What does queerness look like for South Asian women in Canada? I never knew.
I grew up in suburban Toronto thinking I was the only gay Brown woman ever because I had never seen a queer person that looks like me. LGBTQ+ representation was—and still is—heavily Western-normative and perpetuates a stereotype that only white people can be queer. This made me feel completely alone in navigating my sexual orientation at a young age. I was reluctant to talk to anyone about my attraction to women because I was afraid of the violence that would ensue if my parents found out about me. I repressed my queerness by age fourteen to protect my safety as a minor with no resources.
At university, I began venturing into LGBTQ+ spaces as it became possible then to “live a double life.” I expected to feel a strong sense of belonging, love, and acceptance for who I am in the queer community—these hopes and expectations were quickly shattered. I was—and still am—constantly perceived as heterosexual in queer spaces due to my Brown skin and South Asian features (i.e. long hair), which are incongruent with colonial understandings of what a lesbian looks like.
For years, this had turned my pride for my South Asian roots into shame and pressured me into assimilating. Despite my best efforts to hide my South Asian identity, I continued to experience racially-charged microaggressions from white queer people, as I was unable to fully disassociate from my South Asianness without being exiled from the Brown community. The inability to be queer in culturally conducive ways is extremely invalidating, invisibilizing, and infuriating.
As a South Asian-Canadian, I have additional battles in my fight for sexual liberation. As a queer person, I need to fight for acceptance in heterosexual society. As a queer woman-presenting individual, I need to fight for space in the male-dominant LGBTQ+ community. But as queer South Asian woman, as with our fellow queer East Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, I need to fight for both my ethnic and sexual identities to co-exist within queer spaces. The constant pressure to choose between being either queer or a person of colour makes it incredibly difficult to celebrate my authentic self.
Pride month is a beautiful time of joy, love, and liberation. However, for many queer South Asians, it is also a time of profound grief and loneliness. This is because the Pride that we celebrate in Canada continues to erase the existence of queer South Asian people in the diaspora.
Sexual and gender fluidity was widely accepted and considered normal in pre-colonial South Asian society. However, our queerness was repressed and violently erased by British colonizers, who forced us into the closet. Now, in the Canadian diaspora, the descendants of my colonizers refuse to acknowledge my queerness because I am Brown.
North American LGBTQ+ communities speak extensively about sexual liberation—but for who? As a Brown woman, I have never been given the agency to define my own sexuality in queer spaces.
In fact, my sexuality as a queer South Asian is constantly policed by my white counterparts. I am forced to express queerness in white-normative ways and a failure to do so results in rejection, invisibilization, and micro-aggressive discrimination. It is extremely draining to hear people in queer spaces invalidate my gayness by asking if I’m just experimenting, insisting that I must be straight, and making unprompted remarks assuming that I will have a heterosexual arranged marriage. My Brownness does not make me any less queer and my queerness does not make me any less Brown.
It is so painfully frustrating to hear acquaintances insist that I must “come out” to my family. Mainstream LGBTQ+ organizations have convinced us that “living your truth” means publicly declaring your queerness and severing ties with anyone who does not accept you. But as a queer South Asian, I cannot “come out” to my family without putting myself at risk of family violence. It is not easy to sever ties with the people who immigrated to this country to give us a better life, and it is certainly not an optimal choice given our widespread families and collectivist culture.
I am one of few LGBTQ+ South Asian activists who has accepted the risk of family violence by engaging in this advocacy work as an openly queer individual for the past eight years. During this time, I have simultaneously worked to ensure my parents remain ignorant of my queerness, because I refuse to sacrifice my familial ties. This does not mean that I am “not out” or “less gay” – it means I am living my truth in a way that balances both my queer & South Asian identities.
The LGBTQ+ community prides itself for being a “welcoming family for those who are rejected by their blood relatives.” But there are unspoken guidelines to be accepted into this “queer family”— my experience has been that you must be white or you must be willing to give up your ethnic identity. This principle of conditional acceptance is no different from being rejected by your blood family for being queer.
I refuse to give up my South Asian identity in order to be accepted by the queer family and I refuse to give up my queer identity in order to be accepted by the South Asian family. But neither my queer nor South Asian families want to accept me for all my intersecting identities as a queer South Asian. This is why I have spent my life feeling lonely and grieving my place in both the LGBTQ+ and South Asian communities.
As such, in 2019, I founded the Queer South Asian Women’s Network (QSAW Network) to ensure that all gender marginalized LGBTQ+ South Asian-Canadians have a family-like space where we can show up and be unconditionally loved as our most authentic selves.
The QSAW Network has provided a beautiful community space with an abundance of peer social support. I am so grateful for every person that attends our QSAW Network community spaces, because together we create the loving chosen family that we have yearned for so long.
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