OnePlus India applauds the LGBTQ community in their fight for equality

...with six inspirational stories of people who decided to never settle with what they’re not.

All words that humans use have the same meaning, implication, and consequence irrespective of the gender, race, colour, taste, or sexual orientation. ‘Bread’ and ‘wine’ mean the same to a man as it does to a woman. And so does ‘equality’. Unfortunate as it is, the latter is not true. For long, equality has been judged on the skewed scale of a person’s sexual orientation among others. And the skewed scale has had led to many misjudgments. And thus, we have had settled for inequality.

For a nation that promised to modernize itself, distribution of a fundamental right of equality based on a person’s sexual orientation seemed to be not at place. A small set of people voiced their opinion and after years of struggles and fight, on September 06, 2018, the apex court of India finally read down Section 377 setting aside the criminalization of homosexuality into the trash of history. OnePlus India – a brand that believes in never settling for what’s not worth - in collaboration with Vice, decided to share the stories and struggles of that small set of people – the LGBTQ community. LGBTQ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, and Queer (Q is an umbrella term to encompass a lot of people and is not specific to sexual orientation or gender identity).

The LGBTQ community has been always derided with disgust and snatched the right to love and express love the way ‘normal’ humans do. For years, they have been looked down as weird creatures of nature. They have been denounced, rejected, abandoned, and left with no one to look up to. The video tells the stories of six such people who were not considered a part of the normal and had to carve their own niche. Sonal Giani, one of the six heroes, shared her story of being ousted from her college with pictures of her with another woman being compared as lesbians or Mark Mascarehnas, who talks about his traumatic last day of school where 15 boys permanently left scars on his mind. These stories are of the strength and grit with which these people have persevered to not be someone they’re not. They have chosen the strong-willed path. It is the path that led them to embrace who they are, become what they’re meant to be, and inspired them and others around. Their struggles have been real and persistent. But they have never settled for it.

Sonal today is an activist for the community educating people about the choice they have made and that choosing one’s sexual orientation is a right one has. Mark has become the nation’s first drag queen to launch the first ever LGBT track and Navya Singh, another hero, is the first trans-woman to walk the ramp for the annual Lakme India Fashion Show. Their aspirations and achievements are like everyone else’s and now their right to love and its expression also is.

A rainbow is not made of just a pair of colours. Similarly, a society cannot progress with just a narrow funneled perception. Abolishment of the inequality for the LGBTQ community paved a new road for all of us. It inspired us to accept people as they are, accept their choices, their ideas, their roles, and accept their way of loving and living. It inspired us to never settle for what is not acceptable. These six stories have inspired us to fight against inequality, be together in harmony, and add our colour to it, for all seven makes a rainbow.