India, June 6 -- 'Tumhara naam Jay Mehra nahi, Gay mehra hona chahiye'. This dialogue depicts the lens that Bollywood saw the LGBTQIA+ community from between the '90s and early 2000s - caricaturish, effeminate and always the butt of jokes. For years, queerness was not treated as an identity to be understood but as a punchline to be laughed at. But then came an awakening.

The 2010s saw a shift. For perhaps the first time, queer characters were allowed to exist as people with desires, flaws and stories of their own, rather than as punchlines orbiting heterosexual protagonists, with stories like Kapoor & Sons (2016), Aligarh (2015), the web series The Married Woman, Taali and Class.

As things seemed to be getting better, came Tu Meri Main ...