Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
One of Miraaj’s earliest memories is his mother dropping him off at a daycare center. “I can remember that anxiety, that separation anxiety from my mother, leaving her hand and going into this other house,” says the multimedia artist and event producer.
Born to Sindhi parents who migrated from India to Dubai, Miraaj speaks about how migration — and the separation from family and homeland that comes with it — has been a survival mechanism for his community since the Partition. And so it became for him too, Miraaj’s earliest memory becoming a portent of things to come.
In the nine years since he left his family in Dubai for San Francisco, Miraaj has spearheaded desi drag shows, released and performed his music at multiple venues, directed a music video, and founded a queer South Asian dance party called Dhoom.
Ahead of the tenth and final edition of Dhoom, on June 22 in San Francisco, India Currents caught up with Miraaj at his studio apartment near Civic Center. In a candid interview, he described his journey from Dubai to San Francisco, where he has become a leading figure in the city’s South Asian queer community.
“Nobody around me had the vocabulary to deal with me”
Before he became Miraaj, Dhiraj Korwani was a middle-schooler growing up in a Sindhi enclave in Dubai. Geographically, he was in a different country from his family’s homeland of India, but that wasn’t always apparent to young Dhiraj. His family was part of a tightly-knit community of Sindhi immigrants that strove to retain their Sindhi heritage, even in Dubai. Today, he wears his Sindhiness with pride, but rues the orthodoxy, gossip, and groupthink that were rife in his diasporic community.
“Here I was, a very openly queer-looking kid, meaning I was very expressionistic, I was very animated, I had all kinds of variety in my vocal expression, in speech, in the way I moved and walked. I just felt like nobody around me had the vocabulary to deal with me,” he said.
Amid the isolation, the stage emerged as a rare point of solace. He joined the school choir, and soon that became his identifier. Meanwhile, his quest for understanding himself led him to Western popular culture. When his family got a desktop computer in his early teens, he began surfing the internet and discovered queer representation in music videos on MTV, as well as in shows like Queer as Folk. He also remembers watching the iconic clip of Barbara Walters asking Ricky Martin if he was gay, and the pop superstar refusing to answer. The West was clearly not perfect either, he felt, but it seemed like a place where he could break the shackles that bound him and explore his identity in a deeper, more meaningful way.
Australia, First Taste of San Francisco
He followed in the footsteps of his cousins by enrolling in an undergraduate degree at the Dubai campus of an Australian college. The unwritten family rule was to transfer to the Australian campus in the final year and then return to Dubai to take over the family business. Dhiraj chalked a similar path for himself and flew to Sydney in 2007.
It was at the university’s queer club that Dhiraj first began exploring his identity. He was a fixture in the club’s dinners, game nights, and mixers, and organized South Asian-themed events. He went on trips to Oxford Street — “Sydney’s Castro” — and experienced the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras for the first time.
But Dhiraj was still living a dual life; despite growing more secure about his identity, he stopped short of coming out, fearing that it would stir up a hornet’s nest back home.
“I felt this pressure that word would travel back home, and that’s no good.”
The return to Dubai felt like the end of his odyssey of self-discovery. He started work at his father’s textile business, which was to be his inheritance eventually. “I was totally a yes man for almost five years,” said Miraaj, “before the suffocation would set in around societal expectations.”
In the U.S., Ricky Martin had publicly come out, and in India, Karan Johar’s ambiguous sexuality was becoming a topic of discussion because of his talk show Koffee with Karan. But in the Korwani household, every conversation led to a slippery slope towards a life of conformity revolving around marriage and ‘settling down’.
To defer marriage, Dhiraj enrolled in a master’s program at an American university with campuses in both Dubai and San Francisco. He learned about queerness, the gay rights movement in San Francisco, the HIV AIDS epidemic, and Harvey Milk before he travelled to San Francisco for his final semester.
It was June 2013, and Pride Month was all the more significant because the Supreme Court had struck down two landmark anti-LGBTQ legislations: Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage; and the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA), which held back federal benefits to same-sex spouses of military personnel.
“I saw so many ways of expression, through outfits, through glitter, through joy, all around pride. And I was like, wow!” he recalls.
As queer pride enveloped the city, it had a profound impact on Dhiraj. “I was coming here with the sense of… I’m gonna give it my 100%, not to pretend,” he recalls. “I dated, I held hands with a boy for the first time, walked down Pier 39, hand in hand. That was such a dream!”
But his family persisted with the plan for marriage and running the family business. Dhiraj completed his semester and went back to Dubai, unsure if he would ever return.
“As the song goes, I left my heart in San Francisco, and I really, really did.”
Coming Out and Return to San Francisco
Back in Dubai, Dhiraj told his parents that the family business was not for him and found a job in healthcare marketing, but the pressure to marry remained. He had come out to his mother, but not his father. One day, Dhiraj sat his father down, and showed him an episode of the Indian talk show Satyamev Jayate, in which actor Aamir Khan interviewed experts to tackle the stigma surrounding alternative sexualities.
“At the end of that episode, I said, ‘Dad, this is the reason why I’m not meant to marry a girl. It’s just not gonna happen’,” he recalls. “I was surprised by my own father’s compassion, and he let go of his expectations of his own son and the life that he had imagined.”
He then revealed to his parents that his employer had offered him a job in San Francisco and that he wanted to move there. His parents agreed — “we just want you to be happy” — even though it took months for his father to come to terms with his son’s reality.
With his life packed into two suitcases, Dhiraj took a plane to San Francisco. His parents believed their son had a stable job lined up, and would return home to visit them. In reality, there was no job; Dhiraj was traveling on a visitor visa with the intention to naturalize in the United States. And that was not at all a straightforward path.
“I was just taking a lottery gamble on myself and just arriving here with no real plans.”
The Cosmic Dancer
Dhiraj rented a room in the Duboce Triangle neighborhood north of the Castro and started volunteering at a hospice care facility, while working out his place in a new country.
San Francisco had offered him a new lease on life, but what was he going to make of it?
“I was trying to go internal and assess, what does the inner child want? And the answer was always ringing true around performance arts.”
He was working a job in healthcare marketing, and in 2018, two years after his arrival, he received his green card, marking a watershed moment in his path towards naturalization. He had a secure future and financial bandwidth for his creative pursuits.
Spirituality played its part too: “Now that I was doing away with the shame of being queer and gay and living my truth here, I started holding at the feminine part of the thread. I started looking at Nataraja, which is an avatar of Shiva, fused with Shakti, championing the feminine within. So from that modality of Shiva and Shakti, I found myself a reference point in my own culture and religion. I will follow Shiva’s path. I will be like the Cosmic Dancer.”
Desi Drag, Dhoom, and Music
In 2018, an established drag artist approached Dhiraj and a couple of his South Asian friends to be one of their backup dancers.
“We really wanted to fight for an equal footing to be seen as equally talented or artistic as Indians in the queer scene,” he said of the cultural moment in the city’s queer community. “That’s when things kind of unlocked for us.”
When the pandemic threw a wrench in the works, Dhiraj went back to writing songs, composing music, and producing tracks with other queer collaborators. He also set up a space in his studio apartment to practice choreography. When venues in the Castro opened for parties after the pandemic, Dhiraj knocked on their doors and pitched a South Asian drag show. The response was overwhelmingly positive. It was around then that he adopted the name ‘Miraaj’ as his on-stage persona, since it rhymed with the way Americans pronounced his real name.
“I did all kinds of numbers: Bollywood, some disco, some electronic, but it was always desi stuff,” said Miraaj. “What I was trying to do with my focus on Nataraja was to process out any embarrassment, shame, all of those emotions, out of myself by fully leaning into drag and presenting as feminine as possible, and being celebrated for that, being cheered on for that.”
Not one to be held down to one art form, the year 2023 saw Miraaj moved away from drag towards music, dance, and event production. He founded Dhoom, a South Asian Queer dance party, drawing crowds of up to 400 people at each of its four editions that year. The parties became a launchpad to release and perform the songs he had produced during the pandemic. His work earned him a residency at the ODC Dance Center as part of the 2023 Queer and BIPOC Space Residency Initiative. Performances at iconic venues like the Midway, Oasis Cabaret & Nightclub, the Brick and Mortar Music Hall, and the Palace of Fine Arts followed, rounding out a prolific year in which Miraaj had established himself as one of the city’s most prominent South Asian queer performers in San Francisco.
Since then, Miraaj has split his time between San Francisco — where he organized five more editions of Dhoom — and Los Angeles, where he recorded his first album. On June 22, he will stage the tenth and final edition of Dhoom, and is already working on his next project – a performative movement inspired by Sufi dervishes set to live South Asian instrumental music.
He also plans to roll out songs from his album this summer — the first song, titled Secret, is already out. Miraaj is all set to perform it at the Civic Center on June 28 as part of the Pride celebrations. “It’s a bit of an artistic reply to any Indian questioning relative or person back home,” he said about the song. “I don’t want anybody to keep me a secret. I don’t want to feel like a secret. I don’t want to be a secret. And there’s nothing about me that’s worth keeping secret.”
Twelve years since his first San Francisco pride experience, Dhiraj — a young, shy Sindhi man conflicted about his queer identity — has become Miraaj, a driving force behind the city’s queer nightlife scene. He’s a flag bearer of South Asian pride, and he hopes that his story — and his music — will empower others like him.
“I didn’t have a reference point. I did not see myself mirrored in anything or anyone around me,” he said. “I don’t want another Sindhi kid in Dubai or wherever else to feel like there’s no reference point for them.”
Dhoom’s tenth edition will take place at Public Works in the Mission District at 3 pm. Proceeds from the event will go towards the Center for Immigrant Protection projects including Parivar Bay Area and the LGBT Asylum Project. Book your tickets here.