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.
Ana Garcia-Arroyo
Ana Garcia-Arroyo
Editors: Please introduce yourself to us.
Ana Garcia-Arroyo: My name is Ana. Ana Garcia-Arroyo. Garcia-Arroyo is my surname. And I like it with a hyphen. Both parts joined. The first corresponds to my father's name. The second to my mother's. The Anglo-Saxon tradition and the Christian tradition keep on leaving the second half out. My mother's inheritance seems to be invisible to them. And I get angry then.
Imagine getting up in the morning with just one eye, half the face, five fingers, and then you realise that you are lame; one leg has mysteriously been taken away. So please, Garcia-Arroyo. For you, just Ana, if you consider yourself a friend.
Garcia-Arroyo. Ana Garcia-Arroyo.
No. I am not Garcia Marquez or Garcia Lorca… not like ...