Bollywood gay movies
Mainstream Bollywood today has acknowledged the gay disposition in the country and has attempted ‘queer representation’ on the Hindi screen on multiple occasions. Some innovative choices around this ‘representation’ were steady, others perfunctory, and the rest an insidious attempt at homophobia and ‘queer humor’ appealing to only conservative heterosexual crowd.
But there are some Hindi films, apart from what one would regard mainstream LGBTQ movies like Badhai Complete or Aligarh, that have no explicit queerness but manifest fervently and intuitively on being ‘queer’. They may be relatable to the queer crowd or they may acquire queer symbolisms – they may simply entertain the lgbtq+ crowd or it may simply call as ‘not-heteronormative’. These films can largely teach us that being a part of the LGBTQIA+ community isn’t just about sexual preferences or gender fluidity, it’s about ‘feeling different’ and how this separation from the ‘normal’ isn’t necessarily bad. Let’s jump into some non-queer Queer films with quick spoiler-free summaries and why they are queer.
A Thursday
What’s it about? — A kindergarten nanny takes some children hostage o
10 great Indian LGBTQIA+ films
Indian cinema has often had a chequered past with diversity and inclusion, failing to fully represent the Indian LGBTQIA+ community and its people, identities and narratives. Mainstream Indian films featuring gay and womxn loving womxn characters have often been marred by tokenism and unsophisticated stereotyping. Time and again what has emerged is cynically reductive and even regressive.
Richer representations of gay lives have approach from the independent sector, and particularly from regional production industries outside of the Mumbai mainstream. A case in point is A Place of Our Own, the fresh film from the Bhopal-based Ektara Collective, which is receiving its UK premiere at BFI Flare 2023. A step forward in the evolution of Indian queer cinema, it demonstrates warmth, complexity and empathy in its intimate exploration of two transsexual women (Roshni and Laila) and their endless quest to find a place they can phone their own in an Indian world that discriminates and stigmatises against difference. Its refreshing de-othering of Roshni and Laila is part of an almost documentary-like perspective that lays bare the displacement and aggression faced by the Indian trans communi
Pride Month: 5 Bollywood films that depicted LGBTQ relationship without caricature
Sightings of LGBTQ people and their allies holding colourful parades in the streets, armed with rainbows and bright face paints tend to be a shared sight during June. The month is dedicated to celebrating the accomplishments of queer & gender-nonconforming people and highlight the systemic oppression they face from population.
Pride month dates back to 1969 when the Stonewall Inn gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village was raided by the police. The patrons and the guests at the bar retaliated to the police attack fearlessly. This episode brought queer rights movement from the fringes to the mainstream.
Bill Clinton became the first US president to officially designate June as Event Month in 1999. Since then, June has been a month to celebrate various colours and stripes of queerness.
Despite organism one of the more liberal countries in South Asia, India has a long way to go when it comes to ensuring that its queer group secures basic rights such as the right to equality
Top 10 Best LGBTQ+ Bollywood Movies
#10: “My Son is Gay (En Magan Magizhvan)” (2017)
“My Son is Gay” was originally envisioned as a Hindi-language film - the predominant language for Bollywood cinema. After some consideration, however, director Lokesh Kumar realized that it would be more impactful to discharge it as a Tamil language film. Although, by 2017, India had seen its fair share of LGBTQIA releases, none had ever been made in Tamil - meaning “My Son is Gay” would be the first of its kind. A lot of the runtime is spent focused on the gay character’s mother but, unlike many other films of the same ilk, she is often shamed for not accepting her son. To ensure that the movie was respectful and authentic, Kumar spent a year meeting people within the LGBT community.
#9: “My Brother…Nikhil” (2005)
By now, it’s adorable well known how abysmal the HIV/AIDS response was in the U.S. India faced similar problems, with many citizens in the 80s and 90s lacking