Tamil is one of the world’s oldest living literary languages with a tradition stretching back more than two thousand years to the Sangam poets. For a major part of history, queer Tamil writers were present, yet their voices were unheard.
Queer lives in Tamil Nadu did not begin with a Supreme Court ruling or a pride march. They were always there. What was missing was a structure willing to hold the lives, and give them a space in literature.
But there is change today and it began with a rebellion. Thirunangai Press, a queer-led publishing house, had to win a legal fight simply to secure a stall at the Chennai Book Fair, one of the largest book fairs in South Asia. Last year, it sold 20,000 books. This distance, from a court order to a crowd carrying bundles of books, is one way to measure what is happening in Tamil Nadu’s literary world right now.
The beginnings of change
Writer and trans activist Grace Banu understood this before she had a name for it. In 2018, she completed a manuscript and sent it to Tamil publishers and magazines. Her writings addressed caste discrimination, gender, national politics, and international politics, but no one published then. After a series of struggles, she realised that she did not need them to. In 2021, after a conversation with a Dalit trans man who had experienced similar exclusion, she registered the Thirunangai Press.
The registration process required a trans identity card and a stack of documents. When the certificate finally arrived, Grace could not believe it was real until she held it. The press became India’s first Dalit trans women-led publication. It was built as a rebellion against all systemic injustices.
Joy Andrew, who now serves as the operational head of Thirunangai Press, describes the literary world as a space that presents itsel as intellectual, but applies those values selectively. When the press attempted to distribute its books, vendors asked who would read them. When it applied for a stall at the Chennai Book Fair, it was denied. The press went to court, obtained an order, and set up the stall. “We had to legally fight to get a stall at the Chennai Book Fair,” Joy says. “Only since 2023, have we been consistently attending.” This consistency is itself a form of argument. The press showed up, and kept showing up, until its presence became unremarkable.
This pattern of building presence through persistence rather than permission, runs across the organisations that make up Tamil Nadu’s emerging queer publishing ecosystem. Alagu Jegan founded Aniyam Foundation in 2019 in southern Tamil Nadu, initially to provide welfare and rights-based support to women with different sexual orientations, and female sex workers. Publishing grew out of that work. The foundation had been running an e-magazine called Palmanam, releasing six or seven articles a month, and Jegan noticed that writers who could not come out publicly were using it to express emotions they had nowhere else to share. After a year, he collected those pieces and published them as a book. The act of making the book clarified something. “Queer people need documentation. If you look at literature, queer writing is rare. And those who have written it are those who have not identified themselves as queer. If I am a queer person, I can speak about what I feel and how my life is. If someone else tells my story, it may be exaggerated or undervalued,” he says. Aniyam has since published eight books, including poetry collections and a life history of a Dalit Thirunangai. Jegan has represented Tamil Nadu at literary conferences and read his own poetry, all while working in the IT sector.
Queer Chennai Chronicles, founded in 2017 and known as QCC, came to the same conclusion from a different editorial angle. Moulee, its co-founder, identified a pattern in what the existing literary world was willing to publish. Queer books, when they appeared at all, were almost exclusively autobiographies. Writers were expected to establish the legitimacy of their lives by narrating their suffering. “Autobiography is a valid genre, but it often becomes pathological. Queer writers had to prove their existence by narrating hardship. It felt intrusive,” stresses Moulee. QCC was founded to publish something else, fiction, narrative, poetry, stories in which queer lives appear as part of ordinary experience rather than as evidence of struggle. “We had excellent writers. Many of them doubted themselves because publishers were not ready or not equipped to edit such work. They would say it will not sell. They would ask who would read it. They did not see queer lives as part of common storytelling,” Moulee says.
The argument QCC made was not only about inclusion. It was about what literature is for. Readers, Moulee reasoned, do not sort themselves by the identity of the author. A reader looking for good writing will read it wherever it appears. The task was not to create a separate queer readership but to demonstrate to the existing literary ecosystem that it was overlooking writers of real quality. For four years alongside publishing, QCC ran a literary festival at Kavikko Mandram, a primary literary space in Chennai, bringing mainstream publishers, writers, and translators into conversation with queer writers and translators. “A single publishing house cannot bring structural change, but we can point to what is being overlooked,” shares Moulee.
The pointed finger has landed in places no one entirely anticipated. QCC developed an English-Tamil glossary of queer terminology through years of community conversation, and the Tamil Nadu Social Welfare Department adopted it and published the terms in the Gazette. “That happened organically,” Moulee says. “When the government recognised and published those terms, it signalled that this work mattered.” The glossary work began around 2015. The media guide built from it, developed in collaboration with The News Minute, took two more years to complete, beginning in 2021. When QCC expanded the guide into Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, and Hindi, the team did not translate it. They localised it, working with queer reporters and experts in each language to handle the specific ways gender functions across different grammars. In South Indian languages, everyday speech is largely gender neutral. In Hindi and other North Indian languages, verbs themselves carry gender. Each context required its own thinking. “We consulted veteran translators and academics,” Moulee shares. “Even looking at older literary works and translations such as the Tamil Bible helped us understand how new vocabulary could be shaped.” In 2020, QCC launched a web journal to cover policy developments and welfare schemes that mainstream Tamil media were ignoring, and to model how journalists could report on queer issues with accuracy and care.
Thirunangai Press has followed a parallel path of cross-language bridge-building. Grace brought PK Rosy’s autobiography — a Dalit woman who was Malayalam cinema’s first female actor — from Malayalam into Tamil. The press translated autobiographies of Black women from English into Tamil. It has published writings connected to Ambedkarite thought, and books by trans men, Dalit men, and other writers from marginalised communities. The press was not designed to be a closed archive of queer experience. It was designed to connect marginalised histories across languages and make them accessible to Tamil readers. “We want our communities to write their own histories, in their own voices, without being reduced or reshaped by others,” Grace says.
The results of that ambition are measurable. Twenty thousand books sold at a single book fair. Cis men and cis women are now approaching Thirunangai Press to publish alongside trans and Dalit writers. But the structural gaps remain real. Grant systems for queer publications in India are nearly absent, and what foreign funding exists come with conditions and uncertainty. State sponsorship is inconsistent. Vendors still sometimes refuse to work with Thirunangai Press because of trans stigma. Queer publications still cannot get stalls in Madurai, whereas, in Chennai, it has at least become possible. The library procurement process, which offers one route to institutional recognition, is long and complicated. Queer writers who break into mainstream literary spaces are still frequently treated as representatives of a category rather than as writers with a full range of skill and expertise.
The response to those gaps has been practical and political in equal measure. Jegan argues that just as reservation exists to address the structural exclusion of Dalits and other minorities from mainstream institutions, similar structural support is needed in literature. “In libraries, minority literatures such as Dalit and tribal literature should be recognised. LGBTQIA+ people should be included as a minority category,” he emphasises. Joy wants publishing houses involved in the policy committees that make these decisions. Moulee hopes that the ecosystem keeps expanding until readers have real options.
Jegan is already working towards the next expansion. He is writing children’s stories with queer authors, preparing to release his own poetry in Hindi and Malayalam, and building a training network for teachers, advocates, and police officers to understand queer lives and support queer people. He is thinking about translation as a two-way channel, moving Tamil queer writing to other Indian languages while bringing queer writing from those languages back into Tamil. Sharing the hope for the future, Joy says, “We want literature from the margins to become part of the mainstream conversation.”