In an earlier edition of the walk, a soccer match was disrupted when players stopped to ogle and yell out a gibes. Last Sunday, the play stopped, but momentarily. Families on a weekend outing stopped digging into their lunch packs to look up, before resuming again. Two bikers, who were harassing some of the participants, were chased away by accompanying cops, with whom the marchers exchanged jokes. Says Pawan Dhall, country director of Saathii, an NGO which works in the area of HIV-AIDS and LGBT issues, “Possibly, people, including the footballers, by now know who we are and why we march.”

In defiance of a law (section 377 of the Indian Penal Code) that shoves same-sex love into shadows of illegitimacy and crime, a small section of people of alternative sexuality—mostly urban, English-speaking and privileged—is standing up to tell the world who they are and pushing the margins of the spaces available to them.

Browse through TimeOut Delhi, a fortnightly lifestyle magazine launched three months ago, and you find between movie listings and the kids’ section another assertion—a page blazoned with the masthead: Gay & Lesbian. Apart from a regular column, it also has a listings section that features events ranging from the screening of a film on alternative sexuality to gatherings like the Sunday Socials. If that is a threshold crossed, the Nigah QueerFest, held in Delhi from May 25 to June 3, was another landmark. Hundreds of gay men and women from across the country celebrated their sexuality in full media glare as they watched feature, documentary and short films covering gay, lesbian and bi-sexual to transgender and hijra experiences in India. “It was an affirmation of their lives and choices that people were desperate to see,” says 53-year-old photographer Sunil Gupta, whose film India Postcard on gay life in India in the 1980s showed at the fest.

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