The saying goes that Nepal is 'a garden of four castes and thirty six sub caste'… Caste is one classification, gender is another classification.
– A participant in one of Creative Nepal's focus-group discussions.
Pride Climbing Higher began through the efforts of Chad Frisbie, a creative writing instructor in New York. He launched a kickstarter campaign to travel to Nepal and work with people who identified variously across the gender and sexuality spectrum, and were affiliated with Nepal's Blue Diamond Society (BDS), an organisation that works for the rights of sexual minorities in the country. The campaign was looking to share the stories of the people Frisbie worked with – in whatever way 'story' was interpreted by them. After several months of working with each author, the resulting work became an anthology entitled Pride Climbing Higher – a phrase one of the authors used to describe his own feelings of acceptance of his identity as a gay man.
It was in the duration of this project that we met and combined our efforts to form something called Creative Nepal, a platform for creative expression and discussion of issues surrounding sexuality and gender in Nepal. Something that struck Frisbie and me was that legislative reforms often lag behind public opinion. For instance, the US Supreme Court's ruling in favour of gay marriage in June 2015 occurred only after there was a clear majority in support of equal rights for same-sex couples.