To My Beloved Chennai…

I first met you in whispers – stories traded like contraband in anonymous forums and late-night Yahoo! chats, careful words exchanged between strangers. Chennai, beyond the streets, the salt-slick air, hurried auto rickshaws and long-winded conversations, is a city where people like me could belong, or at least belong more than where I was. That’s how I got introduced to you as the city of possibility.

In 2009, I stood near the Triumph of Labour Statue at the Marina beach to witness the first Self-Respect Pride march, just a bystander. I was 19, defiant in name, unsure in heart. You, 370 years old, had held generations before me – queer folk, sex workers, people on the margins who still claimed their space. I was too scared, too uncertain, too naïve to understand what was unfolding in front of me. But I watched. I watched people who looked like me walk the roads, hold their banners high, and hold each other even higher. The next year, I walked too. The mask they handed me wasn’t just a shield; it was a bridge, between who I was and who I could become. You did not ask me to be brave before I was ready. You simply held me, and a lot of others. You still do. I went back home with a heart full of hope. Thus, you became a City of hope.

My hope, for a future. My hope was a future with him – where love could be lived, not just whispered into the dark. But when love disappeared, so did you from my dreams. I swore I wouldn’t return. But life had other plans. I came back, not for love, but because I had nowhere else to go. You were no longer an idea, no longer a city of hope – I arrived when I had lost all of it.

Pride is loud. But queerness in Chennai is quieter, stitched into the everyday. It’s in the way the pookaara akka at Besant Nagar beach smiles and says, ‘Un kondaiku Poo vecha Innum azhaga irupa’. In the way a coworker acknowledges the people I bring into my world – other queer friends, lovers, kin – not with curiosity or discomfort, but with an ease that asks no justification. In the small cafés where I linger, reading, watching, knowing I am safe. These moments are not grand, not loud, but they matter. They build the foundations of what home means.

You are a contradiction – history tangled with progress, caution woven into care. You hold us, yes, but sometimes at arm’s length, with unspoken conditions pressing between us. You are a city that not just welcomes but lets people thrive – vandhaarai vaazha vaikkum Chennai – but only if we learn how to navigate you, how to create our own shelter within your vastness. You are not perfect. You offer space, but not always safety. You welcome with warmth, but with conditions. For some of us, home is shaped by privilege. I know this because I have been lucky. I have walked your streets with the comfort of knowing I am not alone. Knowing how your streets can turn, how safety is a fragile thing, dependent on luck, on privilege, on the company we keep.

I have worn my queerness in ways that invite admiration instead of threat. I have stepped into rooms where my presence was not questioned. And yet, I know others who have not been as fortunate, whose safety is not a given, but a wager. I know what it is to hold safety in my hands and wonder how easily it could slip away. I learnt that even in a city that claims us, belonging is still something we must negotiate.

I see you in the quiet acceptance of strangers, in tea shops where a cup of tea is just that, no questions, no conditions. In the way trans people move through your streets, not just clapping for money at traffic signals and public transport. They travel through the same signals, waiting like everyone else, heading to work. I see them in offices, on buses, laughing in cafés. I see them buying things, sitting by the shore with their own, breathing in the sea air. I see them in temple festivals and church pews, not as spectacles, but as believers. The way your festivals do not always demand explanations before offering belonging. I see them because you allow them. You do not brandish your inclusivity like a medal, nor do you drown in rainbow capitalism. You simply let us exist. And somehow, without promise, without spectacle, you became a city I now call home.

I see how you have your wicked ways of teaching us patience and resilience – to survive our queer and trans parents and siblings being beaten up and burnt in police stations, their names swallowed by bureaucracy. How your media feasts on our existence, turning trans women into spectacle, framing interviews as curiosity, not conversation. How it invokes violence as comedy, applause as absolution. Queer couples turned into viral content, not for their love, but for the outrage they provoke. How your cinema still casts cis men in trans roles, applauding their “National Award-winning performances” while Negha Shahin had to go to Kerala to be recognized with a state award, and still struggles to find work in Tamil cinema.

I also see your persistence. The way your history bends towards change, even if slowly. The way your religious spaces do not always push us away, but instead, sometimes, make room. In the way your government, flawed as it is, was the first to create a Transgender Welfare Board, in the way you are now on the brink of an inclusive queer policy, the first of its kind in the country, an attempt at recognizing what has always been here.

I see you in the red hearts of your traffic signals, glowing above the waiting city. It is easy to miss them, but they are always there, part of the same streets that carry us home.

So I have hope. Hope that even when people fail us, you will not. That you will continue to hold us, like a hen gathering its chicks beneath its wings, not always gentle, not always soft, but protective nonetheless.

I arrived untethered, uncertain. You held me before I even knew how to hold myself. For every queer person who steps onto your platforms, hesitant and searching, I hope you do the same. You have never been the flashiest, never been the easiest, but you have been steady.

For those of us who call you home, we carry your warmth. We move forward, but never without you.

Anbudan,
Vaanavil Thozhar