Queer Storytelling in India: Finally Taking Center Stage I The Queer Stage I Unscripted with Akarsh Khurana

Right.

Okay.

Start off a little bit with just like what were the first steps into queer storytelling for y'all? And since y'all, I mean, like you did mention, maybe we'll start with you since you said Vikram was your first interaction as a producer.

So what was that? How did it happen? How did it come about? How did those choices happen in the first place?

I think for me, most experience with Gacy has largely just been very organic.

Never thought through things.

You know, no template, no plan as such.

Do I try to be a little structured today? But back then, not.

So, I started Gacy also because one felt lack of lesbian narratives that's when my understanding of gender and sexuality was very low and I'm talking about 2008 so that's when I didn't

see

anything online so I thought let's start it ourselves and then I got more people and then organically it grew then we started with event and which was actually part of Mumbai Pride there was another organization that used to do open mic And he said no this time.

So then we said, let's do it, me and another team member.

And that's when we started doing open mics.

So

Mumbai Pride was something that existed?

This is 2010 or 11.

Many of you are not born then, I guess.

But yeah, and we did open mic and through one of the open mics, I met Vikram and Vikram came to me and said, you know, for this particular, like one segment I want to do on Drag Queen.

and that time there was no drag at least you know in our the way drag performances used to see today in metro

cities Asif Ali Baig was performing this drag queen piece which had written and the audience seemed to be loving it that's when Sakshi came up to me and said if you want to build this into a whole show I'll produce it so it was like a remarkable you know and then of course then I met Pooja and then we said let's do Drag Kings

right

and that's when all that but so Tape is actually Gentleman's Club so

Tape is a

precursor to Gentleman's Club it's almost the same show we just had a different name earlier and then we were premiering in the NCPA so we had to change the name and then we decided to call it the Gentleman's Club

But tape was not the beginning of your journey in terms of the storytelling I know of course you are a journalist and you were also associated with Bombay Dost Yes,