This essay unveils the tension between mainstream queer theory—rooted largely in Western academia—and decolonial frameworks emerging from the Global South. Arguing that while queer studies destabilise norms of sexuality and gender, they often reproduce Eurocentric assumptions about race, history, and modernity. The essay proposes “decolonial queerness” as a corrective approach that re-centres non-Western epistemologies and lived realities of queer people of colour.