Our Guide to Pride 2023 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️

At the NYC Pride march, a queer person wearing a trans flag holding up a sign that reads, “Respect your roots. Trans women of color rioted for your right to Pride!”

This Pride month, there are so many ways to celebrate our LGBTQ+ community and for allies to show meaningful solidarity.

We've put together a guide to our favorite organizations, pop-ups & local queer-owned businesses you can support all year long!

STAND UP FOR QUEER & TRANS JUSTICE
Help organizations that protect queer and trans people stay running by donating extra funds, volunteering your time, and advocating to your local lawmakers on issues that matter. 

This year, we have seen a staggering number of violent anti-trans and anti-queer legislative bills in states across the U.S. that ban trans existence in public, gender affirming healthcare, LGBTQ history, and creative queer expression. Be part of the change and help ensure that queer and trans kids grow up to be adults and can live in safety.

⚖️ Sylvia Rivera Law Project 
SRLP is a collective organization that provides free legal services to meet survival needs and build community power with transgender people who are low-income, people of color, and immigrants.

🩺 Callen-Lorde Community Health Center
Callen-Lorde provides healthcare services, education and wellness to New York’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities regardless of ability to pay.

🍽️ Queer Food Foundation
QFF is a collective-run resource and platform for queer folks in food and beverage. Their mutual aid fund provides support for Black Queer and Trans folks facing food insecurity.  

🥕 Love Wins Food Pantry
Love Wins provides LGBTQ and gender non-conforming people & families access to healthy vegetables and non-perishable food.

SHOW SUPPORT ALL YEAR

Pride month is in June, but true allyship happens during the other eleven months of the year. Attend a local Pride march, patronize your neighborhood queer vendors, and shop from queer-owned small businesses (like ours!) year round.

Here are just a few of our favorites in NYC, but look up queer events and LGBTQ+ creators closest to you to show your patronage and to get involved!

🎪 Hester Street Fair Pride Market
We will be at this pop-up market of all queer-vendors serving TAGMO fare featuring Diaspora Co. spices. Join us Saturday, June 24th from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM at The Seaport, 89 South Street in Manhattan.

🥣 Queer Soup Night
QSN is a queer-run pop-up with chapters across the U.S. where LGBTQ+ folks and allies can share food and raise funds to strengthen grassroots social justice movements. 

🗺️ Diaspora Co.
Diaspora Co. is a queer South Asian-run spice company that sources South Asia's freshest, heirloom, and single-origin spices directly from farmers. 

🌶️ Shaquanda Will Feed You
Shaquanda's is a queer Black-owned small business making drag-themed small-batch hot sauces. Each flavor uses high quality chili pepper varietals and relies on the bounty of mother nature, with less sugar and salt than commercial sauces.

🌯 Ursula Brooklyn
Ursula is a queer-run New Mexican inspired cafe & bakery in Brooklyn that centers activism in the hospitality industry and the queer food community.

Making Mithai a Household Name

This time of year, desis everywhere from Jaipur to Jackson Heights head to their local mithaiwala to stock up on boxes of mithai that will be given as Diwali gifts, or unboxed as dessert for the holiday’s weeklong festivities. Our own mithaiwali, chef Surbhi, is hard at work with our team grinding nuts into powder, filling molds, and dusting mithai with sparkling dust. 

Mithai, the Hindi word for sweets, represents a diverse array of confections, each with their own regional distinctions and culinary techniques that date back thousands of years.

Mithai are given alongside prayers to the gods, gifts at weddings, births and festivals, and are a daily snack with tea time. They are distinctly South Asian but have evolved with the spice trade, colonization and global trade, with influences from Persian halva to European pastries, and even share traits with deep-fried fair food across the Midwest — fried dough unites us all. Yet, outside of communities on the Indian subcontinent and here in the diaspora, many of our most beloved South Asian sweets are still fairly uncommon.

In recent decades, food from the Indian subcontinent has permeated the U.S. culinary landscape beyond chana masala and butter chicken. A taste for regional South Asian cuisine is growing, and along with it, understanding of its evolution as it crosses over into the diaspora. But among the pillars of our expansive cuisine, sweets are still largely unfamiliar to non-South Asians. 

Everyone knows what Turkish delights and petit fours are — why not mithai?

That moment when you bite into a fudgy Pistachio Burfi or crack the thin shell of a Besan Ladoo is unrivaled, and the floral fragrance of kheer sends us down deep portals of childhood memory. We want everyone to experience mithai. By eating our food, you can better understand South Asian culture’s particular language of love and ongoing rebirth. 

The Indian subcontinent is overdue for recognition of its confectionery legacy. Sugarcane has been a staple crop on the Indian subcontinent for millennia, and the Indus Valley civilization invented the process by which sugar is refined more than 8,000 years ago. 

“Mithai comes from mithas, meaning ‘sweet'. The root of ‘sugar’ is from the Sanskrit word sharkara, and even ‘candy’ (originally khanda) is derived from this ancient dialect. Just as French dessert and Italian dolce house a myriad of tidbits laden with sucrose and fat, so too does the wonderous world of mithai,” writes Deepi Aluwalia. 

Composed of base ingredients like toasted nuts, curdled milk solids and fried dough, mithai are versatile with a wide range of textural and aromatic characteristics. 

Our mithai resemble bite-size pieces of art thanks to chef Surbhi’s eye for detail and influence from her father, who is an abstract artist.

Each piece is hand-decorated in various glittering jewel-tones with dried flower petals, candied ginger, whole nuts or seeds. They are packaged in colorful gift boxes that we design in-house (shout out to Lynn!), and are made to be gifted. 

The cost of each box reflects the care that went into it, from the quality of ingredients to the labor of our staff. We value every component of the process and don’t cut corners, making each piece all the more precious. 

Sugary, dairy-laden sweets can be off limits for some people, so we cater to dietary needs like vegan, gluten-free and nut-free, and we don’t use preservatives. We use less sugar than traditional mithai shops, allowing the delicate balance of our ingredient pairings to shine: Toasted coconut, pecan flour, black pepper. Carrots, almonds, calendula petals. Moong dal, saffron, pistachios, and more. 

This year, we are ringing in the Diwali season with six new gift boxes including our Desi Collection of nostalgic flavors, an expanded Vegan Collection, and the star of the show, the Diwali Collection with sixteen flavors. Our handmade collections feature classic mithai flavors as well as unconventional creations like Lavender Burfi and Salted Pecan Burfi, and veganized favorites like Kaju Katli and Badam Narangi. 

Okay, now we’re hungry. 

We hope you’re inspired to share mithai this Diwali — whether you buy it from our small business or make it at home with your loved ones — and learn more about the history of this ancient confectionery. 

Happy Diwali!

Rakhi is for Everyone

An open box of TAGMO’s Rakhi Collection filled with handmade mithai.

WHAT IS RAKHI

Rakhi (Raksha Bandhan) is a Hindu ceremony that celebrates the bond between siblings and chosen kin, with a lot of street food, mithai, and music. Rakhi is like an ancient take on the modern BFF bracelets from childhood.

Traditionally, sisters give their brothers ornate bracelets that symbolize protection the brothers vow to give their sisters. But today, Rakhi is evolving to include everyone, especially trans and nonbinary people, and is a great opportunity to unpack outdated ideas of gender and family.

A hand-painted Rakhi bracelet

SWEET TIES OF LOVE

It's fitting that Rakhi falls during Leo season, because this festival represents bold love + fierce protection.

Rakhi bracelets are a signature part of the gift giving. Versatile and beautiful, our Rakhi wooden pendants are fixed onto ribbons to wear as jewelry around your wrist, a bookmark in your summer novel, or hang from your rearview mirror for good luck while driving.

Inspired by East Indian Madhubani folk art, our Rakhis are made by students at Ahan Foundation, a nonprofit that provides occupational therapy for the special needs community of Jaipur. Your purchase supports their important work!

Surbhi (right) and her brother Saurabh (left).

CELEBRATING INTERDEPENDENCE

Surbhi grew up celebrating Rakhi with her younger brother, Saurabh. Despite the seven year age gap between them, Surbhi and Saurabh have always been close siblings who looked out for each other.

When Saurabh was a small child, Surbhi visited him at daycare every day after school to watch him play. As he got older, Saurabh returned the sibling kindness by saving his treats like instant Maggie noodles to share with Surbhi. Knowing how much she loves to sing along to the radio in the morning, Saurabh would take the family's boom box to the balcony with the volume turned all the way up so Surbhi could listen to music while she walked to the bus stop.

That’s the spirit of Rakhi — vowing to show up for the people you love, and to be there for them when they need you. Regardless of gender, we all experience moments of vulnerability and need support from each other. This is a sentiment that goes beyond biological siblings and includes cousins, friends, intergenerational bonds, and romantic partners.

Many of our holidays and festivals have troubled origins. They come from a time when notions of gender, sexuality and one’s role in society were a lot different than the possibilities we have today. We approach old festivals with new ideas and playfulness, expanding them to be open and loving for everyone. Happy Rakhi!

Taking Pride in Mithai

An open box of TAGMO’s Pride Collection filled with multi-hued mithai.

The strength of mithai is in its versatility. Able to carry a world of flavors, colors, textures and aromas, these small Indian confections are the perfect vehicles for culinary experimentation. It’s a queer confectioner’s playground.

There are traditional tried and true flavors you can find in any South Asian sweets shop that promise nostalgia and reliable flavor profiles in every bite, from Mumbai to Kolkata, deep in Jackson Heights, Queens to at our own mithai shop in Manhattan’s Financial District.

We love our Besan Ladoos and Pistachio Burfis as much as the next desi, but we yearn to play in the kitchen, create new experiences through food that showcase who we are as queers not just where we come from.

Sometimes we choose the flavor and sometimes the flavor chooses us. Take the newest addition to our 2022 Pride Collection: Blueberry Lemon Curd Burfi, a short king ready for a zesty summer fling, made with dried blueberries and tart lemon curd folded into a sweet Burfi base. It called to us loud and clear.

Mithai purists might call ours inauthentic, but what is culture if not constantly evolving expressions of oneself that’s harkening back to their origins while creatively innovating into the future — and hopefully having some fun along the way.

Blueberry Lemon Curd Burfi

NO BURFI BINARIES

Our new mithai is queer in its own right, not just because it is handmade by well-paid queer people. Blueberry Lemon Curd Burfi shares 3 out of the 4 colors of the nonbinary flag: yellow, white, purple and black, which together represent gender fluidity outside of the male/female binary.

Gender fluidity is an expression of being alive, of vibrance, change and movement — something that ancient South Asian culture made space for prior to British colonization, which imposed its rigid Western cishetero gender ideologies onto colonial subjects, instituting laws that banned centuries-old traditions that honored gender and sexual diversity in India.

Trans and gender fluid people were certainly treated differently than cis people prior to colonization (and there was certainly pre-existing gender oppression of all women and girls), but they were not violently erased in the way they are being threatened today. South Asian culture recognized the gender expansiveness of trans, nonbinary and intersex people, including them in folklore, history and acknowledging their religious roles in society that exist today.

Anjali Gopalan and Gopi Shankar Madurai inaugurating Asia's first Genderqueer Pride Parade at Madurai with a rainbow and genderqueer flag.

PRIDE ISN’T FOR SALE

For us, Pride and queerness is so much more than rainbows, pronouns and a march co-opted by multinational corporations, banks and cops. Pride is about fighting back against state oppression while celebrating queerness in all of its many shades and flavors. It’s about creating spaces where people can be free from harm, harassment and discrimination, where they can feel safe to come alive into their fullness.

As a queer South Asian owned business in New York City, we understand the tension of showcasing our culture and identities while existing under capitalism, selling products that are on the higher end because we want to pay our workers well, buy high quality products and keep the lights glowing in our storefront.

Can a burfi solve structural oppression of gender nonconformity? Certainly not, but it’s a small way we use food to celebrate who we are, and to point to more meaningful ways of pushing the boundaries that have been set for us, whether it’s challenging the ingredients of mithai or expanding what a person’s gender expression can be.

We want to grow and build not just as a company but as a community where people’s lives matter more than profit and where everyone can experience abundant queer joy. Happy Pride!