Essays

The case for a queer history month

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Given the nature of the Supreme Court’s verdict against same-sex marriages in India, could an LGBTQ+ History Month help?

Pride parade Kolkata 2018. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

In a conversation with Lounge just days before the Supreme Court decided it could not legalise gay marriages, Kannada writer Vasudhendra, 54, who has been open about his homosexuality over the last decade especially, recalled that growing up he did not even know the word “gay”.

“A village-born boy” who was “only taught Kannada properly”, he says that even as recently as 30 years ago, there was an alarming lack of resources for, or representation of, queer people in contemporary literature and culture. “It was only in college (in the late 1980s) that I came across a vulgar and insensitive joke about homosexual behaviour in an adult magazine in Kannada—and felt thrilled,” Vasudhendra recalls. “Thrilled because I thought Finally! Finally, someone has finally spoken about me.”

It has taken decades of sociocultural interventions in art, literature and cinema to build awareness on queerness; in parallel, legal appeals to decriminalise homosexual relationships, by individual petitioners as well as the likes of the Naz Foundation, an NGO, brought the conversation in India to the point it reached last week—on the cusp of marriage equality for people of all genders and sexualities. The country’s highest court of appeal had begun hearing petitions that sought legal recognition of same-sex marriage in April-May.

While the court stated that it would be beyond the scope of legal interpretation to go through with the verdict, passing the matter to the executive, Aishwarya Ayushmaan, a Delhi-based human rights lawyer who moonlights as the drag queen Lush Monsoon, says that if there was a stronger understanding of queer history within, and of, the subcontinent, the court might not have been hesitant.

“According to how I read law, if the courts want to do something, they will do it…. There could have been a way, even while respecting the separation of powers,” she says. “The hesitance comes from the fact that while the judges are aware of LGBTQ+ history to a certain extent, the public isn’t. When a majority of people aren’t aware of Indian LGBTQ+ history, they can’t partake in a judgement like this. Therefore, the judges will feel less confident in saying so strongly…something which is against popular morality,” she adds.

The sense is that apart from the huge legal victory in 2018 to strike down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (which could have sent a gay person to jail for up to 10 years), and a few conversations in metro-city salons, panels, and the celebratory photo-ops that Pride parades across the country lend themselves to, not much has changed in terms of the citizenry’s general understanding of love, desire and relationships outside the assumed norms of heterosexuality.

Just as with Vasudhendra, Ayushmaan, now 31, too had no way or context by which to live authentically or express her inherent femininity when she was growing up. This was in Ranchi, “a small town” where many people would, and continue to, dismiss the idea of queerness as a trend or fad. “Therefore, stringing together the terms ‘LGBTQ+’ and ‘history’ itself is a very, very important thing to do…it gives much needed background and context to something that is actually so deeply rooted in our history,” she says.

The late translator, gay rights activist and historian Saleem Kidwai had once said that “(f)or a long time, the history of us queer people has been erased from records and thus from our collective memory, a crucial act for the queer phobia project. Without a history and therefore without a memory, we as a community are rootless, alienated and disempowered.”

Recalling this, Sharif D. Rangnekar, author of Queersapien (2022) and Straight To Normal: My Life As A Gay Man (2019), says that to reclaim this space, the idea of a concerted effort at a History Month will help “create more platforms where these lives can be shared”. Rangnekar is also the director of the four-year-old Rainbow Literature Festival, held annually in December with the aim of spotlighting queer stories and authors.

“Even if the verdict was in our favour, a celebration of Indian queer history is something we should be looking into,” says Sakshi Juneja, founder of Gaysi Family, a media platform for desi queer folks. “It’s always good to remind ourselves where we come from, of both the hindrances and joys of the past. This is even more relevant now: It not only shows the resilience and strength of community, it also aligns older queer people with younger ones,” she adds.

Many countries mark an LGBTQ+ History Month, separate from a Pride Month, to commemorate queer icons, provide a sense of confidence and belonging to the community, and build awareness. History Month is currently on in countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, Romania, Armenia, Australia and Uganda. England marks it in February, Hungary and the Netherlands in March, Italy in April, Cuba and Germany in May, France in June and Finland in November.

Juneja says that while there need not be a hard-and-fast rule for India, perhaps a dedicated month for online campaigns, with offline engagements folded into Pride celebrations across cities at different times of the year, may be a good way to go. “It’s good to have continuous reminders,” she notes.

Similarly, Vasudhendra notes that any occasion to discuss queer lives and rights is a good excuse, whether the month or date was originally regarded more as an “American or Chinese” one. For Rangnekar, regardless of the choice of month or its original context, “if we can leverage (a History Month) for the (Indian queer) community, for them to know their history and for others also to know the history of queerness that the subcontinent has had, it will be extremely significant”.

In India, Pride marches—they started with the Friendship Walk in Kolkata in 1999—have established their significance in visibilising queer folks. Similar to the American Pride that was rooted in the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, Pride marches here also became a display of self-acceptance in the face of systemic oppression, gay- and trans-phobia. Now, a History Month can perhaps serve another important, even if less attractive end at the present moment of disappointment: of unearthing and establishing the past, to pave the way for a stronger future. “It’s now more important to re-establish what LGBTQ+ people have endured through history, and the fact that they have actually even existed in the first place,” says Ayushmaan.

Rangnekar adds that while History Month is as much part of human rights expression as Pride Month, and that you cannot remove one from the other, “a History Month gives more strength to Pride. It gives us a reference, a past. It validates you in a way and it can become part of an argument to further strengthen your case for dignity and self-actualisation.” This seems to be the need of the hour. 

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 27 October 2023

Roger Federer: Growing up with the champion's champion

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What Roger Federer gave to his fans transcended the tight lines of the tennis court

Over the last two decades, the love that Federer’s game and personality inspired led to long lasting connections between fans.  (AP)

The year was 2005. I’d just moved cities, leaving home and friends who were like siblings. I was in a new school, reading a new syllabus, and trying to make conversation with classmates whose fast-paced after-class banter was in a language I was just picking up. Alone for a few dull hours after school that January afternoon, I was flipping channels on the TV and landed on a telecast of the Australian Open. What a day to have done so.

The first Grand Slam of the year was in its quarter-final stage. The legend Andre Agassi was playing the No.1 seed, Roger Federer. Agassi was 34; Federer had not yet turned 24.


I fell hard for the sound of the ball hitting the strings. Federer’s electric blue T-shirt stood out against the then green of the Australian Open’s hard court surface. The game took hold of me. I wasn’t sure what it was but I could sense something sublime.

For the rest of the match, a meditative transcendence calmed the storms of pre-teen angst. I basked in the playfulness and warmth of Federer’s game, the allure of its style and the safety of its confidence. I couldn’t articulate it then, but being engrossed in a Federer game was like escaping it all, while also finding a home.

To a non-believer (of any hue), this would sound ridiculous. I am no sports observer, nor an expert in Federer’s game, but what he gave me was unbelievably beautiful and poetic tennis, to which my mind automatically plays Pachelbel’s Canon in D major. If David Foster Wallace could declare in The New York Times in 2006 that “Roger Federer (Is) A Religious Experience”, then, I told myself, I wasn’t too far out.

To me, Federer is tennis, but also so much more. He is more than the GOAT, more than one of the greatest forehands in tennis history. Much more than the unforced errors he stacked up in recent years, and so much more than the record 237 consecutive weeks he spent as the ATP world No.1. For 17 years, Federer, his matches and his moments, have come to me when I needed them most.

In that cold January, he was my ticket to finding real friends. In the days following the Agassi match, I found out that one of my new classmates liked tennis too. She loved Lleyton Hewitt but she found Federer exciting. Who didn’t? Already world no. 1, and the defending champion that year, he wasn’t an underdog. Saying “I really like Federer” was an easy enough way to forge tennis-specific friendships. One turned into two in school, and extended to a neighbour. I met people I would carry in my heart for decades to come, and the city became one I would end up calling home.

Soon, another move meant keeping in touch with these friends through newly minted email IDs. The internet was young to us, and I found a whole world of friends on the official Federer website between 2007-2010. Rogerfederer.com had a thriving community of people from all walks of life, from all over the world, celebrating Federer. The forums had different threads — we could talk about games, rallies, specific shots, his shoes, his racquets, his family and friendships, and other players who caught our attention.

The fandom here was not blind in its love for Federer. Those who understood the technicalities of the game wrote short and snippety as well as longer, detailed essays. It was a sort of service within, and for, a fandom. They would break down his game, not with the acquired objectivity of a seasoned sports journalist but with the gentleness of an older sibling explaining the beauty of a math formula. During his then infrequent losses, they would cushion the minor heartbreak with tales of its universality.

Unexpectedly, it was through these Federer forums that I discovered new literature. More importantly, the communities there kept me writing through the loss of a grandparent and a beloved dog, and board exams. We exchanged notes, followed one another’s blogs, and discussed writing and reading. A Greek Federer fan I had become friends with introduced me to C.P. Cavafy’s poems, an Italian who diligently compiled a scrapbook to gift Federer on his birthdays connected with writers and artists over email to collect poems, essays, fan fiction, photographs, illustrations, or anything else one wanted to send to Federer. Whether they actually reached him was immaterial.

These were just the tip of the iceberg in collaborations and connections forged purely from the love that Federer’s game and personality inspired. As life and college got in the way, I had less time for the forums; and sometime in 2016, the site shut for maintenance, returning in 2017 without a “forums” tab. It all feels unreal, impossible, now— there remain many different kinds of fandoms but I believe that this one was, and is, truly unique, given the changing nature of the internet.

In the Goodbye Roger Federer episode of The Tennis Podcast, a speaker talked of his “creativity and that sense of fun, a sense that he was always playing a game—he never made it into a war”. In my experience, this trickled down to the RF fandom. We might have had a complicated relationship, especially with Rafael Nadal for example, but the discourse was largely not antagonistic.

Many fans have since moved from the conversational nature of forums and onto a more announcement-friendly world of Twitter and Instagram now. And while that alters the inherent atmosphere for discourse itself, what hasn’t changed is the fervent and intensely personal way of expressing love and loyalty to Federer.

There is a Federer-fan gathering on Forumotion that’s still active, and a busy Federer tribute thread on Men’s Tennis Forums. It makes me wonder, had the Rogerfederer.com forums stayed, how would we have gathered and what would the threads have looked like since the heartbreaks of his defeats became more regular?

We first saw a blip sometime in 2008, when Nadal and Novak Djokovic started to close in. The gut punches began in 2016. There he was, in his mid-30s and struggling, out most of the year since his knee surgery and a back issue. After almost more than a decade of dominance, he was losing to younger practitioners of a sincere and industrious but less graceful game.

For a little over 17 years, regardless of where I was in the world, I have stayed up nights and woken up early mornings to watch him, to find those few moments of a sublime something—whether it was in my pjs at home in Hyderabad, in a sparse DU hostel common room with a few unexpected fellow-residents for company, at a neighbourhood CCD in Chennai, in the dead quiet of my apartment in a cold-to-the bones Chicago winter night, or out at an old bar in Delhi with friends as he won his 18th slam.

For some of us, watching Federer at his peak meant discerning almost no difference between opponents. We’d develop a tunnel vision, one that would have nothing between us and that his awe-inducing overhead smashes, his soft, silent drop shots, and those forehands down the line that would somehow fix us.

Over the last five years, however, being a Federer fan has meant sitting tight while he recalibrates to the frailties of being human. Watching him linger a little longer before a second serve; having your heart thump harder and harder with each shot in an unnecessarily long rally that he would end with an error off his racket and not, as we had come to expect, an effortlessly executed spectacular winner. It hurt.

It was still a spectacle every time he stepped on court though. Just a spectacle of a different kind. Every single time he drew from some miraculous reserve of strength, especially when it seemed like he had none left, when, despite an error-filled game, he could still show us a flicker of what we knew we had experienced before, even if was much muted by a TV telecast, we knew it was a reason to believe again — not just in him and not just in this game. That one championship point he’d saved, in the epic 2008 Wimbledon final, is a fine example. These moments of magic were getting rarer, but despite, or perhaps because of this, the pull they had on us felt even more real. It made the magic, for lack of a better phrase, just so much more magical.

It was a grey, rainy Thursday evening in Delhi when the news of Federer’s retirement broke. And on cue, Federer-friends old and new reached out. “Whattt, Roger noooo. why NOW, and why would you do this at an EXHIBITION?!” said one, in a one-way conversation she was having with Federer, but in my Whatsapp window. “Knew it was coming sometime but still made me so sad,” said another. “I don’t even know why I’m sad when effectively, he’s been retired for a couple years anyway,” texted a friend from J-School, now a sports journalist.

What next for us Federer fans? Some are looking to Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Nick Kyrgios, Daniil Medvedev, Frances Tiafoe and Casper Ruud. I enjoy Tiafoe's cheeky skill and Ruud's charm. After a long time, this year’s US Open felt more exciting than the Slams of the recent past. “Finally, no? This was fully different from the Big 3 era,” wrote a Federer fan to me. “And I think it’s good in a way.”

His point is similar to what hardened critics felt about the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic (and sometimes Andy Murray) era: Federer’s clean wins made for boring copy, Nadal’s very visible hard work and victories over the Swiss became predictable, and Djokovic was likely the only one introducing any drama.

I can empathise: Sports reports and statistics cannot ever evoke the inexplicably intimate quality of being drawn into Federer’s game. He was, as Billie Jean King tweeted upon his retirement announcement, “a champion’s champion”.

His retirement is so personal for some of us that it does not matter whether we have been in touch over the last few years. The minute we see the news, we unplug almost instantly and look inwards. We remember where we were when he first happened to us, we look at how far we have come, how much his wins and losses were ours, and how his example got us to many of our own milestones. We turn homewards, even if for just a few moments, to everything and everybody we have grown up with. Roger Federer brings us together and centres us again.

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge, on 24 September, 2022.