Sayantika recalls a lack of visibility for queers in her neighborhood as a child in Calcutta in the 1990s. “I wasn’t even familiar with the term lesbian. I didn’t have any LGBT friends. Since I love Bollywood so much, I only watched heterosexual films. Rom-coms typically featured a guy and a woman. The absence of LGBT representation made it challenging for me to understand my sexuality,” she says, adding that she briefly dated males.
“I even considered the possibility that I may be bisexual.” Sayantika laments, “I didn’t see any content or any couple around me as a teenager, I didn’t have the vision to see what life as a queer person looks like. There was so much pressure from the other girls in my friend group about boyfriends and crushes that I could never talk about the fact that I was attracted to girls. I was aware that something was off, and the feeling persisted.”
Sayantika first experienced love at the age of 24 in Bangalore. ‘We never met, but she was gay as well. She helped me become a mentor. When I initially started to like her, I simply knew it. I had already ruled out males at that point since I had dated several of them and it had never worked for me.” Sayantika then came out to her parents, and she hasn’t turned around since. “I came out to myself just by discovering that there is a phrase for my identification that accurately represents me. All of my work became around LGBTQ individuals as I started to write a lot of articles and poetry. I started showering everyone with rainbows.”
Source: Pinkvilla
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