My name is Yagnaram Ramanuja Dasan but I also go by Ricky. Yagnaram is my religious name. I am 23, Puerto Rican and I grew up in the Olney section of Philadelphia. I also spent a lot of time in the Fairmount section with my grandmother. So I got to experience two very different neighborhoods at the same time.
Louie: What high school did you go to?
Yagnaram: I went to an all-boys Catholic School.
Louie: Oh.
Yagnaram: I grew up as a very devout child so I really didn’t mind getting religion in school and I liked it. It was really only until high school when I was really getting a sense of my identity and who I was as queer person, All of that really kinda started to weigh down on me. Especially towards the latter end of high school because I was “outed” and I was experiencing bullying and harassment like all the time, so it was a really hard experience.
Louie: What was the response you experienced at school?
Yagnaram: I had a mixed bag of reactions. There were some teachers who supported me but they had to be really, really be hush hush about it and they couldn’t openly support me. Whereas other teachers were very much like “this is a sin and you have to stop.” I had some friends were also gay and who supported me and had my back whenever they saw me getting harassed but it was a really small group of kids and we had to find community in that kind of hostile place. We called ourselves the “secret society.” There were about 5 other boys and when we would down the halls, we’d look out for each other
Louie: How do you discover Hinduism?
Yagnaram: So when I coming out, I was also starting to search for a place spiritually because I really started to feel at odds with the (catholic) church. And eventually in high school I became a Hindu because I so much inspired by Hinduism. It just really started to speak to me and it was also really queer affirming. That was also resonating with me. It was something my parents were opposed to on both fronts because it was like “You’re gay and you got this weird religion thing going. What is that?”
Louie: Has that changed?
Yagnaram: As time has gone on, they have become more accepting of my faith than they are about my sexuality, which is really, really weird for me. I am not entirely sure why that is. But they are far more comfortable asking me questions about my faith than they are about meeting a guy that I am dating. That is not even a possibility for them but they’ll ask me about what I believe and what I do when I go to worship.
Interviewed & Photographed by: Louie A. Ortiz-Fonseca
