Joy and celebration were in the air and a whole array of colours could be seen everywhere as KMC capped off Pride Month with its first ever Gay Pride Parade. Between 5:00 pm and 6:30 pm, passionate chants of ‘Trans rights are Human rights’ and ‘We’re here, we’re queer’ could be heard throughout the campus. Around 60 attendees, each proudly wearing pride badges and holding banners commemorating the occasion, sang along to powerful, uplifting tracks by Queen, ABBA, and Britney Spears.
The parade began at 5:00 pm on the 30th of June, when the core committee of Iris, the queer club of KMC Manipal, along with the student council, unveiled the KMC pride parade banner. A brief photoshoot was followed by intense cheering as the parade kicked off. The parade made its way past several KMC landmarks, such as MCOPS, Sharada hostel, the Ramdas Pai block and the Infectious Diseases block, before finally coming to a close at the Interact building. KMC’s ever so helpful security staff made sure the parade was not endangered by oncoming traffic.
In the halls of Interact, the core members of Iris and the Student Council expressed their delight at how well the parade was conducted. Ms. Surabhi Jain, the President of Iris, expressed her gratitude to everyone present for banding together to make the parade a reality. She went on to talk about the tragic history of pride month and how said tragedy sparked revolution and reform. Mr. Aditya Prabhash spoke about what went into organising the event. Ms. Sudiksha, the Ex-President of Iris, was called upon next to speak to the crowd. She expressed her joy at the fact that she got to see an Iris-organised pride parade before graduating from KMC. An emotional Sudiksha emphasised how much this meant to her, and reminisced about the inception of Iris and all the previous attempts to organise a pride parade. Her speech left the crowd in a state of wistful serenity. Ms. Medha Chatterjee, the President, and Mr. Vrishan Shetty, the Vice President of the student council spoke a few words of appreciation towards everyone involved in making this event a success, including the professors, security guards and attendees. They were pleased at the success of this event, which stands as a landmark achievement for this years student council.
KMC Manipal has always been a safe space for LGBTQ+ culture to thrive, but because of the stigma surrounding public displays of queerness as well as the fact that homosexuality was illegal until very recently, put a damper on the possibility of a parade of this sort taking place in the past. Now that homosexuality has been decriminalised through the partial striking down of section 377 though, a celebration of gay pride was a near certainty, and Iris definitely delivered with this event. This parade will go down as a watershed moment in the history of KMC, a start of a new era for Iris and queer culture in KMC as a whole.
Writer: Krish Shanbagh, The Editorial Board, KMC Manipal
Photographer: Pranav Shenoy, The Editorial Board, KMC Manipal
Uploaded by: Tarunya Sashikanth, The Editorial Board, KMC Manipal