On the morning of the 2nd of July – a very overcast and somewhat dreary day – a motley group of 15 people met at Park Circus Maidan in bright yellow t-shirts. What happened thereon, was history.

Or so it was – in 1999. On the 2nd of July, 2024, a motley group of incidentally, about 15 people (and a few others who joined for logistical purposes) gathered at Park Circus Maidan in bright yellow t-shirts, on an overcast day. This group of 15-ish had members from the original group of ‘99ers’, journalists, academics, and some of the ‘Friendship Walk 25th Anniversary’ volunteers, who came together to embark on what would be the pilot of the Queer Kolkata Heritage Walk.

In honour of the first ever rainbow pride walk in Kolkata and India, the heritage walk would retrace and revisit several parts of Kolkata’s queer history – remembered in physical spaces and places – in an effort to create awareness about the city’s sexual past. Armed with umbrellas, snacks (what’s a good group tour without food) and a minivan to ferry us around town – we spent three and a half hours in the morning, hopping site to site to see where, and how queer and trans people would meet, interact and build communities (and engage in sexual activity) in the heart of the city, often sometimes not at all far removed from the thrum of the heteronormative and cisgendered mainstream.

The heritage walk (or ride, however you want to look at it) stretched from Park Circus Maidan to George Bhawan on Creek Lane, then via Esplanade to Park Street and finally ended on Little Russel Street. As we moved between parks and gardens to meeting halls and party venues, to workplaces and leisure spots – we reminisced on the many little histories of being queer, of stories shared over plates of food, of strutting in your Sunday best in the hopes of catching others’ eyes, of intense and complicated efforts at creating communities and organizing events, and finally, of the physical manifestations of the desire to meet others like you, to not have to be lonely any longer.

This daytime photograph shows some of the Queer Kolkata Heritage Walk participants waiting to cross Park Street from across the Park Hotel - the name of the hotel can be seen across the street printed on a board above its entrance. A couple of taxis can be seen moving past the participants and parked outside the hotel. A few shops and establishments, some shuttered down, can be seen in the hotel arcade. Most of the participants are wearing the bright yellow t-shirts designed for the 25th anniversary of ‘Friendship Walk ‘99’ and the anniversary logo can be seen printed on the back of the t-shirts. The cheerful colour of the t-shirts seems to contrast with the grayness of the overcast day. Photo credit: Mihir Seth

Queer Kolkata Heritage Walk participants waiting to cross Park Street ‘back into time’. Photo credit: Mihir Seth

The heritage walk ended there, but the day didn’t. We then carried on to a lovely brunch hosted by Mahua Seth, a member of the 25th anniversary organizing team, at the Calcutta Ladies Golf Club, and over tea, croquets and cakes, the conversation continued over how we can remember queer histories and reflect on them in the present. We were accompanied by journalists, whose articles and interviews are now published – so the more detailed descriptions of the heritage walk and the history of ‘Friendship Walk ‘99’ can be found there (here, here and here). What I would like to touch on is something very different.

Throughout the heritage walk, there was only one thing that kept coming back to me over and over as we went from place to place – how many of them are still ‘queered’? How many of them are still regularly used by queer individuals for socializing, cruising or other purposes? Very few in truth – and it’s also true, that from some of them, queerness was actively ostracized and removed, while it died out in others due to a host of other factors. And then – if I went and asked another queer person, especially someone my own age (I’m not even 25), if they knew where queer people went to find themselves and others like them in the past, especially before the Internet, what would their answer be? Probably, crickets.

Queerness has a deeply physical aspect to its history – much like any sexuality and sexual history. The crucial negotiations with regards to companionship, sex, procreation (yes, that too) and love are played out in physical, material worlds – and under the influence of the very politics and social norms of the time in question. Queerness is restricted from being material – there is no mundanity to its existence, you cannot hold your same-sex lover’s hand or be dressed unlike your assigned gender when on the streets without being subject to judgement and violence, because the norms under which spaces are designed and who they are designed for does not actively recognize queerness as a legitimate form of identity and expression – and thus, forces queerness to constantly remain at an ephemeral and transient form of being.

One could not, at a certain point of time, hope to be queer and actively be part of the public world – or at least, occupy it the way cis-heteronormativity does in the present, all-encompassing and stifling in its disciplinary nature – and thus, we don’t have active memorials or sites that scream out and say, “We were here and queer and have always been.” For that spatial history of occupation, of the material interactions of queer sexualities, we’re forced to look for those little, and hidden histories – in spaces that look perfectly indescribable and forgettable, in the repulsive and the dilapidated, and in those that we have lost – and then extract those stories from them.

This image consists of two photographs and text extracted from the accompanying article. The upper panel shows two photographs depicting the same scene - a small courtyard area inside the premises of George Bhawan on Creek Lane in Central Kolkata. George Bhawan was the venue for the monthly and later fortnightly meetings of queer support group Counsel Club from 1997 to 2002. The courtyard area has a flight of stairs leading to the first floor of the building. To the left of the stairs is a partially cemented and discoloured wall of an adjoining building. The wall has a few paned windows. To the right of the stairs, on the ground floor, is a closed door with bamboo poles stacked up against the adjacent wall. While the door is a musty brown, the walls around the door are a discoloured red, clearly not painted in several years. The entire structure seems run down in both the photographs. The photograph on the left was taken on July 2, 2013 by Pawan Dhall on the 14th anniversary of ‘Friendship Walk ‘99’. The one on the right was taken 11 years later by Mihir Seth when the Queer Kolkata Heritage Walk stopped by on July 2, 2024. The photograph on the right also shows four of the heritage walk participants standing on the flight of stairs. The accompanying text says: “One could not, at a certain point of time, hope to be queer and actively be part of the public world – or at least, occupy it the way cis-heteronormativity does in the present, all-encompassing and stifling in its disciplinary nature – and thus, we don’t have active memorials or sites that scream out and say, we were here and queer and have always been. For that spatial history of occupation, of the material interactions of queer sexualities, we’re forced to look for those little, and hidden histories – in spaces that look perfectly indescribable and forgettable, in the repulsive and the dilapidated, and in those that we have lost – and then extract those stories from them.

Upper panel shows two shots of George Smriti Bhawan (or more popularly George Bhawan), the Bengal Motion Picture Employees Union office on Creek Lane. On the left is a shot taken on July 2, 2013 – from the personal collection of Pawan Dhall, one of the ‘99ers’; the photo on the right was taken by the author of this piece when the Queer Kolkata Heritage Walk stopped by on July 2, 2024

I don’t blame people for not knowing the depth and complexity of our own queer past and its network of physical cultures, because we don’t have the privilege of confronting them on a regular and daily basis – queerness was never memorialized and historicized because to do so was to be confronted with the weight of every single normative force placed against you, from puritanism to gender biases. We’ve already lost several decades and centuries of rich histories of sexuality and gender diversity in the Indian subcontinent to the ravages of time – but as long as the memories of queer histories can still be accessed, while the ephemeral can still be given form and placed in time, I think it’s a duty of ours to remember, recount and relay these stories.

That is why the Queer Kolkata Heritage Walk project was created, in an effort to act out this relaying of queer histories – to ‘queer’ the city of Kolkata once more, and to reiterate the fact that we’ve in fact, always been here, and been queer, even if we could never say it.

Look out for announcements on more editions of the Queer Kolkata Heritage Walk on the social media accounts of Varta Trust or write in to vartablog@gmail.com. The pilot provided only a sample of the city’s queer history and there are many more stories waiting to be told.

About the main photo: Some of the Queer Kolkata Heritage Walk participants pose at the gazebo in Park Circus Maidan in South Kolkata, the starting point of ‘Friendship Walk ‘99’ on July 2, 1999. Photo credit: Partha Banerjee

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