Shaneel Lal is an activist, model, law and psychology student and 2023 Young New Zealander of the Year. They have become an outspoken advocate for Aotearoa's queer communities, from their activism in helping ban conversion therapy to fighting anti-trans rhetoric.

In an extract from their new book, One of Them, they reflect on "the search for my people".

Everyone knows I am gay. There is no hiding anymore. Scrolling through Facebook in early 2018, I stumble on an advertisement for the ‘Big Gay Out’. I have never been to a queer event before. The Big Gay Out sounds like heaven. I immediately sign myself and my friends up to volunteer for Ending HIV, at the Big Gay Out and the Pride parade. The Big Gay Out is cancelled due to heavy rain. Bummer. But the Pride parade is still on.

My parents don’t know I am going to the Pride parade. I don’t ask for their permission. I doubt they will allow me to go to the parade if I ask them. I have a youth conference to attend during the day. Ma and Pa are rarely aware of the things I get up to.

I have not, to this day, sat my parents down and told them about my gayness. The concept of coming out is very confusing to me. I understand my gayness as something that is a part of me. No matter how hard people tried to change it, they couldn’t. It comes to me as naturally as the colour of my skin. I never came out as brown.

I never sat Ma and Pa down and come out as brown. Imagine this: I sit Ma and Pa down and say, ‘I hope you still love me, but I am brown,’ and Ma yells, ‘Anything but brown. Give him a heart attack. Anything but brown.’

Sweta did not sit Ma and Pa down and come out as straight. It was assumed that she would be heterosexual. Almost like people are straight until they say otherwise.

I doubt myself, though. Am I not telling my parents about my gayness because of this theory I have cooked up in my head, or is it because I fear that my parents will reject me when I come out to them? Coming out means running the risk that they may not accept me. I fear they may even throw me out of home. There is so much to lose. The fear of losing so much overwhelms me and over powers my will to tell them. It is a gut-wrenching feeling.

I use these theoretical arguments as a shield to protect myself from facing the painful reality that they may disown me. I protect myself from the humiliation. I convince others that I am not affected by the miserable things that are happening to me. The truth is that I was deeply traumatised by the things that happened to me. I feel a lot of shame in being the victim. If I come out, I fear I will be the victim again. I don’t want to make myself vulnerable to more harm.

I understand my parents are a product of colonial conditioning. I understand they cannot change overnight, but I fail to afford them the opportunity to undo that colonial conditioning. I feel weak, and maybe I am weak.

I have rarely been outside South Auckland on my own. I take Cathrine to the Pride parade on Ponsonby Road. She grew up in a Christian family who taught her that being queer was wrong. But she has come around to accepting who I am, and our friendship has blossomed. Soon my friends Ammon, Tanya, Amanda and Lucy join us. We arrive at the New Zealand AIDS Foundation office in St Marys Bay. It is nigh on impossible to find other brown people in this area; I wonder if there will be many queer people who look like me at the parade. I get dressed up for the parade. I put some blue and pink paint on my face, stick an Ending HIV tattoo on my left arm and pick up a massive condom balloon. It blows my mind to be around so many confident and flamboyant queer people.

As I walk down Ponsonby Road with the Ending HIV float, I feel the fear of being caught and the joy of liberation. After a while I become carefree. I am euphoric in the company of so much queer excellence. Everything is vibrant. There is music, shirtless men and drag queens. I am chucking out condoms to the bystanders as I am dancing down Ponsonby Road. Lilly Loudmouth is singing ‘Raining Men’, and I am living, jumping, kicking, dancing. I have no care for what anyone thinks.

This parade is not one of those things I grew up wanting to go to. I didn’t know that a world like this existed until this very moment. It feels like a dream. I do not want the night to end. I have been longing for a community for so long and finally I have found something, even though it is not the perfect fit for me. I am a nobody in this parade. No one knows who I am. They have never seen me before, and I have never seen them, and with that at the back of my mind, I party harder than I ever have.

I don’t want to go home after that, but I get in the train and wave the night a gloomy goodbye. The parade is over and so is the excitement and joy that came with it. Ma and Pa know by now that I have snuck out and they are coming to pick me up from the train station. I panic. My head is about to split in two. I scratch the paint off my face and try to remove the tattoo. I brush out as much glitter as I can from my hair. I hide everything that could give my parents a clue as to where I have been.

Being part of the Pride parade makes my loneliness worse. I go from being surrounded by my community to sitting alone in my dark room. I stay up all night googling to find the next queer event. I go on Instagram and look up the tags #Prideparade and#BigGayOut to find queer people who went to these events. The next morning is depressing, and my loneliness doesn’t get better as the days go by. I constantly feel like I am missing out on something. But this is my last year at high school and people are telling me life changes once you start university. The closer it gets to the end of the year, the more hopeful I become about my prospects of finding a community.

I feel a sense of cultural homelessness in the queer community. There is nothing in these LGBTQIA+ identities that makes me connect to my Fijian and Indian heritage. I don’t feel at home with these labels. I need something that recognises that I am not only queer, but also an indigenous Fijian and Indian. The gay community is white. Every time I google the word ‘gay’, only white men show up. All default gay porn is made of white men too. The Pride parade is led and dominated by white queer people.

I cannot see myself as a part of the queer community. I am trying to force my identity into the white LGBTQIA+ framework of queerness but doing that is violently stripping me of my culture and breaking down my relationship with my queer ancestors even further. The more I try to fit into the LGBTQIA+ framework of queerness, the weaker my connection with my ancestors becomes.

I feel as though I am being let go by my protectors, and this is frightening for me. For indigenous people, there are repercussions for not knowing who you are and who you come from, and my punishment is being in a constant state of spiritual homelessness. How can I feel so alone while in the presence of such colourful and lively queer people? I feel solidarity with some of the white queer folk, but I can never understand why these queer people are so different from me, as if we are not one people. There is innate sadness and pain with trying to fit in with white queer people.

I start googling about my identity. When I put into ‘Indian queer community’ Google up comes pictures of the most beautiful hijra and chakka community. I immediately connect to them. This is who I am. These are my people, and I am one of them. I feel euphoric joy. I know that if a queer identity specific to Indians exists, there has to be one for Fijians. I smash the buttons on my keyboard. This is how I find out that I am vakasalewalewa.‍

Vakasalewalewa are trans women, nonbinary folk and gender-diverse folk native to Fiji. This also captures gay men. The word vakasalewalewa means ‘to live in the fashion of a woman’, implying that most vakasalewalewa are feminine rather than strictly women. That is not to say that vakasalewalewa cannot be women; they can,but the term itself captures all diverse identities. Hijra or chakka are indigenous to India. The words aravani, aruvani, jogappa and kinnar have also been used to describe the indigenous queer community of India.

Before colonisation and Christianity spread like a disease through the world, indigenous queer people existed amongst indigenous communities without being othered.

Colonialism uprooted indigenous queer identities through criminalisation and punishment. It attempted to erase both vakasalewalewa and hijra. Neo-colonialism is imposing white queer identities onto indigenous peoples. The white queer identities often captured by the LGBTQIA+ acronym leave no room for indigenous queerness. My people are vakasalewalewa and hijra. There is no Vor H in LGBTQIA+. Indigenous identities are rendered invisible by the + that follows the acronym of colonial queer identities. They are shoe-horned into an acronym that privileges colonial queer identities, primarily cisgender gay men.

I reconceptualise my queer identity for myself. Indigenous queerness is precolonial and distinct from colonial, white or Western queerness. It is not the words that I can’t translate. An attempt to translate indigenous queer identities to colonial queerness would cause our identities to lose our culture, value and significance. Indigenous queerness didn’t emerge when the coloniser set foot onto our land. Our existence didn’t begin at colonisation, so why does our identity?

That night in my bedroom, I feel like this is one of my most triumphant moments. But it also feels like one of my most painful moments. I don’t have an understanding of all the political implications of my identity, but I have finally learnt who I am, and I can finally give words to the years of feeling. These two words capture how I have felt throughout so much of my life. I have no one to share it with. I want to share it with someone, but I can’t. I can’t tell Sweta, or Ma and Pa or Aji and Aja. I am on top of the world, but I am lonely. It is excruciating. I pat myself on my back and tell myself, ‘You go champ. This is just the beginning to all the beautiful things you will discover in life.’

‍This is an extract from One of Them by Shaneel Lal, which is out now. $37. Published by Allen & Unwin NZ. Buy a copy online here and here