Love in a Different Climate : Men Who Have Sex with Men in India

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, groundbreaking, and frustrating
Review: 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.