Mainstream WeeklyEvery June, the world begins to shimmer with colour. Cities light up in rainbows, brands change their logos, and social media becomes a canvas for queer joy, resistance, and remembrance. Pride Month has arrived, and with it come the parades, the performances, the slogans, and the stories. These expressions are necessary. They have been born from pain, built through protest, and carried forward with courage.
And yet, amid all this visibility, a quieter thought lingers in the back of my mind. One that often remains unspoken, not out of disinterest, but out of care:? What about the queer lives we do not see?
While I do not identify as queer myself, and cannot claim that experience, I work closely with questions of sexuality, law, and resistance in postcolonial India. I have read judgments that have criminalized love, policies that have defined bodies, and theories that challenge what we think of as normal. But reading and writing about something is not the same as living it. That distance matters. It is both ethical and necessary. At the same time, queer lives themselves are forms of knowledge