Bhubaneswar: The queer community will gather in the Capital City September 1 to organise/witness the first-of-its-kind Pride Parade.
Members of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) community will lend their voice by demanding rights, justice and freedom for the LGBTQIA (IA stands for Intersex and Asexual or Allied) community in Odisha as the rainbow coloured flag will fly proudly at the parade.
The parade pride, also called Bhubaneswar pride, will be organised by The ParichayCollective (LGBQ Community of Odisha) in association with Meera Parida’s NGO Sakha (an indigenous trans community which the state government has been supporting in the last few years) and SAATHII NGO (working for the cause of HIV-AIDS for over a decade in the state). Representatives from these three organisations have got together to build a core team of five individuals.
Bijaya Biswal, the brain behind organising the first Pride Parade event here, said the motive behind organising Pride March of Odisha is to build a community of people from LGBTQ and allies, while focusing on social education regarding the community.
She said, “Too many people in Odisha suffer from mental health issues, bad marriages and stressful relationships with family members or workplace colleagues because of the burden of being a closeted individual.
“They are often isolated for being what they are, more prone to depression and sexual harassment, disowned by their families or discriminated at their workplaces and take years to convince themselves that it is a “phase” that will pass, or a disease, or something that needs meditation or medication. But by building a community, I wanted to facilitate that these people meet others like them and understand they are not alone; they have others who understand their tragedies and struggles because they have similar stories. Community gives an individual a power to feel at home and that’s exactly what these events have resulted in.”
Biswa Pattanayak, a member of the organising team, said that in bigger cities, there are established organisations that are working for the LGBTQ. “So if you are in Mumbai or Delhi, you know where to go to find people who empathize with you. In Bhubaneswar, this community seems missing because it’s invisible. This event will be a start-up for the same, the growing and raising of a voice for the first time regarding the community, hence establishing that we are present here and we deserve to be visible.”
“Odisha is not a state where the majority is upper class. We are made up of the tribals, the construction workers who keep migrating, the displaced villages where industrialists have built their enterprises and the street vendors. For a state like this, LGBTQIA movements cannot exist in isolation, without being intersectional.
“I am addressing not only LGBTQIA specific problems in the Pride, but the general social constructs of ‘Shame’, ‘untouchability’, the majority deciding what is best for the minorities, class bias and sex discrimination within and outside the community, and the general idea about the freedom of love.
“Our trans community is constituted by a range of people in different disciplines — hard working sex workers and individuals who have made it to authoritative positions in academic institutes and administrative services of the state. We will be talking about inclusion in general, from every perspective. Pride is just a stepping stone for our far-fetched dream.”
Ahead of the Pride Rally, many events were organised to spread awareness. Queer Poetry and Storytelling where the house discussed the struggles of young LGBTQ individuals in colleges who often have to face isolation, discrimination at work places and colleges and shaming because of their sexualities and Queer film screenings were some of the events.
