A breathtakingly unscientific survey conducted among friends and acquaintances has confirmed this (admittedly half-baked) theory of mine: that homosexuality has been tolerated—to some extent—in South Asian and South Asian diasporic families, if not communities. (South Asian father to his son, who has just come out to him: "Why all the fuss, just get on with it and keep it to yourself. Don't let it interfere with your studies. And for God's sake, when you get married, don't tell your wife about all of this business.")

Tolerance is meted out on the condition that homosexuality remain a private, and preferably, secretive practice, masked by the public face and conduct of an immaculate heterosexuality; in other words without being named.

This issue of Rungh is about naming names. But do these names herald new possibilities? Or does the language on which they are routed mean they are just redesignations of old oppressions? Do they usher in a previously undreamt-of liberation or wild new constraints? How does the emergence of an out South Asian lesbian and gay presence in the West intersect with the now established concept of queer politics and cultures? Can we be queer on 'our' own terms? Do we need to be? If they exist, what do these interstices of South Asian and queer look like? And what might they be called?

Armed with an arsenal of theories about 'Queer' and 'Queer Style', writer and filmmaker Sonali Fernando went out in search of a South Asian lesbian variant. Scrutinising lesbian media, she found images that ranged from the problematic to the diabolical. She returned with 'an inventory of absence.' A lesbian support group she came across couldn't even find a name for themselves: "Lesbianism is 'anamika' in South Asian, without/beyond name." Re-claiming a pejorative is one thing; embracing invisiblity, something else. The only artist she came across who was pronouncing the categories of 'queer,' 'female,' and 'South Asian' in her work was the performance artist/ porn princess, Annie Sprinkle. Tantrik Droplets is Sonali Fernando's witty and often despairing report from the realm of this self proclaimed 'Hindu Goddess.' (You'll find another white 'Goddess' in this issue: Barbie, a rather tired journeywoman, is revived and 'raced' to the final frontier—[queer?] South Asianness.)

The current bad-boy, bad-girl incarnations of queer that swamp us in our lesbian and gay lives do not have to encrust us in a new orthodoxy. The London based filmmaker Tanya Syed is trying to find a new vocabulary to express her queerness. Radical queerness does not just have to be characterised by 'outness,' as Kathleen Pirrie Adams writes in her evaluation of Syed's body of work, A Stranger's View. Syed fuses some of the original, ornate significations of the word 'queer' with her own Scottish-South Asian lesbian perspective to offer poignant and kinetic evocations of her world.

In Canada, South Asian lesbian and gay groups have organised and flourished over the last decade. A great deal of South Asian Canadian cultural work has originated and been fostered by these groups: Desh Pardesh, the first organisation and festival in the West to identify and explore a diasporic South Asian arts practice was initially established by Khush, Toronto's South Asian gay men's group. A web of lesbian and gay men's journals, magazines and newsletters have sprung up across the country and offer networking opportunities to the larger South Asian community. The pages of Rungh often feature and review the work of South Asian lesbians and gay men, many of whom have achieved international (and sometimes even national!) prominence. To import and paraphrase the words of the poet June Jordan, there would not be a South Asian Canadian cultural activism without South Asian Canadian lesbians and gay men.

South Asian lesbian and gay artists are beginning to crack the so-called mainstream in Canada as well. Shani Mootoo's videos, writing and visual artwork have been praised across North America. Her new video, Her Sweetness Lingers will win her even wider acclaim. Her work has interrogated not just issues of sexuality and race but of national identity, as well: Canadianness.

One of the great successes in Canadian publishing over the last year is Shyam Selvadurai's novel Funny Boy. As Smaro Kamboureli writes in her appraisal of the novel, "funny... signifies what society decides is queer—strange, unpredictable, unmanageable, ultimately threatening to the status quo." But when the status quo embraces the once-marginalised, the once-invisible, the until recently un-nameable, do we celebrate or become more vigilant?

Queer South Asianness has now become a transnational affair (or at least a fling). But is the evolution of our queerness just an echo of the evolution of American Gay Liberation? In her article, Notes on a Queer South Asian Planet, Gayatri Gopinath deflates that argument. "Consumption," she argues, "whether of identities or fashions or modes of organising—isn't about mimicry but is a productive, imaginative act." In reducing an emerging movement to parody, that argument condescendingly denies queer South Asians agency. The pioneering filmmaker Pratibha Parmar takes the notion of appropriation on a different trajectory. One of the first South Asian artists in the West (or anywhere) to publicly portray lesbian and gay identities, Parmar scans through Bollywood films to reveal and claim her favourite lesbian filmi moments.

Identity is not found in nature but historically constructed in culture, Kobena Mercer has written. In other words, queer, lesbian, gay are not what you are so much as what you do and how and why. We can't be defined by labels and categories, we can't hide behind them. We have to name our practices, and not just sexual practice, but how we live all aspects of our lives. And no longer can we be identified with a powerlessness equated with a position of class poverty or societal victimage. At the very least, this characterisation is not always an accurate depiction. But even more importantly, if we continue to build a cultural politics around the theme of a virtue earned through oppression and alienation, we will never learn to speak, as Andrew Ross has written, in a radical accent, the popular language of our times, which is the language of pleasure, adventure, liberation, gratification and novelty.

These are the languages of our desires. One day soon, we will name them with ease.