The Magazine Born When Being Gay Was a Crime

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, India was a very different place for anyone who did not fit into traditional ideas of gender and sexuality. The law of the land included Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a nineteenth-century colonial relic that criminalised private, consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex. Under this law, being gay was effectively treated as a criminal offence, punishable by up to ten years in prison. The law was rarely used to convict people in a courtroom, but it was used constantly by the police and blackmailers as a tool of terror, extortion, and humiliation. For a gay man or a transgender person in India during this era, life was lived in absolute secrecy, wrapped in a crushing silence that made people feel entirely isolated from the rest of humanity. There were no representations on television, no sympathetic articles in mainstream newspapers, and no books in local libraries that suggested you could be queer and still live a normal, happy life.

It was against this backdrop of fear and invisibility that a small group of brave individuals decided to do something revolutionary. Ashok Row Kavi, a journalist who had courageously come out as gay in a mainstream magazine in 1986, realised that the greatest enemy the queer community faced was not just the law, but the profound sense of isolation that kept people divided and helpless. He understood that before people could fight for their legal rights, they first needed to know that they were not alone in the world. They needed a space where they could see their lives reflected, share their struggles, and find a sense of community. In 1990, alongside co-founders like Suhail Abbasi and Sridhar Rangayan, Kavi took the immense risk of launching Bombay Dost, India’s first registered LGBTQ+ magazine. The name itself, which translates to "Bombay Friend," was a quiet, comforting handshake extended to thousands of people hiding in the dark.

Getting the magazine registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India was the first major hurdle. The founders had to navigate a bureaucratic system that would have instantly shut the project down if the authorities had fully grasped what the publication was about. By using careful, strategic language in their registration forms and focusing on health, lifestyle, and social issues, they managed to slip through the bureaucratic cracks. When the first issue finally came off the presses in May 1990, it was a historic moment, though few outside a very small circle realised it at the time. It was a modest, cheaply printed publication, but its physical existence was a direct challenge to the state’s attempt to erase an entire population.

The actual production of Bombay Dost in those early years was an exercise in pure survival and secrecy. In an era before personal computers and digital printing were widespread, putting together a magazine required layout artists, typists, and commercial printers. Finding a printing press willing to run a magazine filled with articles about homosexuality and safe sex was incredibly difficult. Most printers were terrified of being raided by the police or losing their businesses under obscenity laws. The founders had to rely on a network of trusted, progressive allies who were willing to look the other way or actively support the cause at great personal risk. Money was always scarce, and the production costs were often covered by the founders' own thin pockets or tiny donations from friends who believed in the cause.

Once the magazine was printed, the next monumental challenge was distribution. Mainstream newsstands and bookshops in Mumbai and other major cities flatly refused to display or sell Bombay Dost. Shopkeepers feared backlash from conservative customers and harassment from local police officers who could easily accuse them of selling pornography. Consequently, the magazine had to be distributed through alternative, underground channels. It was sold in a few friendly, progressive bookshops that hid it under the counter or placed it quietly in the back corners. Much of the distribution happened hand-to-hand, passed along like a secret message from one friend to another in parks, train stations, and private homes.

Despite these massive roadblocks, the magazine managed to find its audience, and the impact was immediate and overwhelming. For someone picking up a copy for the first time, seeing the words Bombay Dost on a cover was an intense emotional shock. It was tangible proof that their inner lives, which they had been told were sick, sinful, and criminal, were shared by others. The magazine spoke directly to them in a language that was respectful, validating, and clear. It stripped away the shame that society had spent decades building up, replacing it with a quiet sense of dignity and belonging.

One of the most important and life-changing sections of Bombay Dost was the classifieds page. Long before the internet, dating apps, or online chat rooms existed, these small blocks of text were the only bridge connecting isolated queer people across India. Because of the legal dangers, people could not print their real names or addresses, so they used pseudonyms and box numbers. They wrote short, honest descriptions of themselves, searching for companionship, love, or simply someone to talk to. For a young man living in a conservative town, reading these classifieds was a revelation; it showed him that there were others just like him living in the next town, or the next state, looking for the exact same connection.

To manage the responses to these classifieds and to handle the general mail, the magazine set up a dedicated post office box in Mumbai. Soon after the launch, this mailbox became a portal for an avalanche of human emotion. Thousands of letters began arriving from every corner of the country, stretching far beyond the cosmopolitan borders of Mumbai to small villages and conservative towns where the loneliness was even more suffocating. The staff of Bombay Dost found themselves swamped with mail that was deeply personal, heartbreaking, and beautiful. People wrote about the terror of forced marriages, the physical violence they faced at home, and the extortion they suffered at the hands of the police. Many letters simply said that discovering the magazine had saved the writer from taking their own life.

The small office of Bombay Dost quickly evolved from a simple editorial room into a makeshift crisis counseling center and community hub. The founders and volunteers spent endless hours reading every single letter and writing back by hand, offering words of comfort, legal advice, and practical support. They realized that they were no longer just running a publication; they were holding up a fragile lifeline for a community in crisis. The magazine gave isolated individuals a voice and a way to talk back to a world that wanted them to remain silent.

In addition to providing emotional solidarity, Bombay Dost played a massive, life-saving role in public health during the 1990s. This was the decade when the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to sweep through India, causing widespread panic and devastation. The Indian government’s early response to the crisis was severely hampered by deep social stigma and denial, with many officials falsely claiming that HIV was a Western disease that did not affect Indians. Mainstream media refused to discuss how the virus was actually transmitted, especially among men who had sex with men. Bombay Dost stepped directly into this informational vacuum, dedicating large sections of every issue to clear, accurate, and non-judgmental information about safe sex, condom use, and HIV prevention.

Publishing explicit information about safe sex between men was incredibly dangerous, as it left the magazine open to charges of obscenity under Indian law. Yet, the editorial team refused to back down because they knew that silence in the face of the epidemic literally meant death for members of their community. They translated complex medical terms into simple, everyday language that ordinary readers could understand and apply to protect their lives. By distributing condoms along with the magazine and organizing small, secret health workshops, Bombay Dost laid the groundwork for the first structured HIV prevention programs for queer men in India, long before the government or major international NGOs entered the field.

The magazine also acted as an intellectual and political training ground for the Indian queer rights movement. Through its essays and opinion pieces, Bombay Dost introduced its readers to the concepts of human rights, constitutional protections, and global liberation movements. It taught a generation of queer Indians that their desire for equality was not a Western import, but a fundamental human right that belonged to them as citizens of a democratic nation. The discussions and debates that took place within the pages of the magazine helped shape the arguments and alliances that would later form the basis of the legal battle against Section 377.

Keeping the magazine alive year after year took an enormous toll on everyone involved. The core team faced constant anxiety, the threat of legal trouble, and intense personal exhaustion. Ashok Row Kavi became a public figure, which meant he frequently faced public mockery, hostility, and isolation from the mainstream journalism world he had once been a part of. By the early 2000s, the financial strain, combined with the sheer exhaustion of running an underground operation for over a decade, became too much to bear. At the same time, the world was beginning to change; the internet was finally arriving in urban India, bringing with it online forums and chat groups that offered new, instant ways for people to connect. Facing these shifting realities, Bombay Dost went on a long hiatus, and it seemed to many that its historic run had come to a natural end.

However, the story of the magazine was not over. In 2009, as the legal battle against Section 377 reached a critical turning point in the courts, Bombay Dost was proudly relaunched. The India it returned to was vastly different from the India of 1990. The queer community had grown more visible, pride marches were starting to take place in major cities, and there was a growing movement of young activists refusing to hide. The return of the magazine was a powerful celebration of survival and continuity, a reminder to the younger generation that the freedoms they were starting to enjoy were built on the sacrifices of those who had risked everything decades earlier.

When looking at the history of social justice in modern India, the legacy of Bombay Dost is undeniable. It was a project born out of desperation and love, created by a handful of people who looked at a cruel, silencing law and decided they would not be erased. They did not wait for the law to change before they started living truthfully; instead, they used their simple, printed pages to change the hearts and minds of the people, creating the very community that would eventually bring the law down. When the Supreme Court of India finally decriminalized homosexuality in a historic judgment in 2018, it was the ultimate realisation of a dream that had begun twenty-eight years earlier in a cramped, anxious room in Mumbai, where a group of friends dared to print a magazine for people whose very existence was considered a crime.

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