It’s almost June: Time for performative queerness?

It's tricky to differentiate an ally from those who unknowingly indulge in tokenism. True support shouldn’t hinge on profitability—but it often does, even when communities finally get a seat at the table 

As June approaches, corporations are dusting off their rainbow flags. It’s nearly  seven years since the Supreme Court of India decriminalised homosexuality, and LGBTQIA+ Pride month became an annual ritual. But perhaps it’s the seven-year itch; many wonder whether the rainbow flags and coffee mugs are just so much rainbow tokenism.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘tokenism’ as “the policy or practice of making only a symbolic effort (as to desegregate).” India has plenty: the token woman, the token Dalit, the token queer. The token queer is often the most colourfully clad, and these days the most visible, perhaps because unlike gender and caste, queer issues are newer and cooler and seen as a sort of litmus test for India’s sense of its own modernity.

How tokenism shows up across workplaces, media, and activism in India

When an arts organisation hired Archee Roy, she understood that as a Dalit queer visual artist, she was part of their DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programming. “But when I expressed my opinions, it never seemed to matter. You include the queer voice, but you don’t listen to it,” says Roy. “But when it came to Pride month, then suddenly they would turn to me to ask how they could attract more queer people. That’s tokenism.”

In her famous 1977 study on gender-based tokenism in corporate America, Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter found tokenism hurts everybody. The “tokens” were hyper-visible and under huge performance pressure, but also isolated within a corporation. Kanter estimated a minority needed to comprise at least 15 per cent of the work group for real change. “The problem with tokenism is it’s just symbolic justice, not real change,” says Bidisha Chowdhury, assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. “It’s about optics for the person in power.” 

These optics can be a mirage. The first Dalit President of India did not change the reality for most Dalits in the country. Television news might have women as anchors, but the number of women panelists still remains abysmal. Hindi cinema once had token Muslim characters, but even those have largely vanished now. Some will argue that at least it’s a seat at the table. “I understand where they are coming from—it comes from a hunger to see ourselves somewhere,” says Tejaswi Subramanian, editor at Gaysi Family, a leading queer South Asian platform. Subramanian says what we need to ask is who keeps getting left out. For example, queer discourse is often silent on matters of caste. “Representation without structural change often becomes another form of exclusion—just with better lighting.”

Corporate allyship in India: What separates action from tokenism?

That’s why when he wrote Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion in the Indian Workplace (2020), Parmesh Shahani had a chapter titled ‘No Token Rainbows Please! We Want Your Jobs Not Your Instagram Filters.’ When the book was released, Shahani talked about an insurance company with a rainbow-themed equality campaign but no insurance benefits for same-sex partners. Shahani, now the head of Godrej DEI Lab, says things have improved since. Godrej Capital, for example, offers home loans to same-sex couples.

Shahani has four simple rules to distinguish the ‘tokenista’ from the true ally: Change policies like health insurance meaningfully to benefit queer employees,

actively hire queer employees and create pathways for them,create products and services that serve the community’s needs, and publicly advocate for queer inclusion. “A true ally does at least one or preferably all of these four things,” he says.

“You have to walk the talk every day,” says Akshay Tyagi, head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and founding member of the Keshav Suri Foundation. The Lalit Hotel group, says Tyagi, is the largest organisation in India in terms of transgender and queer members. But what’s really important, he says, is representation at all levels—“general managers, assistant managers, associates, trainees learning to become good hoteliers.” That requires constant vigilance. Their employees must “constantly get sensitised through training on biases.”

But the rainbow flags—or Elphie the rainbow elephant in the lobby of the Lalit Hotel in New Delhi—aren’t just rainbow dressing, insists Tyagi. “It makes people feel seen. They feel safe. Then they can thrive.”

One simple tokenism sniff test would be whether the rainbow flag only comes out in June. Sharif Rangnekar, the director of the Rainbow Literature Festival, has learned this the hard way. Most outdoor literary festivals in India take place in the cooler winter months. The Rainbow Literature Festival, too, happens in December to fit into the literary calendar. “It was an intentional decision but perhaps a foolish one in terms of our ability to get funds,” rues Rangnekar. “You keep hearing from companies that they spent their money for Pride in June.” 

“Tokenism is seasonal, allyship is structural,” says Vikas Narula, co-founder of Depot 48 in New Delhi, which has been hosting Pink Thursdays since 2022. It started out as Pink Tuesdays in April 2017 at its earlier location, when Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was still on the books. Narula says they wanted to create a space with drag nights and queer performances, but most importantly, one that was “consistent and welcoming.” 

In June 2023, Kolkata’s  legendary nightspot Trincas started hosting a Queer Karaoke night every Thursday at one of its bars, Tavern. “It was a way to give the LGBTQIA+ community a space that’s personal and private, yet part of the mainstream,” says Anand Puri, the third generation in the family that owns Trincas. “We started it for Pride month in June. And we just never stopped.”

Why token gestures aren’t enough for queer inclusion in India

Narula remembers there was “hesitation about dedicating a whole night every week to queer programming.” People wondered about sustainability or whether it would alienate other customers.

“Someone walked out just last week when they realised it was a Pink Thursday.  Some fair-weather ‘allies’ say the right things but won’t show up because it’s ‘too gay’,” says Narula. “Frankly, those aren’t the kind of people we want as patrons anyway. The queer community shows up with intent and consistency, giving this place life—both financially and in spirit. I just pay the bills and keep it running.” 

Corporate pride can become “a festival of performative queerness,” says transgender rights activist Anindya Hajra, who co-curated the Kolkata Queer Arts Month or KoQAM2.0. “It’s month-long hedonism sans politics that makes the corporations uncomfortable.” It forgets that Pride in June really commemorates the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York, when angry drag queens took on the police. Now queers become part of the entertainment, a dance of the rainbow tokens, that allows the corporate sponsor to feel good. But how far does the goodwill trickle down? 

For example, LGBTQ characters are all over OTT series these days, but they are mostly “just a tick mark,” notes filmmaker Sridhar Rangayan. “Lesbian cops have become the new trope; so many series have one. But they don’t get a back story.” ‘Lesbian cop’ is apparently the new ‘gay best friend’ in popular culture. But this “cool factor” hasn’t made it any easier for Rangayan, a gay filmmaker directing films since 2003, to have queer characters driving the narrative. “It’s still a huge struggle,” he says.

If procuring funding for films highlighting queer lives is a challenge, so is finding financial support for those from the community in dire need. Hajra had once approached a big corporation that spends lakhs on Pride events to bail out a trans person with a loan of a few thousand rupees to secure some land she had bought. “That ‘let me get back to you’ never materialised,” says Hajra.

It’s easy to pick on corporates for pink-washing. But the uglier truth of tokenism is that it happens within the movement itself as well. When queer people allow themselves to be tokenised, they can end up being co-opted. It’s not an accident that cis gay folx, mostly from dominant castes, occupy the most visible ‘representation’ space within the community, says Subramanian. They have the “resources, physical safety, social capital, and professional networks.” But that visibility, says Subramanian, always comes at “the cost of complexity.” And voice.

When tokenism crops up within the queer community itself

Roy remembers joining the angry protests that erupted in Kolkata after the brutal rape and murder of a doctor at the R.G Kar Hospital in 2024. While Roy and her queer friends were welcomed, she realised “many feminist groups wanted to utilise the queers but they didn’t allow them to raise their own slogans”. They literally, and figuratively, did not get the microphone. 

“That’s a familiar trope,” says Chowdhury. “If tokenism remains symbolic, it does not contest the system. It retains the status quo.” Tokenism affects the token too. Kanter had said: “For token women, the price of being ‘one of the boys’ is a willingness to turn occasionally against ‘the girls’”. Worse, the token bears the burden of representation of  an entire community, irrespective of caste, class, gender, and other factors.

Intersectionality, then, can become an empty buzzword, just a numbers goal or, as Hajra says, “sleep gummies for a woke queer generation.” When Hajra curated KoQAM 2.0,the goal was not to just have artists for each letter of the queer identity alphabet soup. KoQAM 2.0 went beyond gallery spaces to include an assisted living space for those recovering from mental health conditions. That actually queered our notions of what was queer instead of just ticking token checkboxes. “But it’s walking a tightrope,” admits Hajra.

This ticking of the boxes is, in some ways, unavoidable, admits Rangnekar, while programming the literature festival. “There will always be a certain amount of incompleteness in who we can include.” In the end, tokenism is just a checklist. But real inclusivity, says Rangnekar, has to be a journey.

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