Organized By Orinam.net
Chennai, Tamil Nadu (13.050330, 80.188590)
The group that first met at Mövenpick Ice Cream in Chennai on Christmas 2003 has since evolved into Orinam, a thriving online-offline resource for LGBT people. Orinam (ஓரினம்), is a Tamil word that means ‘One kind’ or ‘One community’. Orinam is a social and support group (formerly called Movenpick/MP) and its associated website and mailing list that exist for the LGBT community in Chennai and for those with roots in Chennai/Tamil Nadu. Our Vision is a world where individuals of all sexual orientations and genders are able to access their human rights free of discrimination. Over the years, Orinam has contributed to peer-support, visibility, advocacy, and cultural programming, in close collaboration with several progressive community and ally groups and individuals. It has co-hosted numerous visiting artists, performers, writers, and scholars, and facilitated interface events with the local communities. Orinam is one of the initiators of the Chennai Rainbow Coalition, a fluid cluster of groups that have individually and jointly been organising events during Pride month annually since 2009. It is also one of the principal organisers of Reel Desires, the Chennai International Queer Film Festival, the latest in a series of queer film festivals in the city that first began in 2004. Orinam's diverse resource materials and archives in English and Tamil, available online at Orinam.net since 2006 and significantly expanded in 2009, have been used in many a sensitisation program and workshop in Chennai and elsewhere. They continue to be accessed by our family members, media, students, healthcare providers, and activists, among others. They have also been cited by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in its policy recommendations for transgender inclusion in India, a guidance document supplementing the April 15, 2014, NALSA verdict on transgender rights. Posted on our internal mailing list over the years, a set of first-person accounts by LGBT youth and our families around issues of coming out and family support forms the core of our resource materials for parents Orinam is part of the national LGBT archives project, and, specifically, is archiving legal documents, media coverage, petitions and other materials relating to IPC 377, at the site 377.orinam.net. It has also collated legal documents and analyses of the NALSA judgement at http://orinam.net/resources-for/law-and-enforcement/nalsa-petition-tg-rights-india. Other projects in the pipeline are resources for queer married people in India, and country-wide directories of healthcare providers who are LGBTI friendly, including providers of counselling, hormone therapy and SRS for trans* individuals seeking these. Join us for a meet-up on the eleventh founding anniversary of Orinam, Dec 25, 2014. Details will be posted here.