FAMILY JEWEL Queen Harish arrives from India to perform at Color Me Queer.

Every Pride party provides an escape from one’s own set of baggage—estrangement from parents, a lifetime of school bullying, homophobia at work—that gets joyously overthrown for at least a night each year. Color Me Queer, an annual blowout from Sholay Productions, is no exception. But it has special resonance with queers from South Asian backgrounds.

“For a lot of us—Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis—sexuality was hardly discussed while we were growing up,” explains copromoter and DJ Ashu Rai, who was born in Punjab and grew up in northern California. “It’s a very family-oriented culture, so it’s a real struggle to come out. You think you’re one of very few out there. After moving to New York, I discovered there were more queer South Asians out there— which was very empowering for all of us.”

Sholay’s long-running monthly event, Desilicious—queer-Bollywood bashes that celebrate South Asian pop culture—is a highly festive marriage of old-world traditions and cutting-edge sexual expression. For the similarly themed Color Me Queer event, on Sunday 29, now in its 13th year, the Sholay Productions promoters—Rai, Pakistani-born and Connecticut-raised Atif Toor and Mumbai-born-and-raised Rajesh Parwatkar—are mixing it up by joining forces with the Audre Lorde Project (ALP), a nonprofit for people of color, and the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (SALGA).

“We wanted to work with other promoters to bring in a more diverse crowd,” Rai explains, “and to have a people-of-color presence in Pride, which we think is important and hasn’t existed for years in the mainstream—like the Pier Dance—which is very white.” There’s a huge hunger for more diverse events, she adds—a fact that’s proven by the crowds of about 1,200 that they’ve gotten at past Color Me Queer parties, held for years at the now-defunct Frying Pan. This year will feature Bollywood-bhangra music from Rai, hip-hop and soul from DJ Rashan and a performance from Queen Harish, an Indian drag queen who will be traveling here from Rajasthan.

The newest element of the event will be its Sunday tea-dance time, right after the march, instead of its usual Saturday-night slot. “The previous years’ parties held on Saturdays left everybody so wiped out on Sunday morning, it was taking a toll on the attendance at the march!” says Toor, who was among the organizers of the very first Color Me Queer party, held at the now-closed Club Demerara. Back then, he recalls, “we felt the time was ripe to organize an event that celebrated New York’s LGBT people-of-color activist scene.”

Rai feels that it’s still the right time—especially in a city where the queer nightlife scene is so fractured, both by gender and race. “A lot of people want a specific style of music and are not willing to experiment—and we’re getting that at our parties now, too,” she says, explaining that some Desilicious regulars get bent out of shape when she tosses on Madonna, complaining that they want Bollywood. Still, she says, they’re seeing the numbers of non–South Asians at their parties increase. “I’d like to mix it up even more,” she adds. “I’d like 50-50 men-women, and more non-South Asians. That’s my ideal.”

Color Me Queer is Sun 29 at the Highline Ballroom.