Bio of speakers:

Graeme Reid is an expert on LGBT rights. He has conducted research, taught, and published extensively on gender, sexuality, LGBT issues, and HIV/AIDS. He is the author of How to be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-Town South Africa (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013). Before joining Human Rights Watch in 2011, Reid was the founding director of the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa, a researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, and a lecturer in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at Yale University where he continues to teach as a visiting lecturer. An anthropologist by training, Reid received a master’s from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a PhD from the University of Amsterdam.

Ponni Arasu is a queer feminist activist, performer, lawyer and historian. She was part of the Nigah Queer Collective and the Anjuman JNU students’ queer collective in Delhi. She is also a member of the Voices Against 377 network, and has worked at the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore. She has written extensively on queer women’s issues with the law in India. As an oral historian, she has documented women’s movements in India, and local public political histories of the Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu. 

Mario da Penha is a historian and activist. He is currently working on his PhD thesis on hijras in eighteenth century Western India at Rutgers University, New Jersey. His interests lie in histories of the Deccan, politics, caste, gender and sexuality. He has worked in queer organizing, notably with Anjuman at JNU, Delhi’s first queer students’ collective. He also leads the All India Professionals’ Congress (AIPC) Maharashtra’s Committee on LGBTQIA+ Affairs.