I had been trying to avoid it for hours last night but couldn't escape it any longer, as it was all over social media. "Xulhaz Mannan, 35, the editor at Bangladesh's first LGBT magazine Roopbaan, along with Tonoy Mahbub, a fellow activist, was hacked to death." Many news reports read like this and I was left wondering on how to process that piece of information. I had come to believe that in this digital age, only things related to the internet could be hacked; not people. I went back to the countless Facebook conversations where Xulhaz and I had talked about our mutual struggles, discussing the intersections within our work while envisioning a transnational South Asian Queer solidarity.
When Roopbaan was launched back in 2014 under Xulhaz's co-editorship, the most striking thing for me was the fact that it was a Bengali language magazine printed into hard copies. The message was clear--instead of limiting it to a virtual English-centric socially privileged group, the magazine aimed to reach the average literate Bengali-speaking person with a message of diversity, tolerance and acceptance. It was no less than a heroic attempt, as it not only increased the visibility but also vulnerability, especially in a society where the state's inability to control Islamist militant groups had already created a dangerous nexus against local human rights defenders. But all this didn't deter him and his team--they continued to arrange social support group meetings, workshops, talks, trainings and a rainbow rally to claim the space denied to individuals who don't subscribe their lives and identities to the hetero-normative rules of the world. Many a time, his unbridled zeal for doing what he believed in caused disagreements with fellow activists and groups, but Xulhaz still went ahead with the work. He was not one to hide.
