Searching for community: The challenges queer immigrants face in Canada

Harsimran Singh was not always accepting of the fact that he is gay. During his time at high school in Punjab, India, a thought would constantly stay with him in the back of his mind — he should not be the way he is.

It wasn’t until after high school he began exploring his queerness, such as by watching T.V. shows depicting LGBTQIA+ couples and growing more comfortable with liking boys over girls.

Upon moving from India to the Lower Mainland in 2017, Harsimran started embracing and exploring his queerness even more, visiting queer-friendly spaces, dressing up in colourful clothes, and experimenting with makeup. 

But doing so exposed him to judgement, especially in Surrey, the first Canadian city he moved to and where he lived for four years. 

“If I’m wearing a turban and I have something on my face like some makeup, people will non-stop stare,” Harsimran says. 

“It’s just the fear of myself. I feel like it was just my own fear of not accepting myself in the Indian community because … some part of it is accepting and some part of it is not. But to me, it’s always lingering — what people are going to think.” 

As time went on, Harsimran experienced more instances of intolerance.

Across Canada, about four per cent of the population — or about one-million people aged 15 or over — identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or a sexual orientation other than heterosexual, Statistics Canada reported in 2022.

In 2021, immigrants made up 23 per cent of Canada’s population, Statistics Canada also found.

Hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation have jumped 388 per cent from 2016 to 2023 nationwide, Egale Canada reported.

This is an issue registered clinical counsellor Nazanin Moghadami knows all about. As a former case worker at Rainbow Refugee, a Vancouver-based non-profit that supports 2SLGBTQIA+ refugees and immigrants, she worked with a gay couple who were physically assaulted in downtown Vancouver.

The pair went on to face barriers dealing with the aftermath.

“[Their] English proficiency was pretty low … so navigating and being able to communicate with the police and to the fire department who responded, it was quite difficult to do that,” Moghadami says.

“And it’s quite traumatic because there’s this idea that I’m here, I should be safe. I should be able to hold hands with my partner in the street — and that’s not what we’re seeing.”

The queer newcomer community also experiences microaggressions, she says, such as receiving looks like Harsimran experienced.

“If you’re a trans person — and if you’re a trans woman, especially, and a trans woman of colour — looks are quite devastating,” Moghadami adds.

“One of the saddest things that I hear is that people just grow used to it because they can’t have a response anytime people stare. It happens even within the queer community. There’s still a lot of not quite understanding of gender non-binary or gender expressions that are not binary.”

Moghadami says these microaggressions can manifest into systemic barriers, such as experiencing homophobia or transphobia when trying to receive support from housing settlement organizations or racism and xenophobia within health care or queer-safe spaces.

When interacting with users on Grindr, an online dating platform for queer people, Harsimran has been on the receiving end of anti-South Asian racism. He has gotten messages using stereotypes, such as Indians having body odour, and sexually explicit messages mocking Sikhism, his religion.

These unwanted messages on Grindr have also come from within the South Asian community, he says.

“I’ve had people text me, [writing] ‘You should remove your pugree (turban) if you want to be like this. Don’t soil our guru’s name and … they didn’t make us like that. This is wrong.’”

Surrey resident Mx. Gurpreet Singh Sodhi, an immigrant from Punjab who uses the gender-neutral honourific “Mx.” in front of their name, says they have also received negative messages from within the Indian community on Grindr, including death threats from faceless profiles, and judgemental looks in public.

Sodhi knew since puberty that they were gay. But this was before homosexuality was decriminalized in India in 2018, meaning if they openly expressed their sexuality, they risked going to jail.

While running their medical practice in a village, Sodhi realized they couldn’t live “hiding in the shadows,” so they researched countries they could move to where homosexuality was legal. This led them to move to Metro Vancouver in 2015.

But upon coming to Canada, they found residents here were not as accepting as they had thought, leading them to feel they couldn’t openly express their sexuality. That, coupled with financial struggles, led them into a depression and developing suicidal thoughts.

“Due to [the] mental health stigma from back home, we won’t talk about these things,” Sodhi says. “And especially when a man is facing these types of challenges, it comes to their manhood — men should be strong, they should not be vulnerable.”

In a Statistics Canada survey, three-in-10 2SLGBTQIA+ respondents reported their mental health to be fair or poor, while less than one in 10 non-2SLGBTQIA+ respondents reported the same.

Moghadami says when newcomers experience challenges, such as isolation and a lack of community, they are at risk of substance use, self-harm, feelings of hopelessness, and suicide.

“There are not a lot of resources for them. There are not a lot of queer-competent treatment centres that are accessible for them, or the wait lines are hard,” she says.

“Or they go and face a lot of racism, also, from other people, from their peers in the communities that maybe they have faced poverty or [homelessness]. There’s also lots of transphobia and racism within those communities.”

It wasn’t until 2023 that Sodhi stumbled upon a poster depicting a queer Punjabi man for a screening of Emergence: Out of the Shadows, a documentary about three South Asians navigating their sexuality within their conservative families. This was a shock for them because they had never seen someone who looked like them exist as a gay person.

Soon after, they were introduced to Sher Vancouver, a charity for queer South Asians and allies, and realized there is a community of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans Sikhs and Punjabis in the Lower Mainland.

“I realized that we exist, but why do we need to exist in a way [where] we need to hide ourselves or put a mask on our identity?”

They then started attending Sher Vancouver events and later became a volunteer with the organization, which provided them with a sense of community.

This is something Harsimran, who has also taken part in Sher Vancouver events, also relates to.

“It’s been eye opening because I see some of my friends living openly as … South Asian gay couples,” Harsimran says. “We should normalize that more.”

For Rabab Singh, who identifies as Punjabi trans masculine, he knew since the age of three that he felt like a boy inside.

“I found the term for it pretty late — I would say when I was 15,” Rabab says. “I did not have any community back home. I met queer people for the first time when I moved here.”

He moved to Canada from India in December 2018 and has lived in Surrey and Delta since.

Rabab says he is able to more confidently present his gender identity as an adult in Canada versus as a teenager in India. He’s also found a community of Desi queer individuals who are his best friends, while also making more connections through Sher Vancouver.

The first few years since moving to Metro Vancouver were good, Rabab says, but recently he has noticed a shift with the rise in anti-2SLGBTQIA+ sentiment.

Beyond facing looks from fellow members of the South Asian community at SkyTrain stations, which have left him feeling a little unsafe, Rabab has faced a couple of incidents where he was targeted for being queer while at his job at a storage facility.

Rabab says upon one renter of a storage space realizing he’s trans when a coworker addressed him with he/him pronouns, she called him a “creep” and accused him of following her.

“And then [she] started sending a lot of emails to our work email, being very aggressively, violently transphobic and racist, and eventually we had to evict her,” he says.

The person had sent over 60 emails, Rabab says, many of which described graphic ways she wanted to kill him.

“That was one of the extreme cases,” he adds. “In general, day to day, people would sometimes just ask me, ‘Are you a boy or a girl? Are you a man or a woman?’ which is a bit of an uncomfortable question because you don’t know if you answer, ‘Oh, I’m a trans man’ how the person is going to react.”

Fostering community-level support and connection

Joshna Hirani, manager of community engagement at Sher Vancouver, has worked with queer South Asian immigrants who have gone through a range of challenges, including facing judgement by medical staff, being fetishized while using dating apps, and being teased for the way they dress.

“What we do is help save lives — and I don’t say that lightly,” she says.

“One of the key [programs] that people can access is free counseling. We have up to 100 hours of counseling available through No Fear Counseling. They get between five to 10 sessions of free counseling with master’s level counseling students. And then if they need more, they can be referred or be offered low-cost counseling.”

Sher Vancouver also offers the Dosti Project, which is named after the Hindi word for friendship and allows people to meet up for karaoke, sexual health workshops, painting, cooking, and other activities.

“Once people enter that door, they can just almost breathe a sigh of relief that they can be their authentic self in every way. We try and make it as comfortable as we can for everyone,” Hirani says.

“It’s really nice to see these communities growing and people finding their chosen family.”

Other initiatives Sher Vancouver offers include Queer in Colour, a support group for BIPOC queer youth and adults, Sher Lotus, which is a space for queer and trans women, non-binary and two spirit people, and 2SLGBTQIA+ refugee services.

“These individuals all have other things going on in their lives that, when you objectively look at it, it could be things that can really bring you down,” Hirani says.

“But at least for these events, for these moments, they know that they’re not alone. They can go somewhere to just be themselves.”