Uncloseted Media published this article on Dec. 16.

By NANDIKA CHATTERJEE | “I want to change your last name to make it sound whiter,” Sonali “Alyy” Patel remembers her white girlfriend saying to her while they were spending a quiet evening at home.

Patel felt a wave of grief wash over her. “I [have] to give up my South Asian-ness in order to be in a queer relationship,” she remembers thinking.

Patel and her girlfriend had been dating for some time and were sketching out a future together, even starting sentences with, “When we get married.” But as they built a foundation, she continued to feel marginalized because of her Indo-African heritage.

“I remember I was in [my girlfriend’s] household, and her father made a comment that was racist to brown people,” Patel told Uncloseted Media. When her girlfriend called him out, Patel remembers him responding by saying, “You were racist before you started dating a brown girl.”

Patel, a 29-year-old researcher and LGBTQ activist living in Vancouver, Canada, says comments from girlfriends and society kept popping up. So she began investigating them academically and went on to create the Queer South Asian Women’s Network.

In a 2019 study she published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Patel conducted in-depth narrative interviews with nine queer South Asian women in Toronto. She found that these women routinely experienced microaggressions, erasure and pressure to conform to white, Western queer norms, with one participant being told her queerness wasn’t that important during a conversation with her partner. Another said she was advised by friends and family to stick to other people of color when it came to dating.

This discrimination is often compounded in many conservative South Asian cultures where homosexuality is still stigmatized and viewed as a violation of religious or family values. In addition, women are expected to uphold family honor through modesty, heterosexual marriage and self-sacrifice.

A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that only 37 percent of Indians believe homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared to majorities in most Western nations.

In Patel’s experiences in queer circles, she believes that what often felt like a visceral sense of South Asian identity loss was actually enforced assimilation. “I had no language or framework to understand that this was racism. I grew up in a white town. … People were very openly racist and okay with it,” she says. She adds that in addition to facing racism in LGBTQ spaces, South Asian women face rejection for being queer at home.

“Our families are like, ‘Haha no, you’re not gay,’” she says.

Coming out

Patel says coming out poses unique challenges for South Asian women compared to women of other ethnicities.

In a 2025 study in the Canadian Review of Sociology, Patel interviewed 40 queer South Asian women in Canada and found that staying closeted can protect them from judgment from family and community.

This leaves these women vulnerable to contrasting pressures where their LGBTQ circles want them to come out.

“There was a participant who [was told by another] queer woman who was white that she just needs to ‘try harder to come out to [her] family,’” says Patel. “But that’s not how it works. [She] did try coming out to them, [but] they didn’t listen.” When she did come out, she was told by her family, “You’re not really gay.”

“Our culture prizes silence, sacrifice and family reputation over individual truth, so falling in love with a woman isn’t just about your personal life,” Suja Vairavanathan, a life coach in Essex, England, who works with South Asian women, told Uncloseted Media. “It feels like you’re challenging an entire system.”

Vairavanathan, who grew up in a traditional Indian family, came out later in life.

“For me, it wasn’t a typical ‘I always knew’ story. I didn’t grow up identifying as gay or even questioning my sexuality,” she says. “I spent 20 years in a marriage, raising kids, living what looked like the ‘right’ Tamil woman’s life. Then I fell in love with my best friend, who happened to be a woman.”

After Vairavanathan left her marriage, she came out in a TikTok video where she is smiling ear-to-ear with on-screen text reading: “You’d have to be a little delulu to think that a 42-year-old Tamil divorcee, mum of two sons, eldest daughter, recently turned gay woman had the audacity to show up on social media and live life unapologetically.” Her caption added: “Yet here I am.”

While there were many positive comments on the video, Vairavanathan says the backlash from many folks in the South Asian community was intense: “I had comments calling me ‘a disgrace,’ saying I’d ‘ruined my family’s name,’ even messages telling me I was ‘corrupting Tamil culture’ or that I must have been ‘brainwashed by the West.’ People reduced my whole life to a scandal just because I chose to live honestly.”

Internalized shame

This community rejection can be painful. “It wasn’t strangers attacking me. It was my own people, speaking the same language I grew up with, who decided I didn’t deserve respect anymore. And that hurts in a way racism from outsiders never could, because it feels like rejection from your own bloodline,” says Vairavanathan.

Mental health professionals who work with South Asian clients say that collectivist traditions, where family reputation is often prioritized over individual expression, can lead to the stigmatization of LGBTQ identities.

On the AAHNA South Asian therapy website, they write that understanding taboos associated with sexual orientation “is crucial for effective therapeutic practice, as they can significantly influence mental health and well-being.”

Balancing dual identities

Jiya Rajput, a British Indian content creator and founder of the QPOC Project, says the balancing act of her sexual and racial identity can be tough: “Being both South Asian and queer sometimes feels like having two vastly different identities,” Rajput told Uncloseted Media. “I have tried my best to blend my queerness with my desi identity. However, it is not often easy, with stereotypes and prejudice sometimes making me feel out of place.”

This balancing act may involve navigating stereotypes and racism inside queer spaces, which can have negative mental health outcomes. A 2022 survey of LGBTQ Asian Americans found that discomfort with one’s race or ethnicity within queer communities was associated with lower psychological well-being for those who consider their racial identity important.

Dating as a queer South Asian woman

Balancing this dynamic can make dating challenging. A 2023 study revealed that queer Asian American women are frequently subject to rigid racial dating preferences, with most preferring to date within their own racial group, often as a reaction to feeling fetishized or rejected from white queer spaces.

And even dating within communities of color presents its own set of challenges. “Racism is not exclusively a white people’s issue,” Patel says, noting that she experienced subtle discrimination with another girlfriend who was Punjabi.

“[She] was genuinely trying to relate with me, she just couldn’t,” she says.

Patel remembers her girlfriend holding many assumptions, such as the belief that all South Asians share the same cultural traditions, such as Bhangra, a lively Punjabi dance, or Garba, a traditional Gujarati folk dance performed during festivals.

“It comes from a place of just wanting to be seen for their own culture,” Patel says, noting that many people of color aren’t accustomed to being truly heard or understood. “There’s so much excitement in dating someone from a different background that sometimes you forget to actually listen and receive the culture through their lens.”

When South Asian women do decide to date white women, Patel says it can feel like one “should just assimilate … and try to keep the pressures of being brown [and] growing up in a stricter, possibly patriarchal, culture at bay.”

These pressures in queer spaces caused Lavina Sabnani to leave her culture behind in an effort to feel accepted.

“It felt wrong to push away everything my ancestors carried with them for so long,” Sabnani told Uncloseted Media. “There’s a standard of whiteness at Pride, at lesbian parties, at cultural and social clubs. … Me and the other brown girls never get noticed. It was like you’re invisible within a community where you’re supposed to be counted in.”

“Being a lesbian South Asian means breaking the mold in every possible way,” says Hubiba Ali, a first-generation Pakistani American, self-described “butch lesbian” and food scientist from Chicago. “Pakistani women I was raised around don’t wear boyish clothes, have short, cropped hair, thick muscles, and hairy legs. They do not eat with gusto, laugh and joke boisterously, or take up space. I gave up a lot of my birthright participation in my culture in order to live free.”

Underrepresented and under researched

To make change, Sabnani says South Asian representation in queer spaces is essential. But it’s not happening yet. According to GLAAD’s “Where We Are on TV” 2024-2025 study, Asian Pacific Islanders represented only 11 percent of LGBTQ characters on broadcast, 2 percent on cable and 14 percent on streaming.

Even shows that strive for diversity, like “The L Word: Generation Q,” fail to include South Asian characters. “They had everyone — Black, Latinx, East Asian — but not a single South Asian woman,” says Patel.

She recalls a dating app called Her that featured an image of two white women kissing — one of whom had a tattoo of a Hindu deity.

“They’ll use our gods, but not our faces,” she says.

Outside of Patel’s research, little information exists about racism and homophobia toward queer South Asian women.

And even in queer nightlife, Ali describes feeling sidelined. She says that while there are a few South Asian LGBTQ organizations in Chicago, finding meaningful representation is hard even in those scenes.

“They tend to be hosted in a part of town colloquially known as ‘Boystown,’ which semantically already does not center women or lesbians,” she says. “The events are usually held at gay bars for gay men.”

Finding acceptance

Patel says that to make spaces truly inclusive, folks need to “start by listening to queer brown women, understanding our unique challenges, and amplifying our voices.”

And despite all of these challenges, many queer South Asian women are still surviving and building a more inclusive future.

Artists like MANI JNX, a British Punjabi indie musician, are using music to explore queer South Asian love, trauma and joy. And visual creators like Mina Manzar are building online communities through art. “Funnily enough, here in NYC, so far from Pakistan, is where I’ve found the most vibrant and beautiful South Asian queer community,” Manzar told Uncloseted Media.

As for Patel, she has found a relationship with a Tamil woman that is grounded in mutual respect and cultural exchange. “I’ve learned how to make Tamil food, I’m learning the language, and she comes to Garba with me and dances every year,” she says. Their shared commitment to honoring each other’s traditions illustrates the importance of genuine cultural understanding in queer relationships that goes beyond surface-level acceptance or stereotypes.

Her hope is that the commitment to understanding that she has developed with her partner can become more reflective of how society tries to understand the experiences of queer South Asian women.

“Let’s just address each racialized group as a different racialized group and give them some damn visibility,” Patel says. “It’s not that hard.”

José Antonio Kast on Sunday won the second round of Chile’s presidential election.

Kast is the far-right leader of the Republican Party who was a member of the country’s House of Deputies from 2002-2018. He defeated Jeannette Jara, a member of the Communist Party of Chile who was former labor and social welfare minister in outgoing President Gabriel Boric’s government, by a 58.2-41.8 percent margin.

The election’s first round took place on Nov. 16.

Kast and Jara faced each other in the runoff after no candidate received at least 50 percent of the vote in the first round. Kast will take office on March 11.

“Under his leadership, we are confident Chile will advance shared priorities to include strengthening public security, ending illegal immigration, and revitalizing our commercial relationship,” said U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday in a statement. “The United States looks forward to working closely with his administration to deepen our partnership and promote shared prosperity in our hemisphere.”

The Washington Blade has previously reported Kast has expressed his opposition to gender-specific policies, comprehensive sex education, and reforms to Chile’s anti-discrimination laws. The president-elect has also publicly opposed the country’s marriage equality law that took effect in 2022.

The Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation, a Chilean LGBTQ and intersex rights group known by the acronym Movilh, in a statement acknowledged the election result. Movilh also declared a “state of alert, given this leader’s (Kast’s) public and political trajectory, characterized for decades by systematic opposition to laws and policies aimed at equality and nondiscrimination of LGBTIQ+ individuals.”

“We urge the president-elect and far-right sectors that follow him to understand and internalize (the fact) that the rights of LGBTIQ+ people are inscribed in the universality of human rights, and they are not built upon an ideology or a political trend,” said Movilh in its statement. “This is not, and never has been, a left-wing or right-wing issue, although some on both sides have gone to great lengths to suggest otherwise, without any basis other than their own partisan or electoral aspirations.”

Organizado Trans Diversidades, a group that advocates on behalf of trans and nonbinary Chileans, on social media said it will “continue the fight for our community’s human rights.”

The Justice Department has asked to join a federal lawsuit against Loudoun County Public Schools over the way it handled the case of three male high school students who complained about a transgender student in a boys’ locker room.

The Washington Blade earlier this year reported Loudoun County public schools suspended the three boys and launched a Title IX investigation into whether they sexually harassed the student after they said they felt uncomfortable with their classmate in the locker room at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn.

The parents of two of the boys filed a lawsuit against Loudoun County public schools in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. The Richmond-based Founding Freedoms Law Center and America First Legal, which White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller co-founded, represent them.

The Justice Department in a Dec. 8 press release announced that “it filed legal action against the Loudoun County (Va.) School Board (Loudoun County) for its denial of equal protection based on religion.”

“The suit alleges that Loudoun County applied Policy 8040, which requires students and faculty to accept and promote gender ideology, to two Christian, male students in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” reads the press release.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the press release said “students do not shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate.”

“Loudoun County’s decision to advance and promote gender ideology tramples on the rights of religious students who cannot embrace ideas that deny biological reality,” said Dhillon.

Outgoing Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and outgoing Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares in May announced an investigation into the case.

The Virginia Department of Education in 2023 announced the new guidelines for trans and nonbinary students for which Youngkin asked. Equality Virginia and other advocacy groups claim they, among other things, forcibly out trans and nonbinary students.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in February launched an investigation into whether Loudoun County and four other Northern Virginia school districts’ policies in support of trans and nonbinary students violate Title IX and President Donald Trump’s executive order that prohibits federally funded educational institutions from promoting “gender ideology.”