Voices
Homes away from home – My experiences with the BDSM community
Home is usually the place where we begin exploring all aspects of life. In India, one area that is often…
By Asmi
Friendship, Sexuality and the Auden Group
Friendship has always remained a thinly coded term for same-sex love within queer discourses, and early writings in favour of…
By Kaustav Bakshi
February 15, 2018
Dosti, Main Love and Someone Special
This article is based on our research work in the two resettlement colonies of Dakshinpuri and Sanjay Camp, located in…
By Ekta and Sonam
February 15, 2018
Friendships Between Women: Norms, Intimacies and Imaginations
It has troubled me for a long time now that there are hardly any Bollywood block busters that focus on…
By Shruti Arora
February 1, 2018
ILLEGALLY ADULT: THE STRANGE CASE OF ALISHA MAJOR
She was 17 when she was rescued from a dance bar. Now she’s 18 and she wants to go back. As an adult. And…
By Bishakha Datta
January 2, 2018
SELF-CARE AND MASTURBATION – LET’S GIVE IT THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE IT DESERVES
I was speaking with my friend, Priya[1], about her health issues. She is fifty, unhappily married with an uninspiring sex…
COMING UP FOR AIR: WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE TO GROW UP QUEER?
Why are boys afraid to cry? Why don’t people associate boxers with women? Because ‘boys don’t cry’, and fighting ‘like…
By Zoya Achanta
January 2, 2018
WHAT HAS COMPREHENSIVE SEXUALITY EDUCATION GOT TO DO WITH CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE?
When working with parents on child sexual abuse (CSA) prevention, I often get asked the question, “How old should my…
By Alankaar Sharma
A Café of Our Own?: The Politics of Queer Spatiality in Urban India
This essay is a brief rumination about queer café’s in urban India. Written as part reflection, part recollection, this essay…
By Swati Vijaya and Debanuj Dasgupta
December 18, 2017
The Blindness to my Desire
I won’t shy away from a kiss, In my head I have already devoured you. I don’t want you to…
By Kajol
December 4, 2017
The Nightmare of Shapewear
Caging the Free Body into a Sexual Silhouette At school, roughly in the 7th grade, we learn about tissues, veins,…
By Rajashree Gandhi
December 4, 2017
Freedom and sexuality: walking hand in hand with robots
Where we are now: In August this year the Supreme Court of India declared that privacy at its core includes…
By Suchitra Dalvie
December 4, 2017
Freedom’s Pride: Looking Back Ten Years On
In 2008, there were two important sets of events that happened: six weeks of intense hearings at the final arguments stage in the Naz Foundation case at the Delhi High Court, where section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was being challenged, and a bunch of folks in Delhi deciding that they were going to organize a Pride March. While these don’t seem obviously connected, they were both expressions of freedom, one in constitutional terms within the courtroom, and the other, a very public expression of freedom, taking to the streets.
By Siddharth Narrain
December 4, 2017
Same-sex love in the time of decolonisation: Historicising hidden sexual lives in Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens
Cinnamon Gardens, looking back on the early twentieth century, reveals the trauma of queer lives, in a country where queerness, family and the state are still irreconcilable with each other.
By Kaustav Bakshi