Queer reads

A year after homosexuality was decriminalised, Shobhna Kumar has founded India’s first online LGBT bookshop.
It’s about mainstreaming,” says Shobhna Kumar, explaining why she co-founded Queer Ink, India’s first online LGBT bookshop (www.queer-ink.com). LGBT stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender”, and that is more or less the core demographic that celebrated, this month, the first anniversary of the decriminalisation of gay sex in India. On July 2 last year, the Delhi High Court decided the 150-year-old Section 377 violated fundamental human rights; so the law has at last ceased to apply to things that consenting adults do in private.

Now that people of alternate sexuality are no longer automatically criminals, another struggle remains: for acceptance and ‘mainstreaming’. Indeed, ‘queer’, although it is a less specific term than LGBT, avoids the context of sex. “Queer is not sexuality only; it is anything that is non-mainstream,” Shobhna Kumar explains, adding that “As a queer person, I live in the mainstream.” She lives, and Queer Ink is based in the middle-class seaside suburb of Malad in Mumbai.

You might wonder how mainstreaming is served if you’re setting up a queer-specific business and community. Kumar describes how she came to think of books as her route to normalisation. It started with a lacuna. “I’m a bookworm,” she says, “and when I came to live in Mumbai some years ago I looked and searched high and low for non-mainstream books. The fiction that interests me is not your average murder mystery or something. I like lifestyle books, non-fiction, anthologies. I don’t want to read about rich businessmen.” Eventually, she says, “I figured out that people don’t go to retail stores and pick up books like this.” Between the shelf and the cash counter, she says, other browsers and salespeople “look down” on people who choose certain kinds of books.
 
Full report here Business Standard