no. 84: desi x pride x dc

every little bit of joy is a celebration of being here and being queer

I wrote a few days ago about not partaking in DC Pride this year, but what I didn’t write about was what I did instead – what I chose to call the gayest brownest month of my life in DC. I tried to make it to almost every queer/pride themed event happening in DC for South Asians, and a cancelled long weekend trip to Pittsburgh ended up being what made most of it happen.

So I decided I would do a rundown of all of the components of DC Desi Pride and write some notes about what I took away from them, and what the calendar curation process taught me.

June 5: Early in June, DC saw its first Desi Drag Night, hosted by KhushDC, Muslims for Progressive Values, Caribbean Equality Project, and Hindus for Human Rights. I’ll be honest, logistically, this was a little bit of a nightmare for me – an event that said 10 PM that didn’t start until 11 the night before an early morning train, and an extremely crowded club space with poor air circulation that did not help my increasing claustrophobia in dark crowds like this. But in itself, it was a lot of fun – I haven’t actually been to a drag show since maybe my first summer in DC three years ago, and have never been to a desi drag show before despite having followed a number of drag queens on social media, so it was fun to get to experience.

June 12: As part of their ongoing collaboration series entitled Intersecting Identities, SAAPRI (South Asian American Policy Research Institute - Chicago) and SAAJCO (South Asian American Justice Collaborative) hosted a discussion on Confronting Hate Against Queer South Asians. I found the intersectionality conversation here really interesting – discussions about the meaning of drag in South Asian communities when cultural access to performance, song, and dance often get cut off or jeopardized upon coming out as queer; mentions of how South Asian queers often either don’t come out at all, or often come out multiple times, with each version resulting in family that sometimes doesn’t know what to do with that information; and discussions of racism and xenophobia against Queer South Asians in queer spaces and dating apps.

June 21: Queer Sabha, hosted by DC Sabha and cohosted by Hindus for Human Rights and KhushDC! For any of you who haven’t heard, DC Sabha has been one of the coolest spaces I’ve gotten to be in over the past many months – it was a click between progressive values and community that I’ve really cherished in DC, and a childhood love for classical music and dance that I felt like I’d lost along the years. A lot of this piece that I wrote in April was inspired by attending Sabha then, but Queer Sabha this month was distinctly meaningful – getting to hear from queer performers on how they think of their queer identities in the interactions with classical arts, the way joy and desire and identity manifest in classical arts, and how they’ve found meaning in partaking in that sharing and performance.

June 22: The next day, Hindus for Human Rights hosted their fourth Baithak for Liberation, a series that focuses on liberatory frameworks within Hindu tradition, scripture, and ritual. This month’s was on queerness (naturally), and it was a really interesting chance to learn about how Hindu rituals and rites have been revamped and reworked to be more queer inclusive and to actually uplift transitions and coming outs rather than restricting them. For me, one of my favorite explanations of the legitimacy of queerness within Hindu theology came here – that if the Atman (individual self) is in fact the same as the Brahman (the universal reality), that it does not matter what physical body the Atman exists within.

June 22 (Part 2): After a packed day of theology, I went to a queer South Asian picnic hosted by a friend. I didn’t know most people here, but it was fun to get to meet new people and chat a bit. I wrote a lot about what this experience was like on Tuesday, but regardless, it was nice to do something casual and chill and celebratory that also felt organic and natural and fun on a Sunday afternoon. Plus, something I’ve really enjoyed has been meeting and talking to new people, and this was a really nice moment of extroversion in an otherwise tremendously introverted day.

June 23: The day after (I know, a marathon of brown queer things on a weekend I originally wasn’t even going to be in DC), I went to the AFI Silver Spring Cultural Center to see Fire, a 1996 independent Indian film that discusses the relationship between two women who meet as a result of their husbands being brothers. Amidst toxicity and difficulties in their respective marriages, they end up finding comfort, desire, and attraction to one another. I still haven’t decided if I liked this film or not – on one hand, I thought the depiction of queerness was really lovely, it was tender in small moments that felt laced with cultural significance. Plus, the film was groundbreaking for it’s time – people torched, vandalized, and attacked a number of theaters when this film came out in 1996. And even today, I don’t think this film could be made; the Hindu right would definitely come for a film in which two women named Radha and Sita are in a queer relationship with eachother. But on the other hand, the acting is pretty rough, the film feels choppy and unnatural in English rather than Hindi or another Indian language, and there does feel at times to be a reasonable interpretation of the film that’s just them turning to eachother because of loneliness and difficulties in their marriage. Eventually I’ll figure out how I feel about it, but either way, was tremendously worth the watch.

June 30: Attended a talk by DMV Sari on whether or not the gender binary and patriarchy are most attributable to the Brahmins and casteism or to the British and colonialism. If I’m being honest, I’m 100% certain that the answer is some degree of both, and it meant this was my least favorite of any of the events or programs I attended this month, simply because I felt like it really lacked nuance. But I appreciated the chance to listen, the chance to reflect and think more about it, felt like I really got to meet a lot of cool people and hear about their experiences. If nothing else, it was a good reminder of things I know about and things I still have questions about, and sometimes even the events I don’t feel like I learn from or enjoy as much are still worthwhile to attend. Plus, I’ve gotten to talk about the subject matter with a number of my friends since then, which has been a really great deep dive on the interactions between caste, queerness, and structures of oppression in India.

Even separate the formal calendar events, I got to spend a lot of time interacting with queer content out in the world. I decided I wanted to host a book club for Burning My Roti, one of the most exceptional books I’ve read in the past year, and ended up prepping a reading and discussion guide for it last week, which I’m excited to share here next week. I rewatched parts of Lust Stories (and Lust Stories 2), which I first watched in college, which isn’t explicitly queer, but is one of the most honest representations and discussions of sex and desire in Indian communities.

Plus, I figured out things I want to do. I want to read more queer stories from two books I picked up in London a year ago that discuss queerness in Indian culture, religion, history, friendship, and family – Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile, and Yaari – which I just haven’t committed enough time to so far. I want to learn more about linguistics and terms/concepts in South Asian languages that express queerness or aspects of gender and sexuality, inspired by one of the coolest books I’ve seen, the Queer Arab Glossary.

And of course, also spent time making lists of things I want to watch and didn’t end up getting to. There are so many notable Bollywood movies that center queer main characters, and while I’ve seen Kapoor and Sons and Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, Badhaai Do, Maja Ma, and Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan are still just on my to-watch list. I started watching an Amazon Prime docuseries highlighting trans experiences in India – In Transit – but haven’t gotten to finish it. I wanted to rewatch Karan Johar’s story in Bombay Talkies, which is a queer story. I started Hijab Butch Blues, which explores queerness alongside the Quran in a really interesting discussion of faith and sexuality but haven’t yet finished it.

In the process of believing I could curate the brownest queerest month of June possible, I was deeply humbled, and learned that it just was not possible to make everything I wanted to happen work out. At first this felt like an optimization problem – maybe I should’ve planned my book club better so that I wouldn’t have to postpone it last minute, DC should have started showings of Queen of my Dreams in June like so many other cities, and I should’ve been more disciplined about working through my to watch and to read list(s).

But the reframing I got to next felt better – it’s genuinely a joy to get to have queer & South Asian things existing outside the month of June. There are opportunities and moments that exist separate Pride. We get to have conversations about queer brown things outside of just a month allocated to doing it in speed drive. We get to have queer brown joy and discourse in any other month too, not just tokenized to exist as a diversity overlap during Pride. There are enough movies that I literally could not make time to watch them all during the month of June, enough books that I could not read them all in a prescribed few weeks, and that felt like a really great place to feel like queer brown options and representation were moving towards.

Even in the next few weeks, there are so many things to look forward to. I’m hosting book club for Burning My Roti and finally seeing a screening of Queen of My Dreams when I get back to DC next week, I get to see some of my favorite queer South Asian DJs touring in DC, including MTOORAY and Armana Khan, and while I maybe wish they were in town during Pride, I’m glad I never had to pick and choose between what I could and couldn’t attend when there were inevitable schedule conflicts with June overcrowding. And even things that just happened before June but have stayed front and center in queer South Asian discourse, like A Nice Indian Boy finally having its big screen premiere this April. Plus, Made in Heaven continues to be one of the most prominent representations of queerness in India and one of my favorite tv shows.

And the to-read and to-watch lists aren’t going anywhere anytime soon – and hopefully will only continue to grow.

Plus, there were other queer things and other brown things, and I was reminded of how important even the non-overlapping spaces are. I went line dancing twice, and even got asked if I was interested in starting to teach. I attended my first Washington Spirit game of the season and finally saw Mamma Mia start to finish outdoors – you might say neither are actually queer or Pride things, and you might be right, but I’d argue they’re the some of the more queercoded things you can do on a free evening. I attended an Indian Marxism documentary screening, two liberation theology reading group meetings, a book club, a small South Asian music performance, a Bollywodo concert, and two teach-ins on Kashmir. I sometimes get really caught up in maximizing the overlap, that I forget how rounding the two sides of it are in my life even when they exist on their own. And I’m glad I didn’t pressure myself into only doing Queer Brown things this month or I would’ve missed so many great memories and adventures with friends or opportunities to learn something new.

But more than anything, I had the chance to reflect really intentionally on what that balance between serious discourse and engagement, community building, and joy and memories, actually can and should look like for me during Pride. And I loved every moment of it - the ones where I got to attend things and then talk to people there about them, the ones where I learned something new or was forced to think about something in a different way, the ones where I saw something new and bold become a highlight of my DC Pride month, because it tells me that it’s not just me growing and experiencing new things, but the whole queer brown community evolving in how it interacts with that identity in this city.

Plus – maybe at the beginning of the month I had questions about whether or not I was not queer enough or not doing queerness correctly when I didn’t have interest in attending DC Pride parade or block party. But at the end of this month, I’m fully certain there would’ve been no more authentic way for me to celebrate Pride, and I’m happy to have pushed a little to find a better fit for a month.

When we’re shown an idea of what pride should look like, we lose everything else really fast. Pride doesn’t have to look like rainbow bralettes and glitter and day drinking outside – as much fun as those days of my past have been – and looking a bit different doesn’t make them any less Pride.

At least in this version of my June 2025, I’m certain that I actually am proud.