Rainbow Stories: Documenting the Experiences of LGBTQIA+ Community Members in India
Amy Hill
In India, the current climate around efforts to secure the rights of LGBTQIA+ communities can be tense. While queerness has gradually become accepted in some areas, it’s feared and misunderstood in others. Community members are targeted regularly with relentless verbal and physical abuse, and homosexuality was just recently decriminalized, in 2018. With good reason, many LGBTQIA+ individuals are still reluctant to speak out publicly, for fear that they will be ostracized, harmed, or discriminated against in educational and workplace settings, and within their own families. While social media can provide safe spaces for these communities to gather online, efforts to publicly educate and advocate on queer issues are still in short supply across the country.
The Rainbow Stories project is helping to fill this gap. Spearheaded by the American Center in Kolkata and led by StoryCenter’s Silence Speaks program in collaboration with Theater Alliance, Rainbow Stories brought together ten amazing LGBTQIA+ individuals from states in East and Northeast India, to participate in an intensive performative digital storytelling workshop in Kolkata. Over the course of five days, we led workshop participants through storytelling, collage-making, and community building activities as they told personal stories of survival, activism, coming out, relationships, and more. Told in Bengali and several other Indian languages, the stories collectively recount shared struggles, heartbreak, and courageous action, providing a window into the diversity of queer experiences in India; view them below.
The stories are currently being circulated via social media and in small in-person gatherings, to support dialogue and information gathering about LGBTQIA+ issues as part of a follow-up project, Rainbow Dialogues. For this new effort, BRIDGE India is conducting surveys to document the realities of queer life in seven states in North and Northeast India and determine a cohesive way forward in advocating for an end to discrimination in work, educational, and community settings. These activities will culminate in a second performative digital storytelling workshop later in 2023, and, finally, in a symposium where all of the stories and research findings will be shared, with the goal of spurring further action to support queer communities working to protect LGBTQIA+ rights in India. View the Rainbow Stories playlist on YouTube or click on the video below.