Anupam Sharma, a postgraduate student from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar, is carrying out a mixed-methods study to understand the everyday experience, including challenges, struggles and negotiations, of gay, bisexual and other men who are attracted to men in India, and are above the age of 40. The study has been approved by the institutional ethics committee.

Anupam writes, “Many studies have shown that growing older brings with it a lot of health complications in our community. People tend to feel lonely and depressed, with mental health further affected by ageist and disparaging statements on Grindr^TM and other dating platforms.”

He has already completed the qualitative (in-depth interview) component of his study, with participants ranging from 40 to over 80 years of age.  He is now seeking participants for the online survey, with a sample size of 200 (about 140 responses have been received as of February-end, 2019).

Inclusion criteria:

• Cis (i.e. non-trans) gay, bisexual and other men attracted to men, regardless of relationship or marital status
• Of Indian origin and residing in India at present
• Above 40 as of the date of taking the survey

If you meet these criteria, click here to take the online survey. It will take no more than 15-25 minutes. Participation in this research is entirely voluntary and can be terminated at any point. Confidentiality will be maintained.

When we thought of how we could take forward the legacy of the ‘first love‘ video last year, we thought of involving our allies. After all, the campus is an ecosystem – and the earliest fear that LGBTQ students may have is whether they will be accepted by people around. Our allies in the video must have gotten rid of their doubts.

Our introduction video this year is called ‘Mere Saathi’ (My Companions) and is directed by Anisha Bajaj, a third year student of Energy Science and Engineering, and IIT-B’s first out lesbian student.  Says Anisha, a photography and video-making enthusiast, “Orientation should not matter in friendship. We have been lucky to have such awesome friends and we hope new entrants see the warmth too. My focus was to ensure this message comes out as clearly as possible”.

The video has three LGBTQ students, with their friends. It was first screened to a packed hall of first year undergraduates on 28th July 2015. The session continued with informal conversation with the students.

The video was picked by Buzzfeed and Storypick, and continues to spread warm vibes about friendship and acceptance.

This year Techfest has taken up the issue of Homophobia and Transphobia, and come up with an idea of spreading awareness on this on the occasion of International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia through an interactive video as we believe that this topic has been untouched in the last few years. People in the LGBTQ community are still facing the problems in their real life which are unknown to the Indian society.

International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia is celebrated on the 17th of May every year. Homo/transphobia refers to hateful treatment and social injustice towards the homosexual and transsexual members who are very much a member of our community as any of us of our community.

This video, created by Saathi, IIT Bombay’s LGBTQ resource group, in association with Techfest, challenges homophobia to build safe spaces for queer people – with just a hug!

The video is a unique social experiment, where strangers of different sexual orientations talk to each other, and hug each other. With a seemingly simple concept, the video captures a spectrum of moments: awkwardness to warmth. A beautiful peculiarity being the instance when a homosexual person comes out his friend on camera – and he still gets a hug.

On September 17, 2014, we organized ‘Kashish Forward’  in association with Kashish Mumbai International Queer Festival.  Three films were screened at the event: Crush Shake (by Jagruti Jethe), Kyunki (by Avinash Matta) and Mitraa (by Ravi Jadhav). Jagruti and Ravi attended the event and answered questions from the audience.

This event was open to all, from within and outside IIT B campus. It was extremely heartening to see a full house with a 350+ strong audience. The cherry on the cake was that many in the audience were non-queer members of the IITB campus who had come to understand queer people. This, in the true way, marks the success of this event. The questions ranged from being appreciative of Mitraa to questioning the “tone” of movies when portraying queer characters.

Overall, it was  a well-spent two-hour event and it will definitely help Saathi in its cause of fostering awareness about LGBTQ issues on campus.

More posts referencing Saathi are here. Also, check out Orinam’s list of LGBTQ campus groups in India, and our resources for educational institutions. Also, please let us know of other initiatives of this kind.

Saathi is a LGBTQ resource group consisting of LGBTQ individuals and allies associated with IIT Bombay. Set up in 2010, Saathi aims to create a safe space for community members and a more inclusive IIT Bombay campus. Saathi has organized several social events in the past, including movie screenings in coordination with Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival.

At the undergraduate orientation on 25th July 2014, Saathi was introduced to the new entrants of the IIT-B campus. The details of the orientation are as follows:

0) Aditya Joshi and Aditya Shankar worked on a pamphlet that introduced LGBTQ and Saathi in four languages: English, Hindi, Marathi and Telugu. Avinash, Navdeep wrote the Telugu writeup while Prudhvi suggested edits. The languages were dependent on availability of writers in these languages. A print copy of the pamphlet was distributed at the orientation. The pamphlet can be found here.

1) We screened a new video. Check it out. It’s very cool . The idea of making it multilingual worked well with the audience applauding each time a new language came up. The quotes at the end were received very well. Sudipto suggested the concept of “first love” that was used in the video. You see Aniket, Peeyush Sharma, Aditya Shankar, Prudhvi, Ruturaj, Madalsa and Aaditya Joshi (me) in the video. Aditya Shankar did a brilliant job at filming and packaging the video.

2) The video was followed by Aditya Shankar introducing Saathi and conducting a quick quiz with the audience. I was amazed to see that ALL questions were answered correctly! (Some of them were definitely level 2 like “Which cryptography expert was gay?”).

3) We also had a rainbow-decorated stall outside the venue where we distributed freebies, displayed the books in Saathi library and collected registrations. 43 signed up to be on the mailing list! Way beyond our expectations!!

Meanwhile, when the video and the quick quiz ended, a part of the “cast” of the movie assembled on stage. The audience greeted us with a roaring applause – it’s the hardest I have heard anyone clapping, seriously!

Seeing the participation of all us volunteers and the response from the audience, I am positive that this awesome orientation is only the beginning of an awesome year for Saathi.

Note from the Editors: Saathi’s efforts and resource materials for orienting incoming undergraduate students on LGBTQ issues are, to our knowledge, the first of their kind in India. We hope the resources they have shared in this post will benefit wider audiences, and spur similar initiatives on other campuses. Check out Orinam’s list of LGBTQ campus groups in India, and our resources for educational institutions. Also, please let us know of other initiatives of this kind.

Says Aditya Shankar from  Saathi, the campus LGBT group, “…the video was made for sensitising IIT-Bombay freshmen on sexual orientation. The languages chosen reflect the undergraduate demographic composition. But the video was specifically made so that it doesn’t become very specific to IIT-B as was the video last year in which I came out of the closet.”

Kudos to SAATHI for this effort! Click below to watch the video:

Here is the full text of the petition signed by 1157 students, alumni, faculty and staff the Indian Institutes of Technology against the Supreme Court’s decision to re-criminalise same-sex behaviour among consenting adults in private.

While, unfortunately, the Supreme Court chose to ignore these and other submissions, this petition stands testimony to the increasingly progressive attitudes among members of these premier institutions of technology education and research. Check out the website of Saathi, IIT-Bombay’s campus queer group and Samvita Kalyan’s piece ‘A Rainbow-Coloured Movement‘ published in The Fifth Estate, IIT-Madras campus newsletter, for more evidence of the growing visibility of queer and trans people on campus, and of heartening support from allies.

To
The Honourable Chief Justice of India,
The Honourable Prime Minister of India,
The Honourable Minister of Home Affairs, India,
The Honourable Minister of Law and Justice, India,
The Honourable Minister of Human Resource Development, India,
and The Directors of the Indian Institutes of Technology.

Dear Sirs,
We are a group of students, alumni, faculty and staff of the Indian Institutes of Technology, collectively expressing our shock and disappointment at the Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Section 377 is a British-era statute that outlaws “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” and includes within its ambit intercourse among consenting adults of the same sex. We hold that this law violates the fundamental rights of privacy and autonomy accorded to all Indian citizens by its Constitution, and the rights to dignity, equality and due process of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) citizens. While we demand that the law be immediately modified to exclude all forms of sexual intercourse among consenting adults, we wish to reiterate that this is merely one step towards the goal of equal membership in Indian society for everyone, regardless of sexuality and gender identity.

In 2009, a landmark judgment issued, by the Delhi High Court, declared Section 377 unconstitutional insofar as it applies to consenting adults. Embarking on a well-researched and empirically informed analysis of the impact of the law on sexual minorities, the Court found the law to be arbitrary in its scope and intent, as well as in violation of the right to equality under the law, and the right to dignity and personal autonomy. The Delhi High Court elevated sexuality and gender identity to the status of a protected class under the Indian Constitution, thereby laying the foundation for future efforts to end discrimination in workplaces, educational institutions and domestic environments.

Where the Delhi High Court’s ruling was a bold effort to give life to the promise of Indian Constitutionalism, the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse it is a deceptive attempt to use judicial restraint as a cover for its refusal to critically interrogate the social effects of legal provisions. Ignoring the lived experiences of LGBTQ people in India altogether, it argues that Section 377 merely penalizes certain acts and does not stigmatize a class of Indian society based on sexuality and gender identity. By failing to recognize the fact that the law exposes LGBTQ people to illegal extortion, harassment and persecution, and by suggesting that the rights of LGBTQ individuals are less worthy of protection because of their “miniscule proportion”, the Supreme Court has failed to perform its constitutional responsibility and betrayed the trust of the Indian people. Suffering from contradictory arguments, dubious factual claims, and an absolute lack of empathy, the judgment is an affront to the values of fostering a scientific temperament as part of the commitment to the betterment of humanity, upon which our nation was founded, and which motivated the foundation of the Indian Institutes of Technology.

LGBTQ individuals, activists and supporters from all parts of India have risen up in shock, anger and outrage, determined to repeal 377 and to make their claims of citizenship heard in the public sphere. They have received the support of the legal community, a large section of the country’s political leadership, human rights monitors in the United Nations as well as supporters throughout the global diaspora, of which IITians constitute a substantial share. It is to this chorus of dismay and disapproval that we seek to join our voice. We write to express our commitment towards the rights of LGBTQ people, including members of the Hijra, Aravani, Kothi and like communities, to live their lives with dignity, freed from the burdens of fear, loathing, and pervasive discrimination.

We reiterate that our concern goes beyond the rights of adults to participate in private acts of consensual sex. It is focused on the public domain, where alternate sexuality and gender identity is often treated as a form of deviance in schools, colleges, workplaces, religious institutions, and governmental institutions. Patriarchy and hetero-normativity are pervasive facts of social life in all parts of the country, including the campuses of elite institutions like the IITs. Women and LGBT individuals among the undersigned have often experienced prejudice in their routine interactions with their classmates, colleagues, professors as well as members of the institute administration, and these experiences of prejudice at close quarters can sometimes be more debilitating than an archaic and distant law.

The institutionalization of prejudice, both in the legal and the social spheres, is often premised on claims about certain sexual practices being “unnatural”, imports from “western” cultures and symptoms of “mental illness”. These claims have been emphatically shown to be incorrect. Same-sex intercourse is found in about 1,500 species of animals, including the species closest to Homo sapiens in evolutionary terms. There are many instances of alternative sexualities being expressed in Indian mythology, as seen in the work of scholars like Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Moreover, there is increasing evidence of a hidden sub-culture of queer people in medieval and early-modern India. The Hijra, Aravani and Kothi communities have oral traditions which prove that queer identities are as native to Indian civilization as any other. The medical community, including the American Psychiatric Association, Indian Psychiatric Society and the World Health Organization, have repeatedly argued that alternative sexualities and gender identities are not symptoms of mental illness. Given the preponderance of scientific, historical and anthropological evidence, it comes as somewhat of a surprise to us that patently incorrect claims are still circulating in society, and we call upon the scientific establishment and various educational institutions – including the IITs – to assist the LGBT community at large in dispelling these misconceptions.

While efforts to read down Section 377 and to dispel societal misconceptions must continue, we also re-commit ourselves to protecting the gains made in recent years within IITs to create a more welcoming atmosphere for women and LGBT individuals. While Section 377 has, in the past, relied heavily on social stigma to penalize sexual minorities, we assert that we will not allow ourselves to be used in this manner to discriminate against our own peers. Several support groups for queer students have been established and received official recognition in various IITs in the past two or three years. Their rights of free association are by no means affected by a law that merely criminalizes certain sexual acts. We therefore hope that they will continue to get the full support of their peers, their professors and the institute administrations. In short, while the latest Supreme Court judgment represents an unfortunate reversal in the development of India’s human rights law, we hope that this will not halt the realization of human rights for women and sexual minorities through concerted social change, with IITs leading the way.

Yours sincerely,

Download the full list of 1157 signatories here.