There is ALWAYS Someone Who Looks Like You!

By Jayan Singh

I was never short on friends who looked like me. Growing up in an immigrant neighbourhood, Desi people took up the majority of my elementary and middle school populations, with a whopping three white people in my graduating class. Sure, I was the only gay brown kid, (at the time, at least,) but there was never any question as to where my community was. Diwali was a bigger event than Christmas; Gym classes were canceled during Ramadan; And on class movie days, the popular vote swayed in the direction of Tollywood. 

My dad always told me about his high school experience growing up in the suburbs. There were four students of colour; Two of them were him and his younger brother. The idea made me laugh. I couldn’t imagine going anywhere and having to explain what dadima means. Oh, what a life I had ahead of me. 

On the first day of high school, I walked into my band class to find that I was the only person of colour in the room besides a Vietnamese boy in the corner. We made eye contact. Relief washed over his expression. I quickly learned that one part of my identity had been exchanged for another; The queer art school kid fit right in. The brown guy in kurtas did not. 

Within the week, I had shortened my name to Jay and been assigned by the group members of my first project to do the whole thing myself on something from “where I come from”. I spent the rest of my time answering to my anglicized name and explaining that yes, Indians do shower and no, your “Namaslay” mug is not an accurate cultural representation. I started to see what my dad had been talking about. 

On the opposite pole, I had started to collect queer friends by the dozen. It was the first time I had ever been in an environment fostered by our collective joy. The student census came in with numbers of queer-identifying students at 60%. I mean, I knew that’s what they said about art school in movies, but I didn’t expect it to be true. But despite my friends all feeling like me, none of them looked the part. With numbers like that, there had to be other queer Desi kids in the school, too, right? 

By twelfth grade, I’d had enough. I had gone without a brown friend for my entire high school career. I was, despite my thriving social circles, undeniably lonely. My intersectionality was on the back burner, conducive to a kind of tokenism that I had never experienced before. (It did not help that I had the same name as Jay from Big Mouth. It did not help at all.) 

That was when the idea struck me to found my school’s Asian Student Alliance. I hadn’t heard of an ASA in the entire school board, but if gathering every Asian student in my school was going to help me meet other brown people, it was going to be the first. I got the support of a teacher and we put out a poll to the student body, inquiring as to who would come.

We received 28 responses in two days. That was more Asian students I had ever met in my three years of high school combined. The majority of them identified as East Asian, Southeast Asian, and, to my joy, South Asian. On the day of our first meeting, the poll rang true, and for the first time since middle school, I found myself in a room with six other brown people in it. My friend found herself in a room with nine other Filipinos. The Vietnamese boy I had met on the first day of school sat down at a table with four other Vietnamese kids. 

As the chronic overachiever I am, I had written down an entire schedule for what this meeting was going to be, what we were going to accomplish, how we were going to move forward. Instead, I put down my notebook, and said, “Where have all of you been?”

Everyone laughed, but it was true. We didn’t end up planning, or scheduling, or trying to make something productive, we just talked. We talked about where we had been. What made us walk into the room. How long we’ve been waiting, biting our tongues, and wishing for someone to ask us what our name is, what it really is. We talked about our grandparents, and complemented each other’s lunches, and didn’t accuse a single one of smelling “too Asian”. 

The thing we talked about the most, though? It was being queer. What came up in conversation again and again was what it felt like to be intersectional in a place that only seemed to care about one identity. What it meant to be inextricable. A third, more complex thing, instead of two things at the same time. 

In the weeks to come, we would put together a zine full of art by Asian students. We would celebrate Lunar New Year with one of the biggest lunchtime events of the school year. We would bring henna artists to the foyer and let dozens of students experience it. 

In one conversation, we brought up Raksha Bandhan, a holiday where sisters wrap a rakhi around their brother’s wrist to protect them. I don’t have a sister, so this holiday had only been something I could celebrate with my peers in middle school. To my left, one of the six brown kids in the club spoke up. I’ll be your sister this year, she said. To my surprise, I began to cry. 

In the summer, I managed to make enough queer brown friends to do a mixed-media photography series on what it meant to my peers to be desiqueer. I told them to dress in their brightest formal wear in the way that they wanted to style it, not to impress the aunties. My friends showed up in sarees pinned with chains, Doc Martens under their lenghas, and rubber duck earrings matched with yellow shalwar kameezes. When coming to pick him up, one of my friend’s mothers stopped me to say that she had never in her life imagined driving her child to be captured and appreciated as he truly was; When she was growing up, they would never talk about these things. She liked every single one of my Instagram posts.

The truth is, there is always someone who looks like you. In every space you’ve ever been in, someone has touched the ground you stand on who understands what it’s like to be you. And they’ve been waiting for you to find them just as long as you’ve been waiting for them to find you.

• Jayan Singh is a queer, South Asian artist based in Tkaronto, Canada. He is a photographer, poet, and mixed-media artist, previously published in Poetry In Voice’s VOICES/VOIX and LGBT Youthline’s Coming Home: YO Anthology.