Amit Anand

Note: I Was Once Ghosted has 24 parts. Only the Ist Part is published here with 4 chapters.

I am a published author who is making a cogent effort to bring to the surface, empowered LGBTQIA+ protagonists, characters, and their stories, all centered around positive portrayals and happy endings! Normalizing LGBTQIA+ portrayals, relationships, and life (rarely depicted) in the media. As a multi-award-winning advocate for LGBTQIA+ equality, I am loving this direction my work as an author and a changemaker is taking me to.

Through my writing, I am mainstreaming the narrative that being LGBTQIA+ folks can also have happy, fulfilling lives. To be honest, a lot of stories and poems I write are inspired by real people who carry the self-belief that they can be themselves wherever they are, even in the wake of disapproval of their lifestyle, they persist to be authentic... to be happy.

The need for a more positive depiction of LGBTQIA+ individuals in the stories we as writers weave is the only way we can normalize an individual's natural orientation. LGBTQIA+ underrepresentation isn't the issue... it's the misrepresentation that we ought to focus on! Ableism, sexism, racism, etc. is something I do not tolerate on a personal level and that kind of reverberates in the work I do. Minorities discriminating against a subset of minorities within the SAME community is appalling, it is frankly appalling even for any diaspora and beyond, for that matter as we are all interlinked, interrelated, and intersectional.

I will also include discussions that would include debates on why LGBTQIA+ characters can't and don't fill up the casts of mainstream movies. The OTT platforms are paving the way for queer protagonists and characters with broader roles to perform weaving their full lived experience and authenticity into the story.