A Beautiful Mind

Kashish Chopra’s parents could not be more proud of her college studies, beauty pageant win, or musical talent. It’s her homosexuality that they don’t understand.
By Scott Lajoie | March 14, 2004
www.boston.com [Click here to read the article]

Of all places, it was on a stage at a Ramada hotel in Edison, New Jersey, surrounded by dozens of other beautiful young women she barely knew, all of them competing for the title of Miss India USA, where Kashish Chopra found the acceptance she has never been able to get from her own parents. Attired in a flowing grape-and-white satin gown, she played classical Indian music, flashed her perfect smile, and walked away as Miss Congeniality.

Pageants can get pretty stressful,” Lisa Mehta, Miss Illinois, said after last August’s pageant, “and she was so supportive of all of us.” Chopra, a senior at Boston’s Suffolk University, has been openly gay since the eighth grade, and she was out to all of her fellow contestants at the pageant, so her homosexuality hardly registered a blip there. But it was when she gave an interview that appeared on a website called www.AfterEllen.com that the flood of e-mails began, most of them from women in such far-flung places as Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. They wrote in desperation, complete strangers, detailing their own struggles to find an identity in their homeland. In Chopra, they see hope in a young woman who has challenged an entire culture’s traditional mores. In her own small way, she is forcing her people to examine whether the time has come for old values to give way to modern culture. This is why she has spent hours answering those e-mails, because she knows that coming out isn’t easy. Especially when you’re Indian.
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