Private Project

Second Class Queer

Suffering from dating app fatigue, a gay man, Krishna, a Tamil Malaysian, has signed himself up for an hour at a gay speed-dating event in Berlin. Happening all in one night, we see Krishna’s state of grief through various speed-date dialogues as he spends five minutes each with five speed daters. Even though his grief may not be so clear to him, he is haunted by never having come out to his late mother. We slowly see his personal journey from Kuala
Lumpur to Berlin as he reflects on his family, his cultural heritage, and what it means to be a man and a gay in his homeland and what it now means to be racialised and gay in Germany.

  • Kumar Muniandy
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Stage Play
  • Country of Origin:
    Malaysia
  • Language:
    English
  • First-time Screenwriter:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Writer Biography - Kumar Muniandy

After completing his bachelor's degree in acting at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, Kumar Muniandy worked as a film producer, actor, and director. He has acted in several short films and theatre plays and is the author of the autobiographical documentary Sunny Boy, which has been shown at numerous festivals worldwide. He is the writer, director, and performer of Second Class Queer, first performed at the English Theatre in Berlin. His last own work, White Talcum Powder, was shown at the KAUM Film Festival in Berlin in 2023.

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Writer Statement

My grandparents are from Tamil Nadu in South India, and they were displaced to Malaysia as collies by the British. My parents are the first-generation of the low-working class of Tamil Malaysians. I was born as a second-generation Tamil Malaysian. My parents made their living selling South Indian breakfast at the morning market for forty years. As a toddler, I remember my parents waking up at three a.m. every day to prepare the dosa batter, lentil curry, and chutneys so that they could be ready before sunrise to make dosa on a hot iron pan for the marginalised Indian labourers before they headed to work.

I moved to London in 2003 to pursue a career as an actor, where I spent seventeen years doing cleaning and customer service jobs on a minimum wage in London cinemas and theatres, all because I loved films and plays. During these times, I had the opportunity to learn about the film and theatre industry that encouraged me to become an actor, and then in 2019, I expanded my profile to Berlin, where I now live.

Despite the low pay in various jobs, I was dedicated to the discipline I had and remained loyal and committed to my career as an actor. After fourteen years of auditioning as a South Asian actor in London and Berlin - 90% of the time for terrorist, stereotypical Indian, and Muslim roles due to my ethnicity and rich-melanin skin - I decided it was time to produce and create my own work in order to finally write the stories and narratives I had always wanted to portray.