Anindya Kar knows, painfully, that “history keeps repeating itself”. For instance, the book he is currently reading – Siddharth Dube’s ‘An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex’ – mentions that gay rights lawyer Siddhartha Gautam and the author were thrown out of a Delhi pub in 1989. Similarly in the late 2010s, Kar’s gay friends had been asked to leave from a club in the same city. “We never acknowledge or correct ourselves. We never change,” rues Kar, who runs the Instagram page LGBTQIAP Plus History of India (@lgbthistoryindia). 

Gautam, a Yale alumnus who was one of the early members of the ‘AIDS Bhed Bhav Virodhi Andolan’, and one of the authors of the ‘Less Than Gay: A Citizen's Report on the Status of Homosexuality in India’, is the subject for a series the account is doing for Pride month. The group had been among the first to launch a legal fight for the rights of the queer community. “Siddhartha’s story is one of those inspirational and amazing facts I stumbled upon while looking for content for the page,” says Kar, an ally who is also assistant director and chief medical officer at the Advanced Neuropsychiatry Institute in Kolkata.