Pakistani-American poet and activist Ifti Nasim was BOTD in 1946. Born in Lyallpur in British-controlled India, the son of a local newspaper owner, he grew up in the violent early days of the creation of the state of Pakistan. When he was 16, he was shot in the leg by a soldier after reading a poem protesting the imposition of martial law. Aware of his attraction to men and under pressure from his family to marry a woman, he emigrated to the United States when he was 21. Arriving in New York City, where he quickly discovered the joys of anonymous gay sex at the YMCA, he moved to Detroit, Michigan to study at Wayne University. He eventually settled in Chicago, working as a car salesman and reputedly once selling a Mercedes to Oprah Winfrey. (When Winfrey asked how big the car engine was, Nasim claimed to have replied “Are you going to sleep with it?”). Embracing the hedonism of Chicago’s gay scene, he moonlighted as a go-go dancer at a gay bar, eventually forming a relationship with the club’s owner Eddie Dugan. In 1986, he co-founded Sangat, one of the first South Asian LGBTQ organisations in the United States. He also served as president of the South Asian Performing Arts Council of America, hosted a radio talk show and wrote columns for Weekly Pakistan News. His 1994 poetry collection Narman (from the Persian word for “hermaphrodite”), created instant controversy in Pakistan and was distributed underground. Thought to be the first modern expression of gay desire in the Urdu language, it became an important text for Pakistani LGBTQ communities in Pakistan and the United States. In 1996, Nasim was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. He produced two further volumes of poetry: Myrmecophile, published in 2000, and his 2005 collection Abdoz, containing his most frequently-quoted line, “I feel my life was spent in a submarine / The journey has ended; I saw nothing.” Nasim died of a heart attack in 2011, aged 64.