesses.

India celebrates Pride. (Photo: Courtesy of blog.foreignpolicy.com)

Lotus awakening

The new climate gave Devesh his “big break” to come out to his mother, he says. Out and very active in the Desi queer community in the U.S., the Pune native, was presented with a Times of India article about two gay men’s commitment ceremony in Mumbai by his mother during one of his visits home, he says.

Seizing the cue, Devesh, 42-years old at the time, says, “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 onetime 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,” says 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 Kavi was the only gay man Indian as he was the media darling when it came to anything queer in India, Rakesh says, as the audience and panelists laugh.

Three of the panelists 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 say.

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 says.

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,” continues 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 LGTB 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 Row Kavi and filmmaker Sridhar Rangayan, who he later founded national community services for India’s LGBT community before immigrating to the U.S.

In the U.S., Rakesh continued his activism with Trikone, the oldest LGBT South Asian organization which celebrated a quarter century of activism in 2011, and as a co-chair person of the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, a federation of LGBTQ organizations, until early this year when he took a break to focus on OMG!, a queer South Asian bar in San Francisco, that he is co-owner.

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 U.S., Devesh found freedom to discover his sexuality. He also found his activist voice during his quest to find community and a social outlet, says the former technology professional turned nonprofit professional.

Dipti also found freedom in immigrating to the U.S. with her mother in her late teens changing her visions of a “pretty traumatic” life to having a “chance … to do something different and may be have a different life.”

Her first day of school America when 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 says.

“I had no desire to go back to India,” Dipti says. 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 says, 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,” says 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 until she found her way home again, found 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 says.

But it’s the stories of a new generation of LGBT 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 says.

“I’ve been very hungry for that and I’ve read everything there is to read out there,” says 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 LGBT community in light of recent progress and protests against India’s Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, who propagated the belief that homosexuality is a disease and foreign import in July 2011. His statements garnered global outcry from queer South Asians and HIV/AIDS experts and organizations.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a lot of like arranged same-sex marriages that start happening,” Rakesh adds, 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 LGBT world around the globe at the Commonwealth Club.

Originally published by GirlsThatRoam.com

The post A new queer India first appeared on Lesbian.com.

You know times are changing when India, historically a country with a complicated relationship to same-sex relationships, shows keen interest in the lesbian travel market. Well, one tour company in particular is extending a warm welcome to lesbian travelers who wish to visit the land of silk saris and exotic spices. In November of last year, I joined the first LGBT press trip organized by Out Journeys (their tagline is “Come Out in India”) and was curious as to exactly how gay they could make our itinerary. The answer is … not very.

But perhaps the expectation was unreasonable. India is so vast and diverse, and the experience it offers travelers is so intense, that to insist on a queering of the subcontinent seems persnickety, if not naive. Sure, there is a thriving LGBT community in Mumbai, there is a gay presence in Delhi, and Goa is becoming a resort town that attracts gay men. But Western expectations of a rainbow-flag welcome should be left at home. Nevertheless, a cosmopolitan, friendly, and women-focused vacation is now possible, if you place yourself in the capable hands of Out Journeys. These guys (and just to be clear, they are all guys, albeit sensitive ones) have taken the time and trouble to understand American lesbians. They were there at the First Asian Symposium on Gay and Lesbian Tourism, presented by Community Marketing Inc. in Delhi, a conference that aimed to raise the profile of the LGBT market segment in a land where business owners crave hard facts about the legendary “pink dollar.” If you’ve been paying attention to global economics, you know that India (along with Brazil) is on the rise, fiscally; its middle class is thriving and the country now has many Western symptoms of prosperity: huge malls, luxury cars, much real estate development. The chance to snatch at the low-hanging fruits of capitalism has led to open minds in India, as well as open wallets. So if you’ve longed to visit the land of the Taj Mahal but didn’t dare, now is your time to venture forth among open-minded people, with tour guides who are respectful of your sexual preference or gender identity — important in a country known for heaping a bewildering array of challenges on you even before you even get out of the airport!

Read more at Curve

Curve, the nation’s best-selling lesbian magazine, spotlights all that is fresh, funny, exciting, controversial and cutting-edge in our community.

The post A lesbian passage to India first appeared on Lesbian.com.