Growing up in Thane, the first time Saurabh Bondre was introduced to graphic sexual content was when he went to the local newspaper stand that stocked a R2 magazine called “Bagal Wali Chichori Maina”. As his friends drooled over the “Maina”, whose blouse couldn’t contain her décolletage, what caught Bondre’s eyes were the chiselled men. 

Soon, the then teenager’s neighbours knocked on the door of the Bondre home to inform his middle-class parents that he was openly discussing how he found the men attractive. His Brahmin parents’ first reaction was to take him to a psychologist, who decided Bondre was going through a “phase”.  “He was very conservative, he told me that I can exercise these thoughts away. So every morning, I would get up and do these exercises, but I realised that my sexuality cannot be changed. I stopped. I was 19 at the time.”