A digital magazine on sexuality, based in the Global South: We are working towards cultivating safe, inclusive, and self-affirming spaces in which all individuals can express themselves without fear, judgement or shame
My mother and I have both made certain choices, sometimes inconvenient for me, sometimes difficult for her, but those choices have revealed to me the strength of our relationship and alternative possibilities that she and I can imagine together.
Raising your head shyly, you stumble over your words as you ask if you can marry a woman instead. Instantly, your lungs seem to fill with a tsunami of panic, as you witness his usually warm eyes crackle – the first grey clouds of a storm saturating the brown hue of his eyeballs.
Queer cafés are not exempt from the fast changing landscape of Indian metropolitan areas and offer both inclusion as well as exclusion from the promise of a queer utopia.
In a country like India where both mental health and non-binary identities are topics that are neglected despite being essential parts of an individual’s identity, it can be quite challenging to navigate through issues regarding the same. Accessibility to affordable and quality mental health services is a serious difficulty that the queer Indian population faces.
Wesley D’Souza recounts the time his school put up a production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, his preparations for its audition, and how the process was intertwined with an exploration and acceptance of his sexuality.
In this month’s issue of Play and Sexuality, Wesley D’Souza recounts the time his school put up a production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, his preparations for its audition, and how the process was intertwined with an exploration and acceptance of his sexuality.
We are two boys in our early twenties
who can read touch like that, who have broken into
a 200-year-old mansion, without permission,
to see from above where people like them go
after 377 has been read down only for those
who can stay behind closed doors — in the custody
of cheap hotels, or houses that welcome nights
with the sound of latches closing.
Pleasure, in the context of the private, defines the parlance of sexual satisfaction. As a womxn, the private is also the public: how I present and play with my gender, is a way of seeking validation of who I am.
Being a woman who loves other women, I realised that women look at me with the same tender gaze I look at them with. And that, more than anything, has made me feel at peace with my body. I hope to one day love it
The conversion of the noun (adult) into the verb form (adulting) implies that ‘adulting’ is more performance than inevitability. Which is to say, there is no intrinsic understanding of ‘adulting’; it is something that can be learnt over time.
In my opinion, Ghosh was in search of a language of cinema which could be adequately expressive of queerness; he was slowly moving towards inventing that language, which would not be alienating to his conformist audiences, yet, would be intelligibly pleasurable to his (informed) queer viewers.
This reconciliation between Pallavi’s public (seemingly) heterosexual and closeted lesbian identities points to a distinctly Indian way of avoiding polarities through a new social arrangement where both identities are allowed the space to flourish.
For a lot of queer people, ‘home’ can hold complicated meanings. The space of one’s home can be fraught with bigotry and alienation, and be far from safe or comforting. And so, there is a quest to find alternate ‘homes’, to find a space where we feel truly accepted, safe and protected.