This week saw the Kashish LGBTQ film festival in Mumbai. Just a few days earlier, a journalist asked me why is it important to have LGBT film festivals and why was it important to have books on LGBT history, mythology and fiction. As I gave my answer, I realised how important stories are to us. For example, we have no story of gay and lesbian and transgender freedom fighters. Do they exist? Were they recorded? Were they edited out? Does it matter? It does, to gay and lesbian and transgender people, for stories validate identity. It makes them part of collective memory. And prevents ‘educated’ people claiming that certain choices, desires and behaviours were never part of our tradition and culture, simply because other ‘educated’ people in the past blocked their transmission in order to manipulate culture towards their narrow vision.

Are stories real? This is a very difficult question to answer. For stories are of different kinds. There are fantasies, which is nobody’s truth. There are myths, which is some people’s truth, which capture the subjective truth of a people and conveys conceptual realities like justice, rebirth and heaven. There are legends, based on people’s memory that valorise heroes by glamorising their deeds.