Reeta Loi, London(UK)
Activist, Musician, Writer & Founder of Gaysians
She was featured in the Forbes 100 Women Founders list, has won British LGBT+ Award, and played an instrumental role in lobbying for the repeal of Section 377 in India. “I grew up witnessing oppression of women in my family and chose to follow the path of self-discovery when given an ultimatum for coming out as a lesbian to my family,” she recalls. It was excruciating for Reeta to lose her family, grow apart from her Punjabi culture and be alienated at the age of 18. “I was on a quest to seek out people like me, be an anonymous voice in the media for years before deciding to use my name and set up Gaysians,” she tells us.
The music industry is male-dominated and so is the queer scene—with 98 per cent of music producers and 80 per cent of music artists being men, Reeta informs us. “Our suppression is a product of patriarchy and frankly, it’s so pervasive that we can’t even see it. I continue to make art from love and compassion to reverse this,” she says.
Gaysians, a non-profit organisation spearheading the global visibility and representation of the South Asian diaspora and the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, is almost 5 years old, with a team of seven volunteers and a network of 25 organisations in the UK and North America.
Being a Londoner, Reeta is heavily influenced by the melting pot of sounds of the diaspora—from Reggae, dance music like Garage, Breakbeat, Jungle, Hip Hop, to Bollywood soundtracks from films like Bobby and Mughal-e-Azam and Lata Mangeshkar. Reeta tells us, “I queered my collection of Bollywood records—the only memories I have of my dad apart from a few of his old kurtas. I started using samples from Hindi love songs and distorted my vocals to turn them into same-sex love songs or responses that messed with people’s gender perceptions. I released some of this work in an EP in 2018 called Ek under LOIAL, my artist name at that time. ”