I saw the oppression of gay men during my time in Minsk, Belarus, where I was studying for my master’s degree in computer science. The queer bashing, the posters in hospitals telling people to ‘beware of gays’, the police raids and beatings were commonplace. Throughout my stay there, I didn’t have contact with the subterranean gay life that existed there. So it was in Japan where I was first exposed to my own sexuality. I had gone there to work as a volunteer.  What I found changed me irrevocably. For three days I could not sleep, I was deeply scared. In order to reconcile my own view of myself and the world, I talked to a gay book seller and read every useful book I could get my hands on, including works on Hinduism and sexuality. Next, I went to Hong Kong for further studies at the University of Science and Technology. What I found there confused and disoriented me. Expecting Hong Kong to be a modern society with liberal ways, I was open about my sexual orientation. I was wrong. People there were not comfortable with my openness. I abandoned my studies and returned to Nepal after just six months.  I was less interested in computer studies by that time. I wanted to become a social worker instead. In 1999, I went to Odisha as a volunteer to bring aid to the victims of the super cyclone that killed over 10,000 people. I stayed 10 months there. While I was there, I was also introduced to Buddhism.  Returning to Nepal, and by now certain of the sort of path my life would take, I started to meet other people from LGBTIQA+ community and learned how unpleasant and difficult their lives were. So, I decided to do something about this, and in 2001 formed the Blue Diamond Society, Nepal’s first LGBTIQA+ organization. Blue Diamond started off with AIDS prevention work, the only way then available to get funding and NGO registration. The organization swiftly moved into monitoring and reporting on human rights abuses. We also instituted a human rights training program. We set up an office in Kathmandu, and quickly spread to other towns and cities.  The activities Blue Diamond was involved in culminated in 2007 in an incredible victory in the Supreme Court, in Sunil Babu Pant and Others vs. Government of Nepal and Others. An interim government was in power, from which I had hoped for much, but it proved uninterested in reforms, so Blue Diamond decided to go to court to fight the discriminatory laws and attitude towards the gay community. We won the landmark case, and, in a wide-ranging decision, the court ruled that the government should recognize the third gender and review and reform all laws that had a discriminatory basis.  The government accepted the ruling and Nepal thus became the first country in the world to recognize a third sex and the first in South Asia to legalize homosexuality. The upshot also included the formation of a seven-member same Sex Marriage Committee. The ruling basically decriminalized homosexuality and allowed study on same-sex marriage in Nepal in 2008. And this decision became a reference for many other countries. 

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