Pride Month | Desi Danmei? Indian Gay Love Is All Over Instagram and YouTube

It is raining men, hallelujah. Stories wet and heated, or cosied under umbrellas, are cropping up from the corners of the mainstream. Here, in India, it has been drizzling for a while. Romil and Jugal (2017), a web-series on ALT Balaji, was part of the first wave of streaming — promising stories at a slight angle to the mainstream, bringing in fresh voices, and through that, a new crop of audience. It was also one of the first Indian shows with front-and-centre gay protagonists, a somewhat humorous, entirely homosexual retreading of the Romeo and Juliet template. 

The show had its fair share of takers when it came out, though hemmed in by the subscription wall and the style of storytelling — it was certainly no Heartstopper. But in 2024, the whole show was put on YouTube: first, as individual episodes on Ultra TV Series, and later, as one 3-hour video on Kutingg, a subsidiary of Balaji Telefilms. 

With time, the show garnered over 7,00,000 views. “It picked up again because of Heated Rivalry”, Sakshi Juneja, co-founder of Gaysi, a digital space for gay desis, tells THR India, referring to the popular 2025 gay Canadian show on rival hockey players who quickly, consummately, turn devoted lovers.

In the vein of China’s homoerotic danmei-adapted reels or Thai Boys’ Love (BL) stories or MLM (Men Loving Men) fan fiction, India has been slowly, though steadily, building up its genre of gay love stories.

Take Last Leaf Pictures, a YouTube channel run by Zaheer Shaikh. Having written soaps for StarPlus, ZeeTV, and Colours, Shaikh began the channel in 2025 to tell his own stories without interference or pressure — a brain-rot horror comedy, a divorce drama. But inspiration struck with the tidal pull of Heated Rivalry, and he wrote, shot, and released Mujhe Rang De earlier this year as an experiment. 

“The response was very good, and that is when I realised there is a huge audience in India that wants to watch queer stories,” Sheikh tells THR India. Each of the six episodes pulled between 3,00,000-4,00,000 views on YouTube. “That is how I turned Last Leaf Pictures into a BL channel, to normalise queer love,” Shaikh notes.

Currently, fresh episodes of their new show Tera Bann Chala Hoon are being dropped every other day, the first episode picking up over 3,00,000 views. Shot mostly indoors to control budgets, the show uses AI to further pull down costs — using it for more involved scenes, and also for music. 

While Shaikh is not a stickler for hiring gay actors to play gay characters, Nakshatra Bagwe, who has been making queer short films since 2012 and shows on YouTube and Instagram since 2017, is insistent on hiring queer people to tell queer stories. Bagwe sees representation as not just as an on-screen, but off-screen phenomenon, too. He takes time, training queer people whom he lassoes into acting. Even his technical crew houses queer people. “In fact, in my recent web-series a trans woman played the role of a pregnant straight woman,” Bagwe tells THR India. 

Bagwe’s Agal Bagal (2020), a racy show — Bagwe’s shows lean heavily into eros, thumbnails showing sculpted men in close, promising proximity —has gotten over 6 million on YouTube, and millions more on Instagram. He recently completed the fifth season of The Visitor — a show where a travel writer discovers new cities and dabbles in new erotic experiences, from the men in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra to Gujarat, Goa, and Rajasthan. He makes these shows, shot on iPhones, by crowdfunding but also bringing in hospitality partners like The LaLiT Hotels, who take care of food and stay. 

Increasingly, Bagwe notes, more women are being smitten by these shows, “When we look at the insights from every video, the ratio of women to men is steadily increasing. Before, it was 95:5 men to women. Now, it is coming to 70:30. It is a new audience, entirely.” 

Online creators are rushing to make queer content. Filter Copy, the popular digital media channel, put out their first queer show, Lost & Found, starring Barun Sobti and Gagan Dev. Navneet Khhurana, as part of his Normal Couple series, even has one episode trailing two men battling their masculinities in their own way — one refusing to call out a friend for using a homophobic slur; the other refusing to call his lover “baby” because “gay hai toh ladke banna bhool jayenge kya?” (By being gay do we forfeit our masculinity?). It is one of their highest performing Instagram Reels. 

Viren Tak, too, chanced upon the potential of queer stories incidentally. “I was making a microdrama where this dude goes on different dates, and one of the dates was him experimenting with a guy. I put it out on Trial Reels and people really enjoyed that dynamic.” He spun that into an entire microdrama, Strangers, about the friendship between a straight and a gay man, which soon snowballs into something deeper and tangled. “It got love from queer people and straight women, some straight men as well. If the big producers are not taking this up, it is on us to take it up.”Currently, he is working on a second season. 

Since these shows are released on Instagram Reels, they can make use of existing music — from The Cinematic Orchestra to Shashwat Sachdev — without being struck down for copyright violations. That said, they also have to toe the line of the platforms, with regards to eros, producing sweet, sanitised stories which, nevertheless, are mobilising the most monetised aspect of our lives: our attention. 

Many platforms are swerving strategy, beginning to make queer content. On Instagram, for example, ListenTBH put out their first queer show — the 16-episode microdrama Tere Mere Beech Mein, following a straight couple who rent their spare room to a guy, which quickly sparks up an entanglement as it sours another. The episodes are raking in between one and four million views.

“It is definitely one of our strongest-performing fiction series,” Shreya Nair, the Creative Director of ListenTBH, tells THR India. They consulted Asian BL shows while scripting it, “but more than the specific references, we were interested in understanding why audiences connected so deeply with them.” 

The radical democratisation of storytelling on social media coincided with the declining footfalls in theatres. Mainstream films like Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020), Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021), and Badhaai Do (2022) were trying to zero in on the emotional and erotic entanglements of queer characters, but were unable to bring in the audience and sustain the genre. It was a lost opportunity and producers began to look elsewhere for stories. It was the small screen — YouTube, Instagram — that is ushering in queer stories into the marketplace of ideas. 

It has produced a new wave of stories, and a new landscape of storytelling, with its own demands, rigours, limitations, and pay-offs. “Think of how overwhelming it was to make a film, then a queer film. With social media, this burden of storytelling is far less,” Juneja notes, adding, “Today I see a lot of straight men content creators making queer stories and Reels.”