Queer things can happen over coffee. Lovers smoulder, friends fall out and every Sunday morning, at a coffee shop in south Delhi, a group of 10-15 men get together—to steer clear of straight talk. They are a motley bunch: young, bleary-eyed call centre workers and shy undergraduate students, middle-aged bankers and photographers, corporate executives and NGO members. They are also gay. The banter, over cups of bitter brew and stacks of crusty sandwiches, is lively as they talk about Tendulkar’s return to form, the knotty politics of a corporate office, the lack of a love life, the pressure to get hitched and the sullen walls of silence they run into in homes. This is the Gay Delhi Sunday Social, a gathering of a handful of urban, middle-class and upper middle-class homosexual and bisexual men of the capital that every week stakes a claim—to visibility, to a social space.

“When we decided to start the Socials about a year ago, it was a conscious decision to be visible, to hold our gatherings in the day in a coffee shop. It was our way of pushing for a bit of public space,” says 41-year-old Ranjan, who works for an NGO.

Last Sunday, as Ranjan and his friends sipped on dark cappuccinos and creamy lattes, in Kolkata—the city has been organising a annual Gay Pride March since 2003 to mark the homophobic Stonewall Riots in New York of 1969 —a file of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, was curling itself around the lush-green Maidan. They were on their way to the Rabindra Sadan-Nandan complex, the hub of the state government’s intellectual and cultural activities in an annual ritual of affirmation. Some wore masks; others looked onlookers straight in the eye.

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