by Ashok Row Kavi

The author is a founding member of the Humsafar Trust and was its chairperson for 25 years. He resigned in December 2019 to write his autobiography, and now mentors a group, Mumbai Seenagers, of older gay, bisexual and otherwise single older homosexuals, divorced and partnered gay men who need support.

A scary experience in 1989 convinced me that gay men in India needed help. The problem was firstly that they were invisible and, secondly, nobody including me had a clue how to reach out to them. The incident was gay men from ACTUP protesting at the 5th International Conference on HIV/AIDS in 1989 at Montreal, demanding that society investigate the hundreds of homosexuals dying from a disease then named after them, GRID (Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease). After loud protests, GRID was replaced by AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome)

That concern led me and my friends from the establishment to publishing India’s first over-ground gay magazine, Bombay Dost, in 1990, which led to a flood of desperate mails asking for help from all over India, and even from neighboring countries. Not only were the editors of Bombay Dost shocked at the huge groundswell from an underground populace, they realized the range and scale of problems that India’s LGBTQI+ communities had.

Bombay Dost led to the establishment of the Humsafar Trust, which was incorporated as not-for-profit with the Charity Commissioner in April 1994. The importance of the Trust was that it had a vision statement that was clearly cross cutting – to offer health services to sexual minority communities and dovetail these services into the public health system in a seamless way. The plan was not to replicate anything that the state already offers but to sensitize the delivery system in such a way that we were integrated into the mainstream service delivery system. Read more via Outlook India