Small cities, big shifts: How the queer community in small-town India is claiming space

With the beginning of the nationwide lockdown in March 2020, the fragile freedoms the queer community in India spent years building started to unravel. With jobs lost and rents unpaid, thousands who had migrated to cities like Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata were forced to return home—often to places they had once left in search of safety, anonymity, or belonging. 

Home often meant the small towns and tier-2 cities the queer community in India  had once left behind in search of anonymity, solidarity or simply the freedom  to be themselves. For some, the  return felt like a personal undoing. The metropolises that had offered sanctuary—whether through screenings of indie queer films, a bar hosting drag nights, a chosen family of people who understood—were replaced by conservative neighbourhoods and watchful relatives. Back in the same houses where their teenage selves had had to hide, many were forced to re-closet themselves or negotiate constant micro-surveillance.

How the queer community in India is claiming space through drag culture

Cut to five years later—while the pandemic’s rupture scattered people, it also seeded new, quieter movements in places where queerness was, more often than not, invisible. Across India’s smaller cities—from Agra to Coimbatore—artists, organisers, and everyday community-builders are finding ways to survive, to locate one another, and to claim joy on their own terms. They are bringing this to fruition not through pride parades or corporate sponsorships, but with intimate acts of presence: an improvised drag performance in a public park, a sharing circle in an ancestral home, a small collective determined to reimagine what belonging looks like.

In Agra, Taj ke Saat Rangis a two-week-long project that brought queer artists, historians, and community organisers together. The event that took place on 28 June 2025, was an unprecedented gesture of queer presence in one of India’s most iconic—and most surveilled—cities. It began in the evening with a quiet, unsanctioned drag walkthrough at the Taj Mahal itself.

Since the Taj Mahal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that demands decorum, there could be no staged performance, no booming music, no overt declarations. Instead, drag royalty Hiten Noonwal and Dusky Dee—two prominent artists who are helping shape and expand the drag culture in India—travelled from Delhi and chose a subtler kind of spectacle. They walked calmly among the tourists, their shimmering saris and sharp make-up turning heads  in the golden light. 

It was not an act of provocation, but of presence. It was a reminder that queerness has always existed—even in the most policed spaces. For a moment, the ivory-white marble monument became something more: a witness to history being reclaimed.

From there, the gathering moved into a guided walk through Agra’s overlooked queer histories, surfacing stories woven into the city’s past but rarely acknowledged, facilitated by Agra Heritage Walks. The evening culminated in an intimate studio performance at arts centre Kala Kutir, comprising music, drag, a playful fashion show, and a panel discussion. Around 40 people participated—Agra’s first-ever community-led queer event was a gesture of visibility, joy, and belonging in a place rarely imagined as a site of such celebration. In a landscape where queer safe spaces in India remain limited, this gathering felt quietly radical. It was a shared impulse among friends—a collective made up of filmmakers, designers, musicians, poets—some who had returned to Agra, some who had never left.

For filmmaker and curator Dhriti (she/her), coming back to Agra as an adult was less about nostalgia and more about possibility. “I didn’t grow up in Agra, but it’s always lingered on the edges of my life,” she says. “My mother’s family lives here. As an adult, I came back for work, pulled by this desire to trace Delhi’s Mughal roots back to where they began. But what changed everything was finding a chosen family; friendships that turned Agra from a place of nostalgia into a living, breathing site of possibility.”

Saloni (she/her), an interior architect who co-curated the event, remembers the ache of never quite fitting in. “I grew up in Agra, and for a long time I couldn’t connect my queerness to this city,” she says. “Being back here always felt like I had to shrink myself to fit the boxes people were comfortable with.”

That longing, to be fully visible, became the seed of Taj ke Saat Rang. “We didn’t want to put on a spectacle,” explains Dhriti. “We wanted to build something that could hold all of us: our apprehensions, our histories, our celebration.”

Kaleem (he/him), a musician and the founder of Kala Kutir, felt the same urgency, especially when he thought about those who hadn’t survived homophobia, transphobia, violence or oppression. “This event was about making space so that others might feel a little less alone,” he says.

When the group finally walked on the premises of the Taj Mahal, adorned in their queerness, they knew they were taking a risk. Some tourists were curious; some tried to turn them into a spectacle. But for a brief moment, they occupied the monument differently, an act of resistance witnessed by the marble itself. “When the authorities asked us to leave, it didn’t erase the fact that we had been there,” says Dhriti. “Even if it lasted only minutes, we had claimed space. That was enough.”

Queer collectives in small-town India are building safe spaces and visibility

While Agra’s intervention was ephemeral, in other cities, efforts to build community have taken the form of slow, persistent organising. In Coimbatore, a district thought to be more conservative than others in Tamil Nadu, queer collectives have been piecing together a movement for over a decade. What began as a single Pride march in 2009, led by the Sahodari Foundation—founded by transgender activist and artist Kalki Subramaniam—became a quiet cornerstone of queer pride in India,  eventually grew into a coalition of groups determined to keep showing up.

“The success of this continuous Pride parade began with the 2009 march,” says Saran (he/him), the founder of the Magizhvan Vaanam Collective. “It took a 10-year gap to do it again in 2019. Later, the coalition was formed by these collectives and organisations in 2022. We came together across our previous activities and programmes.” The coalition includes SIAAP, Sahodari Foundation, Nirangal Charitable Trust, Queebatore, Magizhvan Vaanam, and PSG Queer Collective—queer collectives and NGOs that have been active in different spaces across Coimbatore and Tamil Nadu at large.

Vandarkuzhali (they/them), a non-binary organiser and volunteer with Queerbatore, describes the challenges of working in a city where queer visibility is still fraught. “Identifying queer-friendly spaces has been difficult through the years, and it continues to be so,” they say. “But it brings a lot of joy and strength to extend support to the community in your own hometown.”

Like the team in Agra, Coimbatore’s organisers view queerness not in isolation but as inseparable from other struggles. “We take an intersectional approach to fight against social injustices like honour killing, conversion therapy, and caste-based violence,” says Vandarkuzhali.

Crowdfunding and emotional labour are constant hurdles. “One of the main challenges of keeping it real is the emotional labour of holding the fort together,” they add. “Since 2022, I have been part of organising Pride. It’s a really big task, getting more complicated year by year. But those tasks have made me bold enough to do it again and again.”

Despite these challenges, they learn to build alliances and hold space, even imperfectly. “Conflict resolution, self-regulation, being accountable, and leadership are acquired skills,” shares Vandarkuzhali. “Showing solidarity despite differences has been the foundation for us to keep moving forward.”

How India’s queer community is building belonging beyond metros

Across Agra, Coimbatore, and beyond, the quiet force behind these movements is visibility—rooted in community, not spectacle. The work of queering the cities is built on quiet, determined gestures: a drag performance under a famous monument, a march down a market street, an unpolished dance on a small stage. 

For those residing in India’s smaller cities, queer visibility in India  doesn’t guarantee safety or acceptance. The risks persist: being surveilled by neighbours, being outed to employers, being treated as a curiosity, or worse.

What is emerging in these places is a quiet refusal to disappear; a belief that even fleeting, imperfect acts of solidarity can shape  something larger. These movements rely on  trust, on holding space for one another  and on the insistence that queerness belongs, especially  in places that never claimed it.

It is in these small, cumulative acts: a drag walk through a historic monument, a crowdfunded Pride march, a gathering of strangers who become kin, that the future is taking shape: one that doesn’t have to migrate to survive. Where it can root itself in familiar streets and call them home—without apology.