Review | Siddharth Dube’s memoir examines how homophobia became ingrained in India’s ruling class
- In An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex, the writer lays bare the terror that dominates gay men’s lives in the country’s ‘homosocial’ society
- Indian elites were groomed by the British to abhor homosexuality while the wider population accepts same-sex love
An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex by Siddharth Dube Atria Books
When Siddharth Dube left India for the United States in 1982 to complete his college studies, he had no idea that homosexuality was illegal in more than half of America’s 50 states. A gay man who would go on to play a significant role in helping combat India’s Aids epidemic, Dube was shocked to learn that American men were being arrested in the privacy of their own homes for having gay sex.
Tortured by his homosexuality in India, Dube had hoped his anxieties would fade into irrelevance “now that I had reached the liberal West”, as he writes in his riveting and deeply illuminating memoir, An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex. But the discovery was a rude awakening for a man who had just left a country where homosexuals were widely despised and terrified of revealing their sexual orientation, which could land them a 10-year jail sentence.
Dube writes in his book – originally published in India in 2015 under the title No One Else: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex and now released internationally – that he had been treated like a pariah long before he knew anything about homosexuality. He was just eight years old when classmates at a top private school first called him a “sissy” because of his “girly” looks.
There were no openly gay men or women to validate the way I felt or for me to emulate or turn to for advice and help. Indian newspapers and magazines were silent on the subject of homosexuality
Dube suffered worse indignities when he went to Doon School, India’s equivalent of Eton College, at the age of 11. Doon was where all the men in his family had studied since it had been founded in the final years of the British Raj. “I left behind a world in which I was despised for my femininity only to enter one where it made me an object of both desire and condemnation,” Dube writes. Like numerous others who have attended the elite all-boys school, he was subjected to relentless sexual assaults by seniors.
