queerness
For the last seven years, I have been working on a body of work titled Hotel Rooms themed around fluid male sexuality, mental health, queerness, and challenging deep-rooted societal gender binaries.
Scribbles: an Escape From the Mundane is a product of my thoughts and emotions when I was struggling to understand my sexuality and grappling with the idea of identifying with the spectrum of gender and sexuality outside the binary, but not being able to put a label on it.
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.
Advancing the most penetrative and succinct theory of caste, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar had this to say in 1916 when…
Puu, an episodic comic (consisting of 92 serialised episodes) created in 2016 by Nabigal-Nayagam Haider Ali – going by Nabi online – is woven together with vast, expansive threads of similar intense spiritual moments and reflections on devotion, faith, and love.
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.
As clear as I was about my sexuality, I was just as unclear about how I wanted to look and what felt good.
Like failure, longing is not interested in happy endings – whether of straight or non-heterosexual relations.
My identity unfolded slowly during my postgraduate media studies course, where I was exposed to peers from different socio-economic backgrounds.