Project Almirah: Documenting stories of gender, sexuality, acceptance in India

How do young Indians navigate their LGBTQIA+ identity? Tackle the fear of rejection? Artist Avril Stormy Unger’s video project gathers first-person narratives.

When Avril Stormy Unger, 37, an interdisciplinary artist from Bengaluru, was considering coming out as queer during the pandemic, she scoured the internet for stories that might mirror her experience and help her navigate it.

She found very few accounts from Indians online. So she turned to people in the real world, including friends, friends of friends and celebrities who had embraced sexuality as a spectrum.

It struck her as sad that so many resonant and evocative stories were playing

Unger’s project seeks to celebrate “the need to come to ourselves despite the heteronormativity that surrounds us,” she says.

Unger saw friends fade from her own life, when she acknowledged her sexuality in 2021. Still, overall, she is a happier person, she says, “because I know a deep truth about myself, about who I truly am”.

The pandemic as a time of clarity is something the speakers on Project Almirah talk about too. Amid those years of living in altered circumstances — ranging from immensely stressful homes that forced them back into the closet, to quiet solitude that allowed them to redraw boundaries they had inherited — they were either forced to or found themselves finally able to acknowledge deep truths about themselves.

Unger’s project seeks to celebrate this resilience “and the need to come to ourselves despite the heteronormativity that surrounds us”.

Meanwhile, through her research, her conversations and her project, Unger has acquired the community that she was missing. “There is a sense of belonging when we talk to each other, a feeling of being heard and seen, and a euphoria from our shared joys and from the fact that our struggles are shared,” she says.

In future videos, “and hopefully a podcast with some funding”, she wishes to address issues such as why heterosexual people seem to know so little, or acknowledge so little, about what life as a queer person is like. “There is a certain kind of blindness that straight people exhibit,” she says. “We often have to educate others about our lives, terminology and pronouns. And aspects of this identity are treated as a debate, when these aspects are simply the everyday life of the queer.”

Her mission to build up the archive of personal stories is driven partly by this: the sense, as she puts it, that “our own stories can sometimes feel like all we have.”