Summary
Contents
Whistling in the Dark: Twenty One Queer Interviews is a book on gay narratives from India and other countries in the form of 20 interviews with homosexual/bi-sexual men and a lone interview with a woman. The interviewees represent a cross section of society ranging from university professors, gay rights activists and students on the one hand to working class men such as office boys, autorickshaw drivers, and even undertrials who have served prison sentences on the other, conducted in the manner of a sting operation. They shed light on major issues in the field of sexuality studies such as sexual identity, sexual politics, the institution of marriage, hetero-patriarchy and hetero-normativity, homosociality and the segregation of sexes, masculinity, women's rights, section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, police atrocities against gays, gay bashing, sex in jails, sex tourism, and so on. The narratives are queer, not just in the sense of being with persons who posses a queer sexuality but also because they go beyond the conventionally decorous questions put to interviewees by their interviewers, and enter the very private lives of the respondents and the private spaces they inhabit.
Mohammad Soltani
Mohammad Soltani
Editors: A biographical sketch of yourself, please.
Mohammad Soltani: As the only child of my parents, I was born in the early 1970s, in an expanded family home in Tehran. After a couple of years, my immediate family, including my parents and I, shifted to a very small town almost one hour from Tehran. The cultural gap between my new classmates and me pushed me to growing up as an extreme introvert. As a child, I was quite talented in poetry and painting. This talent and my introvert characteristics gave me this idea of being a painter, and so it went.
Editors: How do you view sexual orientation, as fluid or in terms of fixed categories like gay or straight?
Soltani: What do we ...