“I want to change your last name to make it sound whiter,” Sonali “Alyy” Patel remembers her white girlfriend saying to her while they were spending a quiet evening at home. Patel felt a wave of grief wash over her. “I [have] to give up my South Asian-ness in order to be in a queer relationship,” she remembers thinking.

Patel and her girlfriend had been dating for some time and were sketching out a future together, even starting sentences with, “When we get married.” But as they built a foundation, she continued to feel marginalized because of her Indo-African heritage.

“I remember I was in [my girlfriend’s] household, and her father made a comment that was racist to brown people,” Patel told Uncloseted Media. When her girlfriend called him out, Patel remembers him responding by saying, “You were racist before you started dating a brown girl.”

Patel, a 29-year-old researcher and LGBTQ activist living in Vancouver, Canada, says comments from girlfriends and society kept popping up. So she began investigating them academically and went on to create the Queer South Asian Women’s Network.