Dhiren Doshi-Smith
“This outfit isn’t a costume. It’s what I wore at Pride in London 2025, while being highlighted as a VolunQueer and volunteering with London Friend and Switchboard. It represents visibility, service, and showing up for a community that has held me when things felt unbearable.
The barber’s chair has never been just a place to get a haircut. Growing up as a British Indian gay man, it was a space where masculinity felt narrow and quietly enforced. You learned what not to say, how not to move, how not to be seen.
Coming back into that space now, photographed exactly as I am, felt grounding rather than intimidating. It felt like choice. Like ownership. Like I no longer have to make myself smaller to belong.
Queerness didn’t take anything away from my masculinity. It gave me one. One rooted in care, honesty, self expression and community. If I could speak to my younger self, I wouldn’t tell him to fit in. I’d tell him to stay visible, stay kind, and trust that being queer will become his strength.”
Dhiren Doshi-Smith (he/they)
Dhiren is a therapeutic counsellor, speaker, trainer and model whose work sits firmly around visibility, care and mental health. He is passionate about showing up for queer, neurodiverse people of colour and about being seen doing so. Alongside his counselling work, he is an ADHD UK ambassador and brings his lived experience into everything he offers.
For Dhiren, being queer is rooted in joy. It is about celebrating what queer people bring into the world, choosing visibility and allowing love to be seen rather than hidden. That sense of openness shapes both his personal life and his professional practice.
One of the moments that made him feel truly seen was being spotlighted as a VolunQueer at Pride in London this year. Walking through the city alongside fellow VolunQueers, he felt part of something collective and affirming, recognised not just as an individual but as part of a wider queer community.
He expresses his identity through speaking, training and caring for the mental health of queer people. Therapy, exercise, writing and advocacy all play a role in how he supports others. Presence matters to him, as does representation, and he is intentional about taking space so others can see what is possible.
If he could speak to his younger self, or to queer kids growing up now, his message would be clear. Full self-acceptance opens the world in ways that are hard to imagine beforehand. He only wishes he had reached that place sooner.
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This is UNCUT — a raw, striking portrait series by award-winning photographer Chris Jepson capturing the power and pride of Queer Joy, shot in a barber’s chair. No filters, no retouching, no compromise. Just bold, beautiful people taking up space exactly as they are.