Gaysi

About Gaysi

Gaysi is a queer digital media platform publishing from Mumbai at gaysi.in, created by and for the desi LGBTQ+ community. The name — a blend of "gay" and "desi" — captures its mission: a safe, celebratory space for queer South Asians to share stories, find community and see themselves reflected. It began in November 2008 as a blog founded by MJ and Broom (with Sakshi Juneja recognised as a co-founder), born of the realisation that India had a scarcity of quality online queer content. From that heartbreak-fuelled blog grew one of India's most recognisable queer platforms: an online magazine of features, personal stories, fiction and essays; the Gaysi Zine print journal launched in 2013; and a thriving calendar of offline events including the Dirty Talk open mics and the Zine Bazaar. Seventeen years on, it remains a vital archive and community for queer desis worldwide.

Founding

Gaysi began in November 2008, founded by MJ and Broom — with Sakshi Juneja, a journalist and activist, recognised as a co-founder — when they realised how little quality queer content existed online for Indians. "The aim was to make you feel like you're not the only one," MJ, who is openly lesbian, has said. "The coming out process for any individual is never easy. After all, it is family and society one has to come out to." The founding moment was intimate rather than institutional: as one account puts it, what started as a heartbreak-fuelled blog, with Sakshi writing her way through a breakup, quietly became an act of category creation — building a queer cultural archive before it was trendy, taking up space before the internet knew how to make space.

The name and mission

"Gaysi" — gay plus desi — announces the platform's dual identity: queer and South Asian, refusing to choose between the two. The mission, in MJ's formulation, is companionship: letting isolated queer desis know they are not alone. In 2008, this was a radical proposition. Section 377 criminalised same-sex relations; mainstream Indian media barely acknowledged queer existence; and the few queer Indians seeking community online found mostly Western spaces. Gaysi offered something unprecedented: a desi queer home, in desi cultural idioms, addressing the specific textures of queer life in South Asian families and societies.

The 2008 founding context is worth emphasising: homosexuality was criminalised, the internet was nascent in India, and queer Indians had virtually no domestic media reflecting their lives. The founders' decision to build a desi queer platform — rather than simply participating in Western-dominated queer spaces online — asserted that South Asian queer identity deserved its own cultural home. This decolonial instinct, present from the beginning, shaped everything: the aesthetics, the language, the insistence that queer desi life be narrated in desi idioms.

Online magazine

The website evolved into a rich online magazine publishing features, personal stories, fiction, erotica, poetry, illustrations and comics, alongside news about LGBT developments in India and the world and reviews of queer books, films, series and music. Popular topics include coming out stories, the "Aam Gaysi" interview series, homophobia and the long battle around IPC Section 377. The content is presented with striking visual treatments and illustrations — a distinctive aesthetic that elevates the storytelling. Contributors write from across the globe, making the platform a genuinely diasporic desi queer space.

The Gaysi Zine

In 2013, the platform launched its first print publication, The Gaysi Zine — a queer journal portraying LGBTQ+ life through curated stories and visuals, with a heavier dose of art. The zine has since published dozens of issues, with the explicit aim of reaching people in smaller cities and encouraging inclusion across the LGBTQ+ community. In an age of digital ephemera, the print zine's materiality matters: a beautiful physical object that can be held, shared and kept, carrying queer stories into spaces the internet doesn't reach. The zine has been recognised internationally among the trailblazing LGBTQ+ publications from regions where queer life remains contested.

Offline events

From 2012, Gaysi ventured offline with Dirty Talk — an open-mic event for the queer community, chosen because the format most closely resembled the blog's confessional spirit. Across ten editions and hundreds of attendees, Dirty Talk featured performances and appearances by figures including Ankur Tewari, Kalki Koechlin, Konkona Sen Sharma and Sorabh Pant — mainstream artists lending their presence to queer space. The annual Zine Bazaar, workshops, talks, meetups and bar nights further built the community in physical space. These events transformed an online readership into a real-world community: people who had met as anonymous readers becoming friends, collaborators and chosen family.

Themes and subjects

The platform tackles the subjects that define queer desi life: coming out to family, navigating arranged-marriage expectations, queer dating, religion and queerness, mental health, chosen family, and the intersection of caste, class and sexuality. It covers the political milestones — the Section 377 battle, Pride marches, transgender rights — alongside the intimate everyday: love stories, heartbreaks, friendships, self-discovery. This blend of the political and the personal reflects the platform's understanding that for queer desis, the personal is unavoidably political, and the political is lived personally.

Visual identity

Gaysi's visual identity — bold illustrations, vibrant design, a distinctive aesthetic across web and print — is central to its appeal. In a media landscape where queer stories were either invisible or illustrated with clichés, Gaysi's art direction treated queer desi life as beautiful, joyful and worthy of gorgeous presentation. The illustrations do political work: they imagine queer desis not as victims or issues but as protagonists of vivid, colourful lives. This aesthetic has influenced a generation of queer Indian visual culture.

Community and safe space

"Built by queer people, for queer people" — the platform's self-description captures its community ethos. It functions as a safe space in a society where queer people still face significant stigma and discrimination: a place to ask questions, share stories, find resources and feel less alone. The comments, events and social channels extend this safety beyond the articles. For young queer desis in small towns — far from metropolitan Pride parades and queer collectives — the platform has often been the first and only affirming queer space they encounter.

The platform's role as an archive has become increasingly important: seventeen years of queer desi storytelling now constitutes a historical record of a community's emergence — from criminalisation to the 2018 Navtej Johar judgment and beyond. Future historians of queer South Asia will find in Gaysi's pages the everyday texture of that transformation: not just the court judgments and Pride marches but the love stories, heartbreaks, jokes and small triumphs. Few archives of marginalised life are this rich, this joyful, or this lovingly maintained.

Evolution and endurance

Seventeen years after its founding, Gaysi has endured through enormous change: the 2018 reading down of Section 377, the mainstreaming of Pride, the rise of queer influencers and dating apps, and the backlashes that accompanied each advance. It has grown from a blog to a movement to community infrastructure — an archive of queer desi life spanning nearly two decades. Co-founder Sakshi Juneja's subsequent ventures, including into politics, reflect the platform's ethos that queer life is inseparable from public life. The platform's longevity is itself an achievement: most independent digital publications don't survive five years, let alone seventeen.

Place in Indian media

Gaysi is the pioneering queer desi media platform: it created the category of Indian queer digital publishing and has defined it ever since. Its archive — thousands of stories, dozens of zine issues, years of events — constitutes one of the most important cultural records of queer South Asian life. For queer desis seeking community, for allies seeking understanding, and for historians of the future, it remains an indispensable space. Its official website is gaysi.in.