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Articles by Siddharth Dube
The unfinished battle for sex workers’ rights
{ONE} THERE WERE BREATHTAKING SIGNS in that heady era, when India was celebrating 50 years of independence and a new millennium shone ahead, that a revolution was underway for the country’s sex workers.
The Enduring Harm of the West’s Moral Crusades
On Stonewall’s 50th anniversary, the US should reconsider its global war against sex work. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Supporters and members of the LGBT community participate in a queer pride parade in Ahmadabad, India, on February 24, 2019. (AP / Ajit Solanki) In 1982, as a young undergraduate, I fled from my Delhi college to Tufts University, desperately hoping that in the liberal West my self-loathing and terrors about being gay would fade into irrelevance.
The Enduring Harm of the West’s Moral Crusades
On Stonewall’s 50th anniversary, the US should reconsider its global war against sex work. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark June 28, 2019 Supporters and members of the LGBT community participate in a queer pride parade in Ahmadabad, India, on February 24, 2019. (AP / Ajit Solanki) In 1982, as a young undergraduate, I fled from my Delhi college to Tufts University, desperately hoping that in the liberal West my self-loathing and terrors about being gay would fade into irrelevance.
Siddharth Dube with Sonora Jha
A public health scholar who has done research and teaching in both his native India and the U.S., Siddharth Dube visits with An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex (Atria), a personal story with larger ramifications. He will be joined onstage here this evening with Seattle writer and Seattle University professor Sonora Jha, author of Foreign. "[A] heart-stopping memoir of being gay in India and the world. . . .
A Personal Fight for the Dignity of L.G.B.T. People in India
Nonfiction Image A patient infected with H.I.V., at a government hospital in eastern India. Feb. 4, 2019 AN INDEFINITE SENTENCE A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex By Siddharth Dube In 1988, when Siddharth Dube was a deeply in love 26-year-old, the majority of gay men in India concealed their sexual orientation. A colonial-era law, Section 377, criminalized homosexuality, which was defined as an “unnatural” offense.
Flawed truth
A Stranger Truth: Lessons in Love, Leadership and Courage from India's Sex Workers, by Ashok Alexander, Juggernaut, 2018, 287 pages. A pillar of society's important but flawed account of people at its margins Over 20 million people had died from AIDS-and nearly twice that number were infected with HIV-before the world's elite paid heed to the carnage. Then, 20 years from the time the disease had first come to scientific attention, AIDS became the global cause du jour.
An Indefinite Sentence
ONE SHAME An Indefinite Sentence In retrospect, it’s clear that the enduring themes of my life were present so many years back in that single night, which is why I recollect it all with such clarity even decades later. But I could see only with a child’s eyes then, simply, directly, without interpretation, without thought of what it might mean for the future. The year was 1971, and I was ten years old. I was at the Grand, Calcutta’s sumptuous colonial-era hotel.
Of Love, Loathing and Life: The strange, long afterlife of an alien degenerate law
The harm done by Section 377 to individuals like me — those romantically and sexually attracted to others of the same sex — was devastating. This was true even for the tiny proportion of us who, like me, were spared the worst because of our affluence and because we had caring families. Most others suffered lifetimes of desperation, scarred by shame and self-loathing, by sham marriages, and, often, by being reviled, blackmailed, beaten and raped.
The Strange, Long Afterlife of an Inhumane Colonial Law
Homophobia in India is an alien import with shallow roots. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms People belonging to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community celebrate after the Supreme Court's verdict of decriminalizing gay sex at an NGO in Mumbai, India. (Reuters / Francis Mascarenhas) Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism.
The Strange, Long Afterlife of an Inhumane Colonial Law
One of the enduring, cruel legacies of British colonialism was that, even decades and centuries after nations threw off British rule, there remained a chilling similarity to the experience of boys and men with same-sex desires in places as far flung as India and Nigeria, Australia and Uganda, Pakistan and the United States. As a child of affluent, cosmopolitan parents in 1960s Calcutta, I learned to feel like a criminal long before I knew what homosexuality was.
Being Gay in the Workplace: From America to India
This article was written in the lead-up to The Economist's Pride and Prejudice summit, an event that aims to advance the global discussion on the business case for LGBT diversity and inclusion. Even now, 30 years later, I can still recall with acute clarity the generalized sense of shame and anxiety about being gay that would inevitably cloud my mind every morning as I headed off to work as a young journalist in the mid-1980s, in the U.S. and then back in India. My fears were incoherent.
The importance of being honest
(An extract from Siddharth Dube’s upcoming memoir No One Else: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex to be published by HarperCollins India. This is the first part of the web package on Himal Southasian’s quarterly on love, sexuality and marriage in Southasia.) Eventually, in the summer of 1984, after graduating from Tufts, a few months short of my 23rd birthday, I resolved to tell my father that I was gay.
Buy No One Else: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex Book Online at Low Prices in India
Review "This searing memoir of a gay man from a country that criminalizes homosexuality is intertwined with a first-hand account of the struggle for basic human rights by gays as well as by women sex workers, two groups similarly outlawed in India.
Love, homophobia and the AIDS panic in 1980s India
I WAS 26 YEARS OLD in 1988, living in Delhi, where I had recently moved after several years as a graduate student in the United States. I was a stringer for the Washington Post, living in a rented apartment in Jor Bagh with my partner, Tandavan, a Frenchman of Tamil and Vietnamese descent in his mid-thirties. We had met by lucky accident one morning outside the nearby Lodi Gardens, and fallen in love instantly. Tandavan was my first boyfriend.
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