Watch: A Beginner's Guide To Growing Up Queer & Invisible In India

Remember the last time you saw positive representation of the LGBTQ community in Indian media? Don’t berate yourself if nothing comes to mind. While Bollywood uses them as a comic relief, the community still remains largely invisible in mainstream television even if things have improved on the independent arts and cinema front. What does this mean for a queer child growing up in India? Well, for starters, in a heteronormative culture like India, there are hardly any children exposed to the possibility of having an alternative sexuality or gender identity. While most would feel indifferent at a young age, they most often grow up with inhibitions that come back to them when they realise they have been living in a heternormative closet build by all the people that surround them, both near and far--their very own society.

A student of animation from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Debasmita Das, had the best solution to this dilemma, deciding to take the narrative back into her own control and to narrate these inhibitions faced by queer kids growing up in homophobic India. Taking from personal experiences, she created a small animation video, which has now developed into a web-animation series called ‘The Beginner’s Guide To Growing Up Queer And Invisible’, thanks to Gaysi Family.

She explains to Homegrown, “As part of a college course, we were discussing sexuality, gender and otherness. We discussed how these topics are further projected in Indian media and how that affects the people who are feeding into this information. Later, I decided to take this up as a personal project. I created a script by collating my own experiences, my thoughts and how media affected me while I was growing up. It was all about visualising the reality and putting it together into animation.”
She has created two episodes so far and the future of this quirky and cute series looks very promising. It is surely a gateway to promote discussions which have been unspoken for far too long. A team member at Gaysi adds, “The idea is to put the right kind of LGBTQ content in the Indian context. The series is for everyone. For people who are coming out, for those who have already and for people who are curious. It is also a sacred space to accept and discuss the inhibitions of a child growing up India and how he/she comes of age finally.”

Watch the first two episodes of this endearing series below. 

Words: Karan Kaul