Salman Toor: South Asian Asylum and Someone Like You
By Anderson Gill
I had only just walked into the exhibition gallery when I felt the subtle apprehension of being watched. It lingered while I milled around the portraits in the first room, spying on the friends in Lunch looking at a phone, and the Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug looking down at his belongings. Each subject I passed was enveloped in their own locus until I stopped in front of The Bar on East 13th. A person (seemingly male) stands behind a mirrored bar, his tan complexion standing out from the wash of green engulfing the scene. Although his eyes are cast out to the viewer, they’re hazy; he’s looking out at the gallery, not at me. I was about to turn away and shrug off the strange scopaesthesia when I finally saw him. Shadowed in the bartender's reflection, wearing a blue coat and leaning intimately over the bartop, his gaze burns through the mirror to lock eyes with me. Or, I suppose, with himself. Having spotted him, I could tell that he was the true subject of the painting. His coat is a real blue, his hair and skin a warm brown, leaving him untinted by the velvety green that dominates everyone around him. Even the bartender who originally drew my attention now seems to blend in, his emerald clothes and eyes melding with his surroundings. The mirror man seems unbothered by his visual isolation, his placidity and closeness with the bartender suggesting a sense of belonging in this place.
After reading the didactic, I think that’s exactly the version of himself Salman Toor was trying to project. Toor said the piece “holds nostalgia, memoir, and an aspirational autofiction. It helped me paint my way into finding a community in New York City; it was also like coming out through a painting.” Born in Pakistan, Toor came to the US and made a name for himself in New York as a “queer intimist,” painting tender, private moments in the modern lives of young, brown, LGBT+ men. Toor subverts expectations of queer pain in art by showing them thriving safely together at home and in the community. But that doesn’t make his underlying messages toothless. While retaining the close-up quality of the intimists, he has created several pieces which provide a deeper sense of how politics play into the lives of his subjects. Upon a second look, I realised one of the paintings I first saw, Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug, puts the viewer in the perspective of a border control officer watching a man take out his personal items in a security line. The scrutiny with which the viewer looks at the man suddenly feels deliberate and discomforting, especially when considered alongside recent changes made by the Home Office.
In 2025, the Home Office updated its CPIN (Country Policy and Information Note) on several countries, including Pakistan, to tighten restrictions on LGBT+ asylum seekers. Key changes were made to the process of what qualifies a person for asylum, and the note specifically asserts that “LGBT+ people are unlikely to face persecution or serious harm from the state.” Yet, in that same note, it also acknowledges that same-sex acts are criminalised for men, with penalties including life imprisonment. The note justifies this logical disparity by pointing out that “Despite these laws, prosecutions are rare, but police sometimes use punitive laws to extort bribes or sexual favours from men who have sex with men (MSM) and trans women.” So, it’s illegal to be gay, but since the danger is usually from police extortion and not explicitly from the legal system, the Home Office categorises them as unlikely to be persecuted. The Home Office then goes on to mention the social dangers of physical and sexual violence to gay men, lesbians, and transgender people. Knowing these dangers should make it undeniable that queer people from Pakistan who manage to be granted asylum deserve an ironclad guarantee of sanctuary. Instead, last March the Home Office drastically altered the terms to remain in the UK for those who get through the arduous process to be granted asylum.
Prior to the changes, refugees and asylum seekers whose claims succeeded were given a minimum of 5 years to remain in the country before requiring renewal. Now, they’ll be granted a 2.5-year “core protection” period before needing to apply for renewal. This seems to be an attempt at curtailing applications for permanent settlement, which requires a minimum of 5 years in the UK. This change not only makes refugees live in greater fear of being sent back into danger, but also discourages assimilation. Assimilation is a daunting task even without fear of deportation, as immigrants take on an entirely new identity in the process. Salman Toor has painted the mixed emotions of this metamorphosis with extreme detail in Group B and Citizens. In them, he illustrates groups of brown people queuing for airport security and taking the US oath of citizenship, using the magnified intimist style to convey how differently they all feel about crossing borders and transforming their cultural identity. The two men standing side-by-side to take the oath look like they’ve each received a different verdict in court; one looks down with a small smile as if heaving a sigh of relief, the other looks as though he’s disassociating while being handed a life sentence. Yet both of them, regardless of the metaphorical trials involved, decided to undertake the challenge of immigration and integrate themselves into a new life.
If a queer Pakistani person is granted asylum, yet has to live here knowing the Home Office will regularly review their claim with the goal of sending them back, they’ll be more hesitant to integrate into British society. Additionally, it makes it riskier to be out as someone of their sexual orientation or gender because they know it will put them at risk of serious harm if ordered to return to their country of origin. This turns paradoxical with the added pressure of the Home Office expecting LGBT+ asylum claimants to live openly as queer. In many of the paintings on display at the Courtauld, observing the interaction of queer bodies is the heart of the narrative, such as the two male lovers in Pillow Fight. Toor uses the supervision of queer sexuality as a catch, changing the meaning of the scene, by painting an open laptop in front of them and raising the question of “whether this scene is being surveilled by technology, or performed for it.” Due to this lose-lose situation of being out or closeted for many LGBT+ asylum seekers, the answer is both. And it will continue to be, given every move the Home Office has made to make life harder and more unstable for gender, sexual, and romantic minorities from Pakistan and beyond. It is deeply ironic that Britain should be the nation to do so, given that the section of the Pakistan Penal Code that criminalises consensual same-sex acts was lifted directly from the Indian Penal Code created by the British Raj.
At the Courtauld Gallery, while admiring Salman Toor's work, I considered the connection between these developments in Britain and the people he’s painted. Someone Like You accomplishes the monumental feat of giving the viewer a multi-faceted delineation of the lives of queer South Asians, the joy and the melancholy, the bodily and the abstract, the rootedness and the alienation. It couldn’t have opened at a more poignant or necessary time than this pivotal moment for refugees and asylum seekers in the UK.
Works Cited
“Making Sense of the Latest Changes to the Asylum System.” Right to Remain, 6 Mar. 2026, https://righttoremain.org.uk/making-sense-of-the-latest-changes-to-the-asylum-system/.
“Outright International.” Outright International, 12 Mar. 2026, https://outrightinternational.org/our-work/asia/pakistan.
Rainbow Migration. Potential Impact of Proposed Asylum Reforms on LGBTQI+ People Seeking Asylum. Briefing note, 12 Dec. 2025, pp. 1–2.
UK Visas and Immigration. “Country Policy and Information Note: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity or Expression, Pakistan, November 2025 (Accessible).” GOV.UK, Dec. 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pakistan-country-policy-and-information-notes/country-policy-and-information-note-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-or-expression-pakistan-november-2025-accessible.
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