9.10.14

Break the Closet


In the first ever event celebrating the National Coming Out Day, the queer community of Mumbai is taking their struggle to streets by coming out of the closet about their sexual orientation at the Carter Road promenade in Bandra, this Saturday at 4 pm.
The “Break the Closet“ campaign, which will be launched on 11 October, marks an internationally observed civil awareness day celebrating individuals who publicly identify as a gender or sexual minority.
What began as a college project assigned to two 23-year-old advertising students of the Miami Ad School in Parel has turned into a campaign against the fear and discrimination that the queer community encounters daily in the city. To make their point, participants will demolish a 7-foot paper maché closet representing the symbolic “closet“ in which community is forced, before they initiate dialogue with bystanders about the issues affecting the LGBT community.
The two founders -Sasha Dias and Dhwani Shah -have been busy all week getting permissions and resources for the event with the support of Yaariyan, a four-year-old Rights group, led by 12 young activists of the LGBT community.
“We wanted to take a stand against the bullying and homophobia prevalent in city colleges. We wanted to show our support to friends who have acknowledged their sexual orientation in public,“ said Dias. “It is sad that there is still so much fear about being gay even in a city like Mumbai,“ added Shah.
“I first came out about my sexuality more than five years ago. But revealing your orientation to colleagues, extended family and everyday acquaintances is an ongoing process. In the current environment of homophobia, it is essential that we talk to ordinary people on the street to show we are more than a block of numbers,“ said Sibi Mathen, who is mentoring the project on behalf of Yaariyan.
“We need to tell everybody, especially students in school and college, that going public with their sexual orientation is still safe, despite the SC ruling on Section 377 which criminalised us. By taking to the streets, we show the LGBT community is not a miniscule minority,“ added Sonal Giani, a founding member of Yaariyan, which is the youth wing of Humsafar Trust, an LGBT rights NGO based in Mumbai.

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