A female bank employee finds herself irresistibly drawn to a woman who sings jazz at a pub in Mumbai. A closeted student confesses to her best friend that she’s finally found someone she likes — another girl on their campus in Jaipur. Two women, a gym trainer and a film star, walk down the aisle in Udaipur in the presence of friends. A married woman begins a clandestine affair with her late colleague’s widow in Delhi. A queer woman and non-binary person seek acceptance from their families.

These storylines from recent films (Sheer Qorma) and web shows (Bombay Begums, Mismatched, Four More Shots Please! and The Married Woman) show how much screen portrayals of queer women have evolved, reflecting not just the hurdles of same-sex relationships but also the fun, the romance and heck, even the ordinariness of it all. Not surprising since many of them have LGBTQ writers and filmmakers at the helm.

Director Faraz Arif Ansari, whose latest film Sheer Qorma stars Swara Bhasker and Divya Dutta as a couple, recalls being asked why they chose to make a film about queer men and not women during a screening of their debut Sisak. “It got me thinking ‘Where are the queer women?” says Ansari, who is non-binary. Ansari adds that the film hopes “to open a deeper dialogue about love and acceptance, especially in South Asian communities across the world”.

Shohini Ghosh, media professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, says it’s just the beginning and as the idea of same-sex love becomes more acceptable in society, queer sexuality will become more visible on screen. “I think the exciting process has begun and will continue,” she says, giving the example of the 2019 queer romance Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga. “When the star body, in this case Sonam Kapoor’s, embraces queer sexuality it becomes a powerful statement in itself,” she says. “It is a delight to see a whole new generation of women, like Bani J and Lisa Ray for example, who are comfortable and uninhibited about playing queer roles.”

So why has it taken so long, though there were subtle hints at lesbian love in Dedh Ishqiya? After all, it’s been 25 years since Fire introduced a lesbian love story to mainstream audiences for the first time in 1996. Writer Apurva Asrani, who has worked on Aligarh and Made In Heaven which had queer men in lead roles, says that it simply boils down to the fact that the dominant voice continues to be that of men. “Women’s voices are muffled in our society, so even within the LGBTQ scene and pride marches, the representation for women is lesser than that of men,” he says. “Maybe that’s why we haven’t had many stories out there.”

Ansari says that when they reached out to producers for Sheer Qorma, they were told to change the lead characters of the queer woman and non-binary individual to men. “I was even told to cast ‘hot, muscular, fair men’ and I would have the required investment,” they say. “Misogyny is real and runs deeper than you and I can imagine.”

But some of that’s changing, and Ghosh credits the blossoming of queer romance to the hard work of activists. “In the early 1990s, none of us would have guessed that queer sexuality would find such wide acceptance. To a very great extent the activism of the LGBTQI community has been responsible for this.”

Gazal Dhaliwal, a trans woman who wrote Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga and Mismatched, says the reading down of section 377 in 2018 has given creators more freedom. “Earlier, there was an inhibition because the very act of loving someone from the same sex was a crime but that is not there anymore. I see more people coming out and owning their identities so there are more stories both on and off screen.”

There has also been a rise in the number of queer women like Dhaliwal in the television and film industries. Dhaliwal says it is important to give space to queer creators to tell their stories, and create nuanced characters rather than caricatures. For instance, while adapting a rom-com novel into the Netflix series Mismatched, she consciously stayed away from clichés. “We wanted to flip the cliche of the female lead’s gay male best friend by having a male protagonist with a female gay best friend,” she says. “She’s also a regular girl-next-door who falls in love with a character who isn’t gay.”

Asrani feels it’s important to have queer creators if you want to tell a story sensitively. “Otherwise it is like mansplaining,” says Asrani, adding that “the Hindi film industry is one of the gayest and also very closeted film industries and to find queer writers and filmmakers is actually very easy.”

Sulagna Chatterjee, 24, is a queer screenwriter who has penned slice-of-life same-sex romances such as Firsts on YouTube and the forthcoming short film Feels Like Ishq on Netflix. “I wanted to tell love stories that our community can relate to,” she says. “Growing up, I barely had such content. There were stories of discrimination, pain and the hard side of accepting our sexuality but we deserve to have our sappy romances to watch with our partners too.”

Firsts follows the relationship of a young lesbian couple who move in together soon after they start dating, and explores the themes of coming out and being in a relationship for the first time. “Many queer women said it was an inside joke, since we are known to jump into relationships,” she says. Feels Like Ishq is also about navigating romance and youth. “Often sexuality is used as a plot point to drive the story, but queer people have lives that are not just defined by their sexuality,” she says.

However, filmmaker Onir, whose next film We Are celebrates gay, lesbian, trans and bisexual love stories, feels that on-screen representation still amounts to tokenism “which keeps a heteronormative audience comfortable”. Ansari agrees. “The whole increase in queer content has not really been about representation but about cishet people (a heterosexual person who identifies as the gender they were born with) using their inauthentic, tokenism to tell queer narratives.” Ansari says it’s time to put the spotlight on queer makers. “Let us tell our stories. Like I keep saying, move, cis!”

Chatterjee says even LGBTQ stories need to go a step further. “We need to talk about gender fluidity, asexuality, trans lives. Our spectrum shouldn’t be about just men loving men and women loving women.”