The FSOG Story

When I returned to India after years in international journalism, Section 377 still criminalised consensual same-sex sexual acts. The 2014 NALSA judgment had affirmed transgender people’s constitutional rights, but everyday life revealed how far legal recognition was from acceptance.

On the drive from Mumbai airport, I saw trans women offering blessings at traffic signals while drivers rolled up their windows. Among the women whose stories I would document were Meetu, who wanted to study and join the police, and Pooja, who relied on shop collections and festival dancing. They were approached for good fortune, yet denied education, employment and an ordinary place in society.

I started Fifty Shades of Gay as a photojournalism campaign. With a camera, a whiteboard and a marker, I asked queer and trans people one question: in a fairer world, what right would you want?

The responses became #IamNotACriminal. Trans women at Mumbai’s traffic signals took part, alongside Sushant Divgikar, also known as Rani Ko-HE-Nur, Dr Sylvester Rodgers and designer Rohit Verma.

Families joined too. At Mumbai Pride, Pradeep Divgikar walked beside his child, Sushant, carrying a message of unconditional love. The campaign documented both the rights people were denied and the support that helped them live more openly.

What began on Mumbai’s streets developed into a wider documentary project. With volunteer contributors, I gathered stories from Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Chandigarh, Bengaluru, Chennai and Mysuru, alongside work in Odisha.

We documented more than 80 personal accounts, from cultural figures to trans women and hijra communities in Mumbai’s red-light districts. Each conversation depended on trust, particularly when being publicly identified could carry consequences.

As newspapers began covering the campaign, more people found us. Some were ready to share their experiences. Others were still closeted and looking for reassurance that they were not alone.

As hundreds of people reached out, I realised that documenting their experiences was only part of the work. Many needed help with what they were facing.

We began connecting people in distress with mental health professionals and legal advisers. We also developed family counselling networks to help parents navigate questions of identity and acceptance.

Alongside this support, I advocated for comprehensive sex education. Again and again, our conversations revealed how misinformation and silence shaped people’s understanding of sexuality and gender.

Our work expanded to include vigils, crisis support, connections to legal counsel and the amplification of petitions challenging Section 377.

I also took the case for sex education to the TEDxEicherSchool stage. My talk examined the silence surrounding sexuality, consent and young people’s safety, drawing on questions that had become increasingly urgent through my work with FSOG.

The photographs remained important, but they were now part of a broader effort to help people be heard and find support.

When the Supreme Court unanimously decriminalised consensual same-sex sexual acts between adults, the legal context in which we worked changed.

But the judgment could not, on its own, resolve family rejection, workplace discrimination or the absence of queer lives from the historical record.

For me, it reinforced the importance of continuing the work beyond the campaign against Section 377.

I began widening FSOG’s focus to include queer histories across South Asia. Alongside documenting contemporary lives, we researched archival sources and cultural records that challenged the claim that queerness was a Western import.

Our conversations with artists and performers, including Anwesh Sahoo and Navin Noronha, explored how queer people were expressing themselves in the present. Our historical research asked whose lives had been overlooked, misrepresented or left out of the record.

We worked to recover those stories with their sources and context intact.

By this point, we had published more than 4,000 posts and grown into a community of 100,000 people reading, sharing and contributing to the work.

I introduced The Living Archive for readers who wanted to explore the research beyond a social media post. This free fortnightly publication brings together long-form investigations, archival documents, source lists and reading recommendations.

It gives us more space to explain what we have found, how we have verified it and what remains uncertain. It also gives readers the means to follow the sources and continue exploring for themselves.