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Let’s Write Tales of Resistance: Queer People Need These Stories Right Now!
Kissing Another Girl and Getting Drunk: My First Rebellion
What’s God to a woman’s love anyway?
Nineteen is a funny age. You’re kind of an adult, but no one really considers you one. You can buy alcohol anywhere in the city (at least in Delhi) but will be denied cocktails at bars. You’re old enough to marry (as a cis woman), but not old enough to share an apartment (according to your very Indian parents). And if you’re privileged enough to go to college outside your hometown, at nineteen, the world is your oyster and freedom the pearl within.
My freedom was slightly more intense, because I’d escaped a toxic religious household and was beginning to question my sexuality and everything I’d believed about myself so far after a brief encounter with a girl that pretty much turned me gay.
This is a story I’ve told so often that it’s always on the tip of my tongue, one spanning less than 24 hours and two major firsts in my life — getting drunk and kissing a girl.
Spring, 2022. I had just come face to face with a part of me I never knew existed — the part of me that wanted to kiss a girl. This feeling was so new, so fresh. Around the same time that I moved to…