From the decriminalisation of homosexuality by the Delhi High Court in 2009, where a judge remarked that members of the LGBTQIA+ community can no longer be ‘unapprehended felons,’ to the ‘apology’ owed to the queer community, as the Supreme Court noted in 2018, and to be accused of being ‘urban elites’ in court proceedings in 2025, the Indian queer community continues to survive while being forced to live a life where existence is synonymous with resistance. Queer India Now, edited by Dhrubo Jyoti and Dhamini Ratnam, serves both as a contemporary documentation of queer lives and holds space for those who are marginalised within the LGBTQIA+ community. The contributions appear in the form of prose, poetry, and illustrations.
In the preface, Dhrubo and Dhamini lay down a historical background of queer existence in India and help us situate queerness in contemporary Indian society. Queer India Now is an announcement that queerness permeates the young and the old, rural and the urban, and the rich and the poor. It also brings to the fore the many fault lines of the movement — of its resistance to cede space to the rural, non-English-speaking queer person, questions around caste and the politics of location.
It is then no surprise that the book focuses on accounts of those historically marginalised among the LGBTQIA+ community. From a small village in Odisha, Rabi Raj writes about the experience of growing up as a Dalit-queer person and their dream of contributing towards the betterment of their community. Kashmir, a geopolitically charged region, is represented in the words of Dr Aijaz Ahmad Bund, who focuses on the absence of vocabulary for non-heteronormative identities. North-East India finds representation with accounts from Nagaland and Manipur.
Queerness is all pervasive, and we are surrounded by it. There is a possibility that the person walking next to you is queer. There is not a profession that hasn’t seen queer folx contributing to it. Queer India Now brings out accounts of trans police personnel, actors, models, lawyers, doctors, and academics — testimony to what all is achievable if trans joy is given the space to exist and not hunted, traumatised and exterminated. We are introduced to Ronit Jha, a transman who is completing his probation to join as a sub-inspector in the police, and Manjamma, a Jogati performer who was recently awarded a Padma Shri. Her dance form appears as a living archive of queer memory.
To grow old is a privilege often denied to queer people. There are no family structures that hold place for them and, in the absence of legal recognition of civil partnership or marriage, an anxiety around growing old is palpably visible. This generation of queer folx would be the first to see a lot of queer people getting old, having lost many in the past few decades to medical apathy and the AIDS epidemic. Vqueeram writes poetically about ageing. Many accounts focus on the joy of the chosen family and loved ones.
There is also a history of the emergence of the gay party scene, making space for non-male spaces, fighting with the state apparatus to keep it alive in the 90s. Vikram Phukan writes with a penchant for equal parts thrill and tenderness in his account of writing a queer history of Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata — of the creation of islands of queer joy in what was otherwise a homophobic milieu. It is sure to make you chuckle as Phukan writes with witty puns and funny anecdotes. His account and others stress the need to stand by one another and to continually work to root out both patriarchy and transphobia from queer spaces.
Violence is built into the everyday existence of queerness — from getting your birth name changed to your chosen one, to getting a gender-affirmative procedure, every interaction with the state has an element of violence inbuilt into it, one may say, to make the process a punishment. Provisions of NALSA have still not been implemented in spirit. Reservations in academic institutions and jobs are only available in a select few states. To this day, we have little clarity on the availability of Ayushman Bharat, a flagship health programme under the GOI, for trans folx. Clinics continue to remain a place of judgement for the MSM community even in urban areas. One can only imagine what happens in non-urban settings. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 has made matters worse for the community. Such actions of the state are representative of the dangers of letting the guard down, in taking the freedoms queer folx have today for granted. Queer India Now does well to take into account these anxieties.
The proverbial ‘apology’ that the Supreme Court spoke about in 2018 remains an unfulfilled promise to the queer community. It is worth noting that queer folx continue to be second-class citizens in a country bereft of many important constitutional rights and benefits, yet there is space for both joy and hope because, in the absence of either, living is unimaginable. Maya Sharma, known for her activism and wonderful writings on lesbianism and innovative use of Maitri Karar (friendship pact) for the recognition of same-sex relationships in Gujarat, has put it succinctly: “This is a book for queer individuals, and for all human beings in their frailty and courage. It deserves a place in our bags and on our bookshelves — to be read, carried and gifted.” I would go on to say that selected writings from this book should permeate the Indian education system, which remains resistant to depictions of queer existence. Queer folx have always existed and, as they say, ‘we are here, we are queer. Get used to it.’
