British south Asians who helped create LGBTQI+ history
Due to religious, cultural and social stigmas, south Asians often struggle to come out but in PRIDE history there have been, and continue to be, LGBTQI+ British south Asians who help other LGBTQI+ south Asians, either by creating representation through the arts or by creating safe spaces for them.
Image of Poulomi Desai from Poulomi’s Instagram page. She is on the left.
Poulomi Desai
Poulomi Desai is a photographer, multimedia artist, curator and activist. As just a teenager, she founded the Hounslow Arts Cooperative Theatre of which one piece in particular, a cabaret based touring show titled On the road to nowhere, looked at race, power, sexuality and gender and was both highly influential and deeply controversial. In 1987, Poulomi also co-founded the first South Asian LGBTQI+ campaigning group, Shakti and the Naz Foundation International, the first HIV/AIDs charity in India, in 1991. Poulomi also organised the first London south Asian LGBTQI+ poetry festival. She also spent many years photographing queer south Asian communities from London, Bangaldesh and Gujarat. The images were compiled together in an exhibition and book titled Red Threads: The South Asian Queer Connection in Photographs.
Image of Hanif Kureishi by Nrbelex - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5,
Hanif Kureishi
Hanif Kureishi is a playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker and novelist. He is best known for his screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette. Set during the years in which Margaret Thatcher was in power, it depicts a gay interracial relationship between two men through the story of Omar, a young Pakistani man living in London and his relationship with white, British man Jonny as the old friends become lovers, caretakers and business managers of a laundrette. Released in 1985, the small budget Channel 4 film, received enough critical acclaim to be released in cinemas and eventually achieved global success. Hanif was nominated for both an Academy Award and BAFTA award for Best Original Screenplay.
Image of Pratibha Parmar from Pratibha’s Twitter page.
Pratibha Parmar
Pratibha Parmar is a filmmaker director, producer and writer. Many of her films have shown south Asian LGBTQI+ relationships, therefore increasing conversation and representation in the community. In 1989, she released a profile on the gay Indian photographer Sunil Gupta, who’s work looks at the lives and issues of gay men around the world. In 1990, Pratibha released Flesh and Paper which looked at the life of the Indian lesbian poet and writer Suniti Bamjoshi, and then in 1991, she released the film she best known for: Kush. Kush is a documentary about south Asian gay men and women in the UK, US and India. 1992, she released the film Double the Trouble, Twice the Fun, which looked at disability and homosexuality in both women and men.
Image of Sunil Gupta from his Twitter page.
Sunil Gupta
Sunil Gupta is a photographer who has spent almost 50 years making work to illustrate the progress of gay liberation and injustices faced by gay men all around the world. In 1976, his exhibition Christopher Street, documented the openness of the namesake street in New York City and shows men meeting and flirting around him, an extremely uncommon practice at the time. Christopher Street is also where the Stonewall Inn, the location of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, resides. In 1986, he devised an exhibition in The Photographer’s Gallery in London showing the lives of gay men in Delhi, his hometown. The candid images were shown alongside comments from the men portrayed. And in 1988, he created another exhibition titled Pretended Family Relationships which showed ordinary gay couples at home. The name of the series comes from a phrase in Clause 28, a law which was passed in 1988 by Margaret Thatcher’s government, and disallowed “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.
Image of Shivananda Khan from Queerbio.
Shivananda Khan
Shivananda Khan was an LGBTQI+ rights activist. His most notable achievement was when he successfully challenged India’s Section 377, which criminalised gay sex, in the high court in 2009. Alongside Poulomi Desai, he founded Shakti, the UK’s first LGBTQI+ rights group and NAZ, a HIV/AIDS charity in India. It was founded in memory of a gay Muslim man who was rejected by his family for contracting AIDS. Shivananda also created education programs to address the way people in Asia see gender and sexuality. This resulted in the Asia Pacific Coalition on Male Sexual Health that brings together governments and the United Nations to address health and social development with regards to HIV-AIDS. He was awarded an OBE in 2005.
Image of DJ Ritu from her Instagram page.
DJ Ritu
DJ Ritu is a DJ, RJ, broadcaster and event host. Ritu was a founding member of the LGBTQI+ rights organisation Shakti and DJ at the UK’s first LGBTQI+ club, Club Shakti. A safe space, it was renamed Club Kali in 1995. Now famous, it continues to welcome queer-identifying individuals. Ritu is known for playing a mix of pop, RnB, World and Bollywood music to support the multicultural British Asian identity.