In 'Funny Boy,' A Young Sri Lankan Gay Man Comes Of Age As Ethnic Tensions Explode

In the opening pages of the 1994 Canadian novel Funny Boy, a young Sri Lankan boy named Arjie refuses to play cricket with the boys as his father insists. He'd rather bedazzle in bridal reds and join the girls' make-believe wedding.

Novelist Shyam Selvadurai's gay coming of age novel became a critical and commercial sensation in Canada when it was first published, enduring as a pioneering story of queerness, politics, and South Asian history. As the new film adaptation opens with the sound of the ocean — establishing the lush seafront tropical landscape of Sri Lanka — a group of girls run across the screen, with Arjie's veil billowing in the wind, gender non-conforming and proudly leading the way.

Funny Boy is directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Deepa Mehta, who has previously explored what it means to be an outsider in South Asian culture in a trilogy of acclaimed and controversial historical dramas: Fire, Earth and Water. Like author Shyam Selvadurai, Mehta is also an immigrant to Canada and she says it was Selvadurai's interwoven narrative of being both a migrant and a queer outsider in his own culture that made it such a powerfully layered story of selfhood.