It noted that tolerance for difference is “deeply ingrained in Indian society, nurtured over several generations” and “traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life.”
The “underlying theme of the Indian Constitution… is that of ‘inclusiveness,’” the lower court wrote in 2009. Also targeted in recent decades were HIV workers trying to conduct outreach and distribute condoms among transgender people and men who have sex with men. Since 1861, the law had been used to harass, blackmail, and occasionally prosecute people suspected of engaging in sodomy. This revolutionary shift in the lives of LGBT people in India is mostly due to the 2009 decision to reverse an archaic law known as Section 377.
Then we’d each show up with a red rose, so we could find each other.” “Back then we would spread the word, by phone, to meet at a certain restaurant at a certain time. “You couldn’t have found us,” she told me. I wondered aloud to a new friend, “How I had missed this hot queer scene before? Had I been too wrapped up in family and work on previous trips to India in the 1990s?” The night I landed in Mumbai, I ended up at a party where 60 or so lesbian and bisexual women had gathered to dance, drink beer, and eat biryani. When I visited India in 2009, I was pleasantly surprised to find a vibrant LGBT movement. I was born in San Francisco, raised in New Zealand and Michigan, and have lived most of my adult life in the Bay Area.