Pride Month Exclusive: Divesh Tolani and Atulan Purohit Share Their Journey and Impact on YouTube

Divesh Tolani and Atulan Purohit are remarkable YouTube creators whose journey and impact resonated with audiences worldwide. As an openly gay couple, they have fearlessly shared their experiences, insights, and adventures on their channel, Honey.Imm.Home. With their unique blend of authenticity, Divesh and Atulan have built a supportive community and become influential voices in promoting inclusivity and spreading awareness.

In this interview, they candidly discuss their Pride Month experiences, the power of YouTube as a platform for change, and the challenges they have faced along the way. 

How did you celebrate Pride Month this year?

This year we've taken things slow—no 'special-special' content for pride month. We are just giving ourselves time to process all the changes occurring during this time of our lives and ease into it with the thought of an abundance of time and gratefulness. We have also tried to take part in some LGBT get-togethers this year. We're both very introverted and feel the need to be a certain way around people from the LGBTQIA+ community. But, we've let go of that uncomfortable feeling and just given ourselves time to attend these events and meet like-minded people from the community without fearing being different or judged.

How do you believe YouTube can be a powerful platform for spreading awareness and promoting inclusivity during Pride Month?

To date, we've seen maximum awareness through YouTube. The first few of our videos were all about talking about our life experiences as two gay boys, as a couple & individuals both, and we feel like many people took inspiration/advice from those personal experiences we've faced. We've forever wanted to use the platform to make a long-format video series for pride month, given that it's one of the few platforms with an audience with the capacity for longer videos. 

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A post shared by Atulan🤍Divesh | Travel + Lifestyle 👨🏻‍❤️‍💋‍👨🏽 (@honey.imm.home)

How has multi-format storytelling helped in the growth of their channel?

We are two individuals that not just love creating content but also consuming content too. Right from short format to long format to image stills, YouTube offers all of them. For an audience to fully relate to you and your story, creating content around all the different formats is important.

Long-form content on YouTube for us is like a video diary. It can be a sit-down video about an incident in our life that we think people will find useful coming from first-hand experience. Or vlogs from our daily life that provide value to our audience or have a feel-good value. We aspire to make content that people think will leave them feeling good or makes them smile a bit during their day.

Regarding short-form videos, we like to explore various formats through YouTube Shorts. Right from mini life/travel vlogs, small learnings from life, outfits inspirations, inspirational content, social content, etc. All while keeping in mind to keep it easy to consume, given that it's of a shorter length.

Are there any specific challenges or obstacles you've faced as creators, and how have you overcome them?

Being a queer couple living unapologetically in India can be viewed as an act of courage, simply owing to the kind of hatred the community is subjected to on a daily basis.

Naturally, trolls had found a new target: Honey.Imm.Home. Living in a repressive and homophobic nation like India can be challenging for folks identifying on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. Being a queer couple residing in an urban city like Mumbai and highlighting our travels worldwide is a hard pill to swallow for some.

Initially, we saw it as people being angry at themselves and excreting that anger all over our page, which we were okay with. It was a content engagement for us, and that's all. However, recently, it's been a bit more flustering. (especially this pride month)

Waking up to these comments on our screen indirectly affected us and made us feel helpless. Imagine being on a peaceful dinner date and checking the phone, thinking it's an important notification, only to realize it's just some angry individual abusing us for being who we are. So, we've been bulk-blocking and using YouTube features that allow us to block some hateful speech to keep our mental health on track.

On the other hand, when it comes to content creators, we're often just seen inside the bubble of our personality, being defined as just "gay". We're extremely proud of being gay and belonging to this community. We think it's the coolest thing ever. But there is more to us. Until we change that mindset, those brand deals/recognition for our work will not come in regardless of the numbers/reach/engagement that we have over our accounts.

How do you engage with your audience and create a supportive community?

With complete honesty, our audience, and every other channel's audience, knows when something is not true. Humans are behind screens but still logical, caring, and mindful. It's all about being honest and raw while connecting with the internet community. We care about the space our audience has given us in their lives; without them, we would be nobody but two boys doing their own thing. So, the least we can do is be truthful. Whether it's brand/travel reviews, life updates, or something as simple as replying to comments, we do it with a pure mind, for there are humans behind the screens engaging with us and our content.

How do you balance educating and entertaining your audience on different topics on your channel?

Regarding entertainment, we've made sure not to get carried away by keeping the content tasteful and creating what we want to watch personally, not just what the audience wants to watch.

As far as educating our audience is concerned, we don't consider ourselves educators or experts in any specific topic because we have much to learn today. But, we have always spoken about various topics from first-hand experience, and that's helped our audience the most.

What advice would you give to aspiring creators who want to make a positive impact through their content?

You may hear this very often, 'Be yourself', but a lot goes into being yourself. There are a lot of times you may get ahead of yourself and have to remind yourself why you started this. So, know that you have abundant time. You do not want to compare your work or talent to the creators that may have reached the big numbers quicker than you. And it's important to understand that that doesn't say anything bad about your efforts and hard work. We all have our journeys; the hard part is trusting that.

Why is it essential for YouTube creators to actively participate in and support Pride Month initiatives?

All humans need to participate in and support LGBTQIA initiatives all year long actively.

How is society changing? Has social media been instrumental in making a difference? 

Definitely, social media has been at an all-time high about consumption since the coronavirus pandemic. And we've seen a huge change in development around the world and in people since then. It has broadened the perspective, knowledge & data with quick access to a mobile phone. Regardless of class, colour, or gender to identify with, the internet is the same for all.

That being said, everything has "two sides to a coin". It comes with a future, but it also comes with a lot of addiction and negative changes in society. Humans decide whether we use it for the right reasons or wrong.

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A post shared by Atulan🤍Divesh | Travel + Lifestyle 👨🏻‍❤️‍💋‍👨🏽 (@honey.imm.home)

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