"I was brought up in an over-the-top Christian household," Romal Laisram, a 37-year-old queer journalist and editor in Bengaluru, said. Sitting at an outdoor restaurant on a cloudy evening, sipping on glass tumblers of filter coffee, Romal told me about growing up in Kotagiri, a mountain town in Tamil Nadu. His father was Meitei, a theologian studying to be a pastor, and his mother a Tamil-Malayali school teacher. His family said a prayer every night before bed, part of "devotion time". At these night-time prayers, Romal and his three brothers were assigned a verse from the Bible and had to lead a discussion around its themes.
Romal described growing up as part of a reformist, modern Protestant movement. His Christian values were bolstered by his schooling too. "It was a hardcore Christian school," he said. "Every school assembly was within the school's church." There was always a roster of pastors and theologians speaking about being a good Christian.
"For a lot of Christians growing up in India and being brought up within organised minority religions, it's like their whole self is defined by their community, and we grow up believing the church is the centre of our lives," Romal explained. "And a lot of people in India don't understand this at all."
He could not place the first time he heard the words "gay" or "homosexual", but by the time he was ten he believed that being gay "was far worse than being a murderer." Attending church as a teenager, he remembered "hearing pastors saying that gay people are the reason the world is ending, for our trials and tribulations, for global warming. Everything terrible in the world was because of gay people."