Maulik Pancholy writes debut novel about gay Indian-American boy

Actor Maulik Pancholy, formerly of TV’s “30 Rock,” has tweeted about a deal he inked to write a debut novel “about a gay Indian boy growing up in a small town in Indiana, dealing with the shifting dynamics of friendship and bullying in middle school.”

The book will be geared toward middle-grade readers. In November 2013, in an interview with Out magazine, Pancholy first came out, revealing a decade-long relationship. In January 2014, he announced his engagement to his longtime love, Ryan Corvaia.

The two were married that same year. Politics, activism and gay rights are not new to the Ohio-born actor. He has a long history of working on behalf of Asian-American students who face bullying in school.

As a member of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI) under President Barack Obama, Pancholy frequently spoke out about the need to combat the bullying and harassment of Asian-American students in educational environments, The Washington Post reported.

“When I was a kid I was scrawny and I had braces and glasses and I was often called a nerd,” Pancholy told viewers in a YouTube video launching the commission’s #ActToChange movement in 2015.

“I was dealing with being gay in a pretty conservative town and sometimes kids made me feel like I was different because I was Indian-American…It’s OK to be weird, but it’s not OK to be bullied.”

In a Huffington Post op-ed last year in honor of National Bullying Prevention Month, Pancholy noted that as a WHIAAPI commissioner he was startled to learn that bullying victims were disproportionately Asian-American.

The commission found that half of all Asian-American students reported being bullying and, of that group, Sikh and Muslim students were often particularly targeted because of their religion and attire.

“We’ve seen that certain AAPI groups – including South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Micronesian, and limited English proficient youth – are more likely to be the targets of bullying,” he wrote in a 2015 post on the official WHIAAPI site introducing the #ActToChange campaign. He has also worked in Studio Theatre’s “The Remains,” a play about one of the first legally married gay couples heading for divorce.