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Love in a Different Climate : Men Who Have Sex with Men in India | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeremy Seabrook
Publisher: Verso
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $14.88
You Save: $10.12 (40%)
New (8) Used (13) from $12.56
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1607335
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 184
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 6.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 1859848370
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.76620954
EAN: 9781859848371
ASIN: 1859848370
Publication Date: June 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
What does it mean to be Muslim, Bengali or Tamil and to enjoy sex with men? How can a lesbian identity co-exist with Hindu, Islamic or Buddhist values? To what extent is 'gay culture' simply another neo-colonial import from a newly liberalised West? In this carefully researched and finely written work, Jeremy Seabrook deals with subjects rarely discussed in Western narratives about South Asia. Going beyond a straightforward contextualisation of the gatoei (lady-boys) in Thailand and the hijara (eunuchs) of India, he unravels the less familiar and more complex territory of homosexual and homoerotic encounters in general, and asks how valid Western models of sexual identity are in the South Asian context, and how effective they might be in dealing with global issues of sexual health, HIV awareness and gender politics. Much of the book is based on interviews which reveal the extent of the complexity at play: wives who traditionally vacate the marital bed to accommodate their husbands' friends; kotis--'passive' male sex partners of men many of whom will be married but see their relations with the kotis as fulfilling their destinies as males; the fundamentalist politicians who curse the Western influence of 'gay liberation' and continue to justify the punishment of life imprisonment for homosexuality; and the activist groups who are working towards a clearer and more helpful understanding of contemporary issues.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Bad Science - Worse Tale Telling April 22, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
About the only useful information contained in this book pertains to the description, generally, of the very hard life of India's poor living in the cities -- and of their limited access to sexual or intimate contacts with others.
The material is largely anecdotal, and the underlying premise that "gay" life is so very different in India due to cultural or family traditions (and obligations) draws little support from the material presented.
In the first place, most (if not nearly all) of the interviews of the subjects take place in one public park in Delhi. As an attorney who has represented hundreds of gay men charged with sex acts occurring in public parks (and other public places similar to those described in this book), I found the author's conclusion that the MSM's (men who have sex with men) of India do so for a whole host of reasons differing from those which motivate such acts in America (and other Western nations) absurd and unsupported. Most of my clients over the years have been men who were married and who had children and believed themselves bound to the families they have created, or, who, for various reasons never connected with the "gay life," or who were bisexual and who found living in the gay community unsatisfying, or who simply could not fully acknowledge to themselves that they were gay (that is, "come out"), or who were actively "hustling" gay men for money in exchange for sex -- that is, having sex with other men for one or more of the reasons stated by the author's interviewees.
Poorly written, unsubstantiated, and nearly a complete waste of the purchase price (I say "nearly" because I did get a sense from this book of how difficult life must be for the overworked and underpaid who constitute a majority of India's city dwellers).
 Fascinating, groundbreaking, and frustrating April 9, 2000
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
Seabrook charts territory never before navigated in a book (to my knowledge), the stories of men who have sex with men in India. This is not about the cross-dressing hijras, who have garnered a lot of attention, but more conventionally masculine Indian men who have sex with men and how they understand themselves and their behavior. Seabrook sat in a cruising park and solicited the stories of the men who visited there so he obtains information from men who would be hard to connect with otherwise. While he admirably doesn't try to make the stories fit a preconcieved ideology of sexuality, there is not a single chapter title or subheading to help organize the material, so you are left to browse the entire book to refind an interesting passage. Seabrook also makes little effort to contextualize his interviews with previous research on the subject--no footnotes or index here either. So as a source of intriguing and sometimes compelling vignettes and a source of raw material to do your own analysis the book is great. I think it could have been a lot more with a little extra effort without diminishing its groundbreaking strengths.
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