Manvendra Singh Gohil

Growing up in a palace might sound like a fairytale, but it wasn’t all roses for Manvendra Singh Gohil. Today, he’s known as India’s gay prince, but it’s not the title he was born with – that would be the heir to the Maharaja of Raipipla, one of India’s princely states. The trappings of royalty, the pressure of public attention, and his traditional family all combined to make coming out an immense challenge for Manvendra, one that he overcame to live authentically.
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In his youth, Manvendra tried to suppress his attraction towards men. He even married a woman his family chose, but he and his ex-wife divorced only a year later: “I realised I had done something very wrong. Now two people were suffering instead of one,” he reflects. After his divorce, he learned to accept his homosexuality, but continued to hide it from his family, leading what he described as a “double-standard life”. It clearly took a strain on him – he suffered a nervous breakdown, after which his sexual orientation was revealed to his family. Worried about what this would mean for the royal family’s public image, his parents urged him to keep his sexuality a secret.
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But Manvendra was ready to live authentically. He came out publicly in an Indian newspaper, and shot to international fame when he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show as the world’s first gay prince. But while he was celebrated in the west, he was rejected back home – locals in his hometown burned effigies of him, and his mother even disowned him. Fortunately, Manvendra found unexpected support amongst the elder generation: his grandmother told him that she was happy for him, and the senior citizens’ association of Raipipla wrote a letter congratulating him for living truthfully.
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Today, Manvendra is an outspoken activist on LGBTQ rights in India. He runs the LGBTQ charity Lakshya Trust, and turned part of his palace into a home for vulnerable LGBTQ people who have been disowned by their family and left without social support. Happily, he also found love: he has been married to his American-born husband since 2013. Manvendra continues to fight for the equality and rights of LGBTQ people in India, wearing the crown of “the world’s first gay prince” with pride.