Our Story — Gaysians

A letter from our Founder & CEO, Reeta Loi.

This third iteration of the Gaysians platform brings our focus to individual and collective healing. We have significantly expanded the number of organisations we promote, especially those providing mental health, housing and International support, in response to the types of requests we are seeing on the rise.

At Gaysians our work has been a labour of love for over five years. We started as a simple website which I built to list the spaces and support groups I was meeting after two decades of performing, speaking, writing and campaigning. We’ve since grown into a global family of volunteers and I’m proud of the incredible milestones we’ve achieved.

There are four key pillars to the work we do.

1) Lobbying for legislation
change

When British MPs from the very government that put legislation in place in 54 commonwealth countries criminalising homosexuality ask for that same legislation to be removed, it becomes much more difficult to ignore the call.

We successfully lobbied UK parliament to apply direct pressure to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for Section377 of the Indian Penal Code (legislation that criminalised homosexuality in India) to be overturned. On 6th September 2018, the landmark ruling saw the largest colonised country and democracy in the world choose to give its LGBTQ+ people the right to live and love freely for the first time since colonial-occupied 1862. This was the result of several decades of work by incredible people in India, supported by many around the world.

This is not to be taken lightly. We hope it will set a precedent for other countries to follow. There are key steps in applying pressure to tip a decision in the favour of our human rights, and we actively support and advise leaders from around the world in developing strategies for legislation change.

Celebrating 377 Scrapped / Photo credit: Kiran Gidda

2) Bringing community together

We hosted the UK celebration of the scrapping of Section377 which was produced in a couple of weeks from the announcement. We reached out to Dishoom to help produce the event, Natco to match-fund donations, and sourced South Asian talent to perform, many of whom met for the very first time that night—we are extremely proud of what they have all gone on to achieve since. Dance, poetry, film, music performances and DJ-ing collided with food and drink to provide a never-before-seen experience where over 200 Gaysians celebrated a key milestone in our liberation and raised £5k for two LGBTQ+ charities in India.

377 Scrapped

The event was the most covered South Asian LGBTQ+ event in the UK media to date and was entirely created by volunteers from within the community. In 2018, this was the start of a huge wave of community building and connection, not just for LGBTQ+ South Asians, but for British Asians as a whole.

3) Media representation

I started speaking widely in the media, initially with the BBC and Sunday Times in 2013. I shouted loudly about the injustices we were experiencing as LGBTQ+ South Asians and what I had experienced as an Indian woman and lesbian at a time when nobody else was speaking for us. After 20 years of being out, I still couldn’t see queer Asian women in the media. Gay Asian men were still under-represented but much more visible; in gay bars, on TV, in media and the disparity was very clearly due to the same silencing we see of the women in our homes. The overwhelming misogyny in both the South Asian and LGBTQ+ communities were colliding to keep us silenced.

South Asians tend to be more accepting of trans identities than the rest of the world, however there is still huge oppression. Uplifting the voices of the whole community was integral..

I spoke out from my own pain, of course because I had lost my own family to live my truth. This experience is an injustice that is sadly rife in our communities, even today. I spoke out reluctantly at first, I used pseudonyms for many years, but in early 2017 I decided to use my name and face publicly when I began working as a columnist for DIVA magazine, the lesbian and bi women’s magazine. I then built this site.

It’s crucial that we tell our own stories. After years of interviews through a cis-het lens; being positioned as savage Indians that throw out our own daughters for being gay; being pushed by a white journalist to disrespect my Muslim peers by BBC Radio; being sexually objectified by cis-het men; being told we are paedophiles live on air at BBC Asian Network, I decided it was time to tell our own stories.

Creating
the first ever Gaysians issue of a LGBTQ+ publication for Gay Times was a key milestone. I selected and interviewed ten notable Asians working in different fields to come together to adorn this special issue and share their inspirational stories, just for us.

The 2018 Gaysians issue of the world’s most powerful LGBTQ+ platform Gay Times was globally recognised and no doubt added to the mounting pressure for legislation change in India.

We now have a *Letters* section on this site where we publish letters from LGBTQ+ South Asians around the world that they have written to the South Asian community as a whole.

Our ongoing work for positive and honest media representation which spans as far and wide as BBC, Forbes, VICE, Gay Times, DIVA, Pink News, Guardian, ITV, Evening Standard and more continues.

4) Promoting and advising charities

From the very beginning we have promoted support groups and charities up and down the country (and now increasingly the world), which, up until this site was built in March 2017, had been almost impossible to find due to lack of resources and funding.

We have advised countless organisations like the leading homelessness charity akt to better support LGBTQ+ South Asians because we (South Asians) under-utilise services as a whole. We have worked with helpline services like the vital Karma Nirvana to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ people who are experiencing forced marriage. We have promoted small community-centred meet-ups, new club nights and small platforms to enable them to become plugged into a vast network of users, partners and funders, all for free.

A note to our community.

Healing is first and foremost what we collectively need.

Our work has inspired people the world over to start their own thing and we have opened doors and propelled many on their journeys. It has not, however, been easy. In a community that sits at so many different intersections, that experiences so many different types of oppression, there are specific traumas that many have endured which make it difficult to bring people together. It's been heart-breaking for me to see the many in our communities that continue to repeat the patterns of abuse that they were raised in and also experience systemically. This manifests in a myriad of ways—patriarchal misogyny, envy, competition and self-hatred. In response, healing continues to be central to Gaysians' work, from platforming resources to allow individuals to access the help they need, to positive media visibility so we may see ourselves shine, to lobbying for legislation change that prevents the cycle of societal abuse to continue. I call all community leaders, contributors, members and allies to seek out healing practices and support first and foremost, this is how we will make our greatest strides for ourselves and others.

I’d like to thank everyone that has contributed to Gaysians over the years. We would not be where we are as a global community without you.

And to the many individuals from all over the world with whom we speak directly that ask for help under the most unimaginably challenging times in their lives, thank you. To those who reach out to let us know that they feel less alone and more celebrated because of the work we do, thank you. This is what reminds us to keep going.

Thank you most of all to my incredible team who work tirelessly behind the scenes, to seek out support organisations and build relationships amongst a fractured community, to promote the work of those organisations, to respond to emails from vulnerable people, to create this beautiful site, to speak in the media on all our behalf and to keep thinking of ways to make things better for people you will never meet. You are my heroes. Thank you for being my family.

We remain unfunded and independent, which is a challenge but also allows for autonomy. Our purpose for Gaysians is that it may one day not be needed. But until then, we will continue to do our best for you, as vulnerable people ourselves, because we are you.

From all of us at Gaysians I’d like to say that we know that there is much in the world that keeps us apart, keeps us feeling alone, but we are here to tell you that we love you. We love you for no reason and we love you for who you are right now as much as who you will become.

Please make use of this offering from us and share with anyone who may need it.