“Omg that’s you!!!” said a recent message from a friend whom I had last spoken to in 2023. I kept staring at it as the phone’s backlight faded out. She had seen my photo in an article about the launch of a zine I had written a story for. The headline read: “Drains to dating apps: Dalit queer booklet maps Delhi’s unspoken caste geography.” Beneath it was my photo alongside my fellow writers.
There I was, in a blue shirt and wide glasses—my caste and queerness outed. Although I knew I was participating in a public event, I was nervous about doing so. I had entered the launch event, navigating a crushing internal conflict, and didn’t think about whether there would be media.
The zine, titled Across the Nala, was launched on 21 June 2025 at the O.P. Jindal Global University’s JGU International Academy, which is housed inside the Taj Mahal Hotel in central Delhi. The 48-page booklet features the stories of ten Dalit and Bahujan queer individuals and their complex yet unique relationships with Delhi.
In the days that followed, as the excitement of the event slowly faded, I began to wake up to how the zine and its launch had been perceived. The article I mentioned earlier had described the zine as “10 Dalit queer individuals’ stories.” Google AI also described it as a collection of “Queer Dalit voices.” Both the article and the AI had flattened our identities and seemingly hallucinated out the Bahujan experiences, which are also very much part of the zine. A comment on Instagram said the launch was a “cock-fest,” ignoring the fact that some of us are trans and non-binary. Someone else found the complexity of our hyphenated identities hard to comprehend: “Pick a struggle bro,” they said, under a social media post celebrating the launch. Dalit-Bahujan, queer, non-binary, cisgender, trans, disabled. Our identities do not line up neatly like a checklist for development goals. They bleed into each other.
This newfound attention felt like erasure. The act of visible-ising us had already begun to erase us.
***
For those of us who are queer and Dalit-Bahujan, being seen is never simple. It is a battle between reclaiming our identities and surviving the scrutiny that follows. As I navigate the aftermath of my “coming out,” I confront the uneasy truth that the spotlight can be as much a site of violence as it is of liberation.
In the week leading up to the launch, I lost 2.5 kg, gained 0.5 kg, and then lost 2.5 kg again. Each day, I woke up to new pimples on my face. I hadn’t fully acknowledged it then, but the stress of owning my identity in front of an audience loomed large in the back of my mind. I struggled to sleep, lost my appetite, and became physically weak. I had also developed diarrhoea and a migraine.
“I wish I didn’t have to choose between speaking [at the launch] and coming out,” I said in a text to Dhiren Borisa, who is a Dalit queer activist, poet, and academic and co-curator of Across the Nala. It was hitting me that I couldn’t speak as a neutral, closeted speaker who just happened to be one of the writers in the zine. The zine was about our Dalit-Bahujan queer experiences. By speaking, I would be coming out. “I think I’ll never be a knowledge producer unless I come out,” I sent another text to Dhiren, who responded. “And that is your story in the zine 🙂 about the politics of knowledge.”
I feared being unloved. I worried about being recognised only by the identity that I would reveal. There was shame, coupled with the worry of being abandoned by friends and colleagues from whom I had hidden my identity thus far. From this day onwards, I could be openly humiliated and violated. Every time I closed my eyes, I imagined myself speaking at the launch. It felt like I was falling off a cliff with no parachute.
That week, I felt so lonely that my heart ached. I kept getting flashbacks from unrelated events. In those flashbacks, I saw an ex-lover and my Dalit family facing each other. I felt being outed. Being found out as Dalit by my ex-lover, and as queer by my parents. I panicked when I heard my doorbell ring at 11:40 pm. I felt my truth would now be seen. As if whoever was on the other side of the door would ‘out’ me. The person kept pressing the doorbell repeatedly, but I couldn’t move from my room. Then all I could hear was the door rattling. I imagined that the bell was a distraction—that someone had already entered the house through the balcony. In that frenzied state, I dialled my family and neighbours. My father called the building’s guard, who told him that a food-delivery guy had probably pressed my doorbell by mistake. Later, when I had calmed myself down, I told myself, “Just five more days until the launch. I will feel better after that.”
Trauma plays out in surprising ways. When I was in college, a Kashmiri student had once told me about how trauma is stored in our bodies—an idea they probably got from Bessel Van Der Kolk’s seminal book, The Body Keeps the Score. Before you see its manifestation externally—as data on caste-based atrocities in crime records, as a pattern of Dalit student suicides in elite university campuses—violence plays out internally, within your body. Your body begins to restrict itself. It makes you feel nauseated, quite literally.
When Dalit-Bahujan-Queer people write, we do so despite all the trauma playing out in our bodies and minds. And when we are invited to speak on stage, we carry with us the nausea and the weight of sleepless nights.
“One was not supposed to be here,” I recall myself saying at the launch. “For the longest time, my body was trying to escape. Thinking of ways to not attend.”
By speaking at the event, I had come out, not just to the people in that room, but also to the world at large. When I saw the article about the launch, my first instinct was to check who had liked the story. Friends from university? Work colleagues? A past lover? I wasn’t looking for social media validation; I was just afraid of the consequences.
“I want to kill myself,” I typed a message to a friend. “And hide somewhere.”
***
A few days later, there was another event co-created by creators of the zine and the YP Foundation, a Delhi-based youth-led NGO. As people settled in, I asked for a pen and paper, so I could scribble to calm my nerves. I breathed through my mouth. Even in a large hall with a high ceiling, I felt suffocated.
Everywhere queerness goes, caste follows. To ensure that our events were safe spaces for our communities, I had drafted a note that was sent along with the invite. “This space is by and for Queer-DBA (Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi) folks,” it said. “Queer and non-DBA individuals and allies are welcome to be present in solidarity.” It didn’t come as a surprise when I learnt that more non-DBA people had registered for the event than DBA folks. By now, some of us who have had our ears to the ground know that privileged caste Hindus fetishise DBA folks and that it usually comes in sweet, liberal, tote-wearing garb. And in this instance, we were particularly special because we came with the branding of queerness. So, it is important to mention that in this setting, our ‘caste-ness’ was somewhat accepted.
The room had chairs and floor seating. It was not very difficult to gauge who was who. The event, which featured an open mic and a conversation circle, was three hours long. I guess it tested everyone’s patience. But all of us who survived the room till the end, belonged together. We sat together on the floor. We sang, recited poetry, and danced. A baby scurried across the hardwood floor as the day rolled by, as if ‘claiming’ their own space. In this room, we were the writers of our stories, we were the creators, the artists. We had our own mics. Not one but many. It took generations for us to be on this side of the room. For some of us, it was probably the only time we got to do so.
It was the kind of event that the folks at the LSE, Ashoka, IITs would have lots of opinions about. Our identity would become a fetishised subject in the ‘knowledge’ they would produce as art or articles. They would write on our zine, record observations and quotes made in our events. They would use our intellectual labour as context and collect praises as if it were their own work. We would feature prominently in their papers but never as co-authors. I would be a footnote. A mention in your acknowledgement, not for my personhood, but for sharing my time and intelligence with you. The scholarship committee will commend ‘your work,’ while writing on their website, “Our alumni reflect the diversity of individuals…” Folks working in the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) sector would want to ‘talk about us.’ It doesn’t matter whether we consent; they will speak about us. Ever since some of us came out, we have been receiving calls and messages for this very “performance of our identities” framed as exposure.
When your truth is no longer just yours, visibility can become violence.
Silence would have been more comfortable. But to our oppressors, this silence looks like subservience. They know that they can use it to keep us in our place. Your upper caste landlord may not ‘out’ your caste in a polite society, but he will keep your secret as your fatal flaw, brandishing it each time you falter with the rent. All my life, I have been silenced—letting go of people, places, opportunities. I played the roles of the obedient kid, the teachers’ pet, the reliable friend, the overtime worker so well, I had let my oppressors win over and over again.
By not coming out, I would have continued to play the tune of my oppressors.
***
Coming out is rarely just personal. When the world is pegged against you by design, you fight back because that’s what you are forced to do in order to survive. Coming out, for me and for many others like me, is an act of rebellion. Now you know me. But I refuse to allow you power over me. Tell me, what harm can you really do? I will resist.
In order to resist, though, one requires some power. Suraj Yengde was regarded as a respectable intellectual only after he earned a PhD and worked at Harvard and Oxford. Yashica Dutt worked in Indian newsrooms for years, but it was only after she made it to Columbia University that she decided to come out. Neeraj Ghewyan didn’t come out until he found one of his feet in Bollywood and the other at Cannes.
It’s not news to us that we are required to prove our worth and win ‘respectability’ in the eyes of the world before we are allowed to live our lives authentically. I need to work harder to prove my ‘merit.’ I am compelled to chase foreign education, an unreserved seat, a stable job, and loads of money before I will be allowed to be myself. Not because of my inherent shame, but because society curates coming out as a celebration, a positive influence, a complete story-arc, a hashtag that warrants engagement. And unless a queer Dalit person becomes worthy of this inflated sense of being, how else would this world bear our coming out?