Ashok Row Kavi

Ashok Row Kavi, born in Mumbai in 1947, was the first Indian to speak publicly about being gay, and built from that a health and rights organisation that outlived the criminal law it was formed under. He read chemistry at the University of Bombay, dropped out of engineering, and spent a period as a monk of the Ramakrishna Mission before a senior monk encouraged him to leave and live openly. He then worked as a journalist for eighteen years, at the Indian Express from 1974, as chief reporter of the Free Press Journal from 1984 to 1989, and as western India bureau chief of Malayala Manorama.

His coming-out interview appeared in Savvy magazine in 1986; his mother, Shobha Row Kavi, gave the same magazine an interview about her son, the first time an Indian mother had spoken publicly on the subject. In 1990 he founded Bombay Dost, India's first gay magazine, and retired from journalism to work full time on giving homosexual Indians a formal platform in public life. In 1994 he founded the Humsafar Trust in Mumbai with Suhail Abbasi and Sridhar Rangayan.

Under Row Kavi's chairmanship the trust became one of the largest organisations of its kind in India, combining community work and outreach to gay and other men who have sex with men with HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention and treatment programmes in Mumbai and Goa, counselling, research on sexuality and gender, and advocacy for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. It has supported similar groups starting elsewhere in the country and convenes the Integrated Network for Sexual Minorities. Row Kavi organised the first conference of 32 Indian MSM organisations in Mumbai in May 2001 and co-organised the first ILGA-Asia conference there in October 2002. He held a 1998 fellowship at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, sat on the executive committee of the Mumbai District AIDS Control Society as an NGO representative and on the technical resource group for targeted interventions at the National AIDS Control Organisation, and has taught as visiting faculty at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the University of Mumbai.[2][3]