pandemic
Queer and Quarantine
How did isolation work for those of us who are already quarantined in perpetuity by the cis-heteronormative gaze?
By Raju Behara
June 18, 2024
Editorial – The Pandemic and Sexuality
This month’s offering of articles, poems and fiction is an eclectic mix that (mostly) reflects what was borne out of the pandemic, and its impact on sexuality, intimacy, relationships, and more.
By TARSHI
May 16, 2024
Listening in today…
In this great repository of the human collective consciousness and exposure lies a wealth of tacit knowledge of COVID-19 that is independent of the subject expert.
By Shikha Aleya
May 16, 2024
Interview – Suchitra Dalvie
Getting to know who I really am has been a game changer. Prejudice, anger, control and violence all emerge from fear.
By Shikha Aleya
May 16, 2024
Centring the Margins: Sex workers continue to battle for identity, entitlements and dignity after COVID-19
Ensuring the protection of sex workers’ physical and emotional wellbeing, as well as safeguarding their rights to life, profession, labour freedom, health, and reproductive and sexual rights is fundamental within a constitutional democratic society.
By Kuhika and Meher
Meet me behind the bushes
With access to private spaces taken away on account of the pandemic, suddenly couples from liberal and affluent backgrounds found themselves in the same position as couples from less privileged backgrounds – desperately looking for pockets of privacy.
By Gitanjali
April 18, 2024
Living in Manbir Colony
Days upon days rushed by, tatoh chiya, alu thukpa, chicken cowrie, and beer kept us warm during the rejections.
By Hitaishi Gautam
April 18, 2024
Lockdown Logs
Why does the gap feel so wide no matter how much I explain, again and again, that I do not mean to hurt him… hurt any of them? I feel torn… but Amma and Appa need my help at home. Lockdown has been so damn hard.
By Kaveri
April 18, 2024
Two Poems: “Hidden Costs of Promiscuity” and “Volition”
I gargle away the itch in the tonsils accompanying this persistent flu.
By Carol D'Souza
April 18, 2024
On the day my lover would die
I would once again be theirs, in memory, on the day my lover would die.
By Sara Haque
April 18, 2024
Quick Bytes with Abhishek Desai
The pandemic and lockdown isolation made recovery harder for people with sex or porn addiction because of a lack of support systems that enabled their recovery.
By Abhishek Desai
April 18, 2024
Queer Spatiality Facilitates Queer Connections: The Pandemic Took It Away
The space where we get an education and form our ideas about the world, and especially about people who are not like us (read: minorities) holds importance, especially for me as a queer Bahujan person.
By Rajeev Anand Kushwah
Interview – This is what you bring to the table!
In this write up, we’d like to share a sense of what emerges from a compilation of these responses. This is based on the thoughts and feelings that come through for those of us here at In Plainspeak who have had the joy of reading the original responses as they came in to us. (Some of the quotations that follow have been slightly edited for flow and to help connect themes.) We know that most things in the realm of art, information and ideas lend themselves to a wide range of inferences and insights depending on the individuals making the inferences.
By Shikha Aleya
March 1, 2022
Challenges to right to life and wellness of being: queer lives in the COVID-19 pandemic in India
New losses, new challenges Elizabeth Bishop, the Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, whose love affair with Lota de Macedo Soares…
By Kaustav Bakshi