As a child, I loved getting haircuts with my grandfather at an open-air barbershop under a peepal tree in Mumbai’s B.D.D Chawl No. 30. It had a blue wooden table with a few basic salon tools like razors and scissors.The sprawling peepal tree had a large chauthara—a raised platform where people, mostly men and kids, would sit and chat all day. It was never empty.

I’d wait for my turn, usually after my grandfather’s. I’d perch on a stool kept in front of the table. I was mesmerised by the rhythmic snip of scissors, the hum of clippers. 

Just like the heavy male presence in the barbershop, my life was surrounded by men. In Mumbai, I grew up with six men in the house. When we moved to my maternal home in Igatpuri in Nashik district, five of the eight family members were men. I spent my teenage years in Igatpuri. Even my cousins—my aunt’s two sons—who visited often, added to that atmosphere. All of it played a role in how I saw masculinity.

I wanted to be like those men. My uncles, cousins, neighbours—all had a certain swagger. The way they ran their fingers through their freshly cut hair, how confident they looked walking out of the barbershop.I was drawn to the attention they received, the authority they held in the house. In contrast, the lives of women—marked by constant labour and sacrifice—held no appeal. I often wondered if the difference in appeal had something to do with how men and women wore their hair. So, I mimicked the men around me. I would fight with my mother to let me wear jeans. I kept my hair short.

Hair codes us in ways we can’t always control: it signals gender, caste, religion, political belief, and sometimes, deviance. This story is about how something as everyday as a haircut can carry the weight of visibility, misrecognition, and defiance—how queer identity is negotiated not just in who we love or how we dress, but also in how we wear our hair.

Hair as queer rebellion

It was during my summer vacation after Class 6 when I got my first period. Overnight, everything shifted. The family that once indulged my masculinity now expected something else. I was handed a new script—of growing out my hair, softening my presence, and performing femininity in ways I didn’t understand. My space to explore queerness as a teenager was lost in these heterosexual and familial realities of my early life.

By the time I left school, my hair touched my waist. I shaved my arms and legs, not because I wanted to, but because that’s what my best friend did. I was learning to perform girlhood, but it never felt like mine. My body was shifting in ways I couldn’t control, and my hair—long, heavy, constantly policed—became a symbol of everything I didn’t want to be.

I didn’t have the language for queerness back then. But I knew this: hair was my first battleground.

In 2018, when I was 18, I returned to Mumbai for my undergraduate studies. I was living in a government hostel for marginalised students, which came with a monthly stipend of 900 rupees—never delivered on time, but enough to give me a sense of independence. For the first time, I felt I didn’t have to follow the family rule of growing my hair long. I could finally decide for myself.

I used that freedom to do what I’d wanted for years. With my waist-length hair, I walked into Shahid’s tin-walled salon, near my hostel. I asked the barber to give me a “boy cut”. Within minutes, Shahid’s scissors had transformed me. The weight was gone. I felt lighter, freer—like I could finally breathe in my skin.

I used to like boy cuts. But over time, as I began to accept my queerness, the boy cuts no longer felt right. I was a girl with a boy cut, I felt.  

I needed to do something more with my hair and its appearance to feel more queer. 

So, on a mundane summer afternoon, I again walked into a small barbershop. It was barely a hundred square feet with two large mirrors on both walls, posters of men wearing different haircut styles facing the entrance. 

“Do you have dye?” I asked. He only had one colour: golden yellow.

He pulled out a packet of Fem bleach—meant for faces, not hair—and smeared it across my scalp. As is the case with instant bleach, within minutes, the hair strands turned a garish orangey-golden. 

I finally felt at peace. The experience of expressing that something in me was different from the world around me.

 Even though my parents found my dyed hair strange at first, they didn’t bother me about it. Others weren’t as kind. Neighbours stared. Friends laughed. Grandmother scolded.  Many hurled casteist slurs—chapri, bhangi.

At the time, I couldn’t make sense of why my buzzed, bleached hair provoked those words. How could orange hair make me “bhangi”? But I remembered being called dalindar as a child when I had lice. In Marathi, dalindar is used to refer to people who bring bad omen, people who don’t bathe, look unhygienic and have lice. The look and color of hair had invited caste into the conversation. I had heard those slurs before, too, whispered by girls in my convent school when talking about “Dalit boys” who wore “chapri cut”. The orange in their “chapri cut” was mostly because they, like me, couldn’t afford to go to fancy salons or pay for expensive hair colours.

Somewhere between memory and insult, I realised: my queerness, my caste, and the way I looked were collapsing into a stereotype others recognised, even when I didn’t yet have the language for it.
To look visibly queer while also being from a caste-oppressed community meant I was always under scrutiny, always too much.

But at that moment, I didn’t care. I felt visible and “queer enough.” 

That bleach job was more than rebellion—it was the beginning of me figuring myself out. Later, I dyed my hair blue. And then I kept dyeing it blue. For two years straight, it became my default—my first choice, always. It wasn’t just about colour; it was how I asserted my commitment to Ambedkarite politics. Blue was my way of saying where I stood—and who I stood with.

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