Some organisations have historically been holding parties in India since the start of the millennium. More vibrant now, the parties are held amongst large, but close-knit circuits and well-known clubs than just at back-alley, seedy haunts. Today though, a younger and more liberal generation is a part of the changed dynamics of the queer nightlife. Predominantly earlier and sometimes even now, when my friends (most of whom are male) and I would try to enter many of the mainstream clubs located across south Mumbai, we would be halted because the door staff was instructed to strictly allow only heterosexual couples. Giving rise to a host of queer party organisations who’ve been striving to set up safe nights out, without any prejudice from others. Since then, there haven’t been exclusively queer clubs or bars in India, but in the last decade, the queer rights movement has proliferated through the crevices of Mumbai’s homophobia. In the 1990s, Voodoo in Mumbai’s Colaba was notoriously known to be one of the first queer haunts in the city’s public landscape. The queer party has come out of the shadows of the seedy back-alley joint and into the spotlight with party organisations that are making the country’s nightlife more inclusive, night after night
