Suhail Abbasi

Suhail Abbasi is a media professional and one of the founders of India's organised LGBTQ+ movement. He holds a master's degree in visual communication from the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay and has worked for more than twenty-five years across print, film, television and digital media.

His first intervention came in 1990, when he co-founded Bombay Dost, the first registered LGBTQ+ magazine in India, at a time when there was no legal or public space for such a publication. Four years later, in 1994, he was one of three self-identified gay men in Mumbai who founded The Humsafar Trust, the country's first community-based organisation for LGBTQ+ people. It began by opening a drop-in centre on Fridays for gay and lesbian people and for transgender and Hijra persons, and running workshops there on health and wellbeing; it became clear early on that the work would have to extend into defending the community's legal and social position as well. Abbasi remains co-founder and chairperson of the trust, and has served on its institutional review board.

He was one of the petitioners in the litigation against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which the Supreme Court read down in September 2018 to decriminalise consensual same-sex relations between adults. Alongside this he has worked on training and on workplace inclusion: he has mentored journalists and filmmakers through the LIKHO citizen journalism workshop and the Studio Dhanak screenwriting workshop, has pressed for diversity and inclusion inside the companies he has worked with, and wrote and directed a short film, Cover Story, about handling one's sexuality at work.[2][3]