Driving movements and drawing community – friendships will make all the difference

As I prepare a speech for my panel appearance for a celebratory event commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the 1999 Friendship Walk in Kolkata – the very first Pride Walk in India and South Asia, I cannot help but muse a bit on what friendships have meant to me over time. I have always believed that friendships are the way to build any kind of community and movement, and I have always practiced my activism accordingly.  

My focus for activism has – from the very beginning - been more on community building and support, creating safe spaces and groups, where queer people can find the sense of safety, support, and love that we are so often denied at home. We have no space to celebrate being in love or mourn the end of a relationship, no support when faced with violence – within a relationship or from the larger world, we have no space to even simply discuss and be who we are. And this is exactly where community, friendships, and peer support take on so much importance.

My own journey as an out queer person, an activist, and a parent has been robustly supported by my various friendships within the community as well as across movements. I am, after all, old enough to have grown up before the internet, before access to easy information and quick anonymous entry into subcultures and marginal  communities. The first time I ever actually met another queer woman was through a journalist in Pune, during my masters’ degree. She had come to take my interview for some random piece for her magazine, and we got to talking about various things. I hadn’t realised that the friend, through whom she had approached me, had outed me to her as well. During the conversation she told me she knew of a lesbian couple, and would I like to meet them? Never mind the privacy and consent issues; it was like being given the moon on a silver platter. DID I want to meet them? Of course I did! So off we went, that very evening, to visit the women who would go on to be not just my conduit into the queer scenes of Pune and Mumbai, but would be lifelong influences, and philosophers and guides.

From here, this introduction, this friendship, grew the first support group for lesbian and bisexual women in Pune – OLAVA as far back as 1999. As a fledgling organisation we had no space, no money, no real presence to pull together or make ourselves visible in any events, let alone organise anything. It was friendships again, with the women’s movement, with women’s resource groups, with organisations like Open Space, and with gay collectives like Samapathik, that we even had places to gather and talk, to hold meetings, and a visibility in events like protest marches, conferences, and more. Those spaces, those friendships, and the resulting strength we gathered, took us to enough strength and skill to eventually organise the first ever queer film festival – LARZISH  - in Pune, and many more events after that focused on gender sexuality and visibility for queer communities. Unfortunately, as often happened back then, in the melee of the anti-377 campaigns and the birthing pains of the queer movements, OLAVA disintegrated in just about a decade, due to various personal stresses and problems of the members. However, the friendships that we formed way back then, have persevered to this day.

In my parenting as well, it has been friendships that have played a large role. I have, of course, always known that I wanted to be a parent, and always had a pretty clear overall idea of what my parenting “plan” or approach would be, inspired by some superb parenting I was fortunate enough to receive in my own life. However, one can always use reinforcement, feedback, and advice. Some amazing people, fantastic parents in their own right, queer or otherwise, have thankfully always been a part of my emotional support structure. We discuss, we troubleshoot, we exchange notes and advice, we talk about best practices that have worked for us, and the mistakes we have made, hopefully making all of us better parents. Eventually I met fellow queer parents or parents of queer children, started participating in parental support groups, all in the hopes of creating a better life for our children.

Through these many and varied friendships in my life, I have met so many wonderful and amazing people, in Pune, in Mumbai, across the country and the world, and learnt so much. Emulating some of my amazing friends has led me to gather more knowledge about issues, take much more of an interest in fighting for rights, and become a better activist and community “elder”. I firmly believe it is friendships that will make us stronger as a community or network of communities. Also, I believe it will be our friendships across movements, with various other marginalised or oppressed communities that will truly build any change in the world. There is strength in numbers, as we all know, and allyships and friendships across movements are the surest way of building the numbers we will need to affect change. One voice – or a few voices – garners no response from the jaggernaut of an established status quo. But call out in unison, gather all your friends together and scream for your rights, and the rafters might shake and the system be forced to take notice.