Moscow & St. Petersburg: Queer Pictures

GQ hired a first-rate photojournalist, Yuri Kozyrev, to take photographs to accompany my story in the February 2014 issue, "Inside the Iron Closet." As a form of notes, I took snapshots with my phone. Following are a few of them, along with some of the stories I couldn't fit into the magazine

***

My translator, Zhenya, and I met Nikolai at a small basement gay club called Ice. Sometime soon I'll publish our whole conversation, but I was able to get this much into the magazine:

I don't think there is homophobia in Russia," he says, "because I always carry a gun."The logic takes me a moment. He means they can't hurt him, because he will hurt them first. His father, a "criminal," he says, found Nikolai on a Grindr-like app once. He said he was coming to kill Nikolai. Nikolai wrote back: "I'm waiting for you." His father never came. Nikolai is waiting. He taps one side of his head and then the other, to show the path of the bullet he'll put through his father's skull.

But I couldn't include as much as I wanted to about the next club we went to that night:

“I’m going to Secrets,” says Nikolai. Another club. He says it’s 20 minutes away. “Will you give me money for a car?” If he’ll take us with him. It’s around 2 am and the street’s empty, but we flag down an old Soviet rustbucket and Nikolai haggles until the driver waves us in. It’s a long ride down small streets and smaller, until Nikolai directs the driver into a deeply rutted dirt alley. At which point Zhenya says maybe we shouldn’t be here. “Da!” says Nikolai. “Da! Da!” I’m looking at his puffy coat. I don’t really see where he could have a gun. Then we come around a bend and Nikolai says, “There.” He points. A small black metal rectangle tied to an iron gate with a piece of wire, “SECRET” written on it in plain English letters.

Beyond it, a beat-up parking lot that’s a study in night colors: a row of fluorescent-lit windows in another building turning the lot green beneath a cloudy city-lit sky bruised purple and yellow, in the corner of the lot one of the branches of a leafless tree incompletely wrapped in Christmas lights, red as a wound. Beneath it, an open door into what looks like a shanty, a corridor glowing redder. The corridor twists and turns, a big man in a black suit pats us down leaving no margin of error—Nikolai checks his coat first so I still don’t know about the gun, I never will—and then we come around another corner into the club.

And it’s kind of wonderful. Three times as crowded as Ice, girls and boys, some of them chiseled and rippling and beautiful, some of them fat and pimply and gorgeous, all of them dancing together or dancing alone if they want to, the music loud but not fully club-loud, we can hear the shouted greetings as Nikolai’s friends gather round and hug him. There’s a big banner across the back wall that says “Secret Lives” in an English font transported from the ’80s, Flashdance sans serif. Only there was a hiccup in translation, so it says “Secret Lifes,” which is even sweeter.

It is a place not so much of secrets as of compromises, hiding and not-hiding at the same time. Zoya Blanche, the 29-year-old halter top cop go-go girl dancing on a platform dressed as a sexy policewoman, lives with her parents, who know what she does for a living—she’s a pro, in every sense of the term—and accept it so long as when she leaves the apartment and when returns she’s a man. “So long as they don’t see me,” she tells me afterwards, relaxing by the dark room.

We meet a boy, Kirill, who says he’s 18 and out to his family and his friends. “Absolutely everybody knows,” he tells us over drinks at a little table on the second floor. Kirill’s built like a giraffe, long spindly legs and an even longer neck, unblinking dark chocolate eyes. “Everybody is talking about homophobia, but when I walk down the street I don’t feel it.” He shrugs. “I haven’t heard of these laws, but I think it’s fine. We don’t need gay pride here. Why do we need to show our orientation?” He’s heard of the torture videos popular online, the gangs that kidnap gays, the police that arrest gays, the babushkas with their eggs and their stones. But he hasn’t seen them. He doesn’t need to. “All of my friends talk about it and everybody wants to emigrate, but not me.” He shrugs again; it’s like a tic. “I love Russia. I love Moscow. This is their experience, not mine.” 

* * *

It is too late for Harry Ben’Ka to hide. He has been out since he was 15, and now he is 17, which means our conversation in a little café near the center of the city is probably illegal: Propaganda to a minor. But Harry would just confuse the police. He is not homosexual, he says, he is asexual, currently biromantic. In short, a sweet, queer kid who loves everybody. He calls the organization he started, a network of about 70 Moscow teenagers like him, Typical Queer. Typical; normal; it’s that very modest ambition again. Very modest, very brave. Harry realized he wasn’t straight when he was 13. He had two fun years, he says, of being a party boy. Then, at 15, he began to take up his responsibilities. He heard about a meeting of an organization called the Rainbow Association. There were maybe a dozen activists there, Harry by far the youngest. They thought that was cute. This was before the law, which makes it illegal.

Harry missed the next meeting, which was just as well. A group of men in masks broke in and attacked the activists. Nothing serious, says Harry. He smiles, a real Chesire Cat grin, this one, and sips his tea. He has bleached blonde hair and four silver studs beneath his lip, tight red jeans and a scarecrow’s frame. He sits most comfortably folded like origami, his long legs twisting and his skinny arms reaching across one another. But there is nothing defensive about his manner as he explains to me his typical queer life: his early fascination with anime, learning how to sneak into clubs, boyfriend trouble; leaving home and finding couches to sleep on, learning how to evade police, discovering that with numbers, sometimes, maybe, he can stand his ground.

He has plans for a café nearby. Its owners don’t know it yet, but soon, says Harry, it will be queered. More typical stuff, a group of teens taking over a diner or a café. Typical anywhere but here. 

Harry is writing a fantasy novel about an imaginary city that sounds a lot like Amsterdam, but he doesn’t want to leave. He still feels like he has just arrived. “As long as they don’t kill me,” he says, “I’m going to keep living here.” He smiles. This, to him, is a happy thought. Standing his ground. “It is not yet ours,” says Harry of the café he plans conquer. “We have not occupied it.”

I want to ask him to take us to his club that is not yet a club, to let us help him occupy this little piece of his dream, but his long answers are growing shorter, his hands rising from his lap to make a point and then collapsing. It’s time to go. I’ve saved the most difficult question for last. It’s about the grey scars and long red scabs figure skating around his left arm. I fumble the question. “I can’t help but notice,” I say, smiling like an idiot, dipping my chin in the direction of the wounded arm, which happens to be lying across his crotch. Harry looks confused. He has already told me has had only one lover, and he has been coy about him; maybe just a boy with whom he fooled around. And he has already told me that there will be no more of that, at least for the time being. He has told me his heart is broken. I can see his brow wrinkle, his mouth begin to twist.

I try to clarify, “I wanted to ask”—and I point at the scars, at his lap. Harry looks at Zhenya. Does the stupid American think the damaged queer youth of Russia are souvenirs?

Zhenya, thank God, understands. He tells Harry in Russian that I’m trying to ask—and then Zhenya also balks. There is an easier way. He pushes up his sleeve and points to the white stripes welted across his wrist like barricades.

Oh! Now Harry understands. He laughs, and waves his hand and his own red stripes. No, he reassures us, his are not a matter of suicide. Just reminders. “As long as they don’t kill me,” he says, “I’m going to keep living here.”

“A little while ago,” he continues, “at an event for Typical Queer. I was not there, but my friends were. And so were some Nazis. And the Nazis were asking for me!” They asked for him by name. Harry Ben’ka! Where is Harry Ben’ka?

Not long after that they caught Harry on the street. He grabs the collar of his own jacket as if to hoist himself up. They pinned him to a tree, shook him, slapped him, shouted at him. Once Harry realized this bunch wouldn’t going to kill him, he began to smile. “I felt like a V.I.P.,” he says. He waves the thought of fear away with his red-slashed arm. “I think these Nazis,” he says, “they have showed their weakness.” They weren’t willing to kill him. So for now, Harry wins.

               

                                                              * * *

From "“To Slavik,” by Dmitry Kuzmin, one of Russia's very few out writers -- out since the last days of the Soviet Union and the early days of the "New Russia," when he edited a queer literary magazine that doesn't exist anymore.

…and once, when you thought I was asleep,

you whispered: “I don’t want to part with you” –

– midnight in Bryansk,

the Russian border, passport control, and for some reason

there is music at the station, the trackman’s crow-bar clinks

shunting the switch, a lantern from the platform

gives light to the guy on the lower berth who is finishing his Perumov

across the aisle a plain cadet is undressing,

the pattern of his chest-hair repeating yours;

oh now I would —

That’s how it ends: blank spaces.

* * *

In April 2013, six agents of the Russian Justice ministry, all men, raided the tiny offices of Coming Out St. Petersburg under the pretext of a new law that allows the government to investigate and prosecute any NGO suspected of being a "foreign agent." Anna Anismova was there with a coworker. The agents began tearing the office apart. And they began flirting, Anna says, who by then was alone with them. "Making dirty jokes." We must protect the children, they'd say, rifling through Coming Out's brochures for LGBT parents. Why do you homosexualists need children? They laughed. For this! they said. They might as well have pointed at their crotches. They knew what lesbians really want. 

Anna wanted to scream, but she laughed. "I was trying to behave very like an easy person and making jokes as well with them. Behave as if nothing serious is happening. That I'm not scared." She couldn't stop them from taking Coming Out's records, but of herself, her true self, she would give them nothing. They stayed for seven hours. After they left, "I went home and cried." 

* * *

I wrote a great deal about the astonishingly courageous Elena Kostyuchenko -- one of the steeliest journalists I've ever met, who'd be a human rights hero for life-on-the-line reporting even if she wasn't an LGBT activist, too. I wish I'd had room for this, too:

Elena is not a believer, but when she was nine, in the cancer ward, she tried to make a deal with God. What she wanted was to walk once more on the boulevard. Just the one outside the hospital. When she could still get out of bed, she’d enjoyed sitting by the window, watching the women in their summer dresses. She wanted to go get some yogurt. Also, if possible, she would like to be admitted to heaven. Her friend Yulia in the next bed, with whom she’d played a game of plucking flower petals, loves me, loves me not, had gone before her. Elena wanted to follow. She thought if she if she made her request small God might listen.

“We were scary and we were dying,” Elena would write years later in her journal, sometime in between Lisunov’s beating and the attacks that have followed. “Why write this now?” she mused. She wanted to remember the Christian children who brought her the flowers, not Roman Lisunov, not the babushkas who shriek Sodom and rip her dresses. She prefers the flowers, she holds on to the flowers. She will not hide in her anger. “No fucking way,” she says.

Only it’s Zhenya who says it like that, in English, adding italics. She grins, because what she has said is so much more vulgar. Literally, “no dick,” but that doesn’t get the half of it. There is nothing outside of Russian, Elena and Zhenya agree, that can capture her meaning—the depth of her determination. “It is so beautiful,” says Elena, repeating this vulgar phrase, both of them giggling. “No fucking way!” says Zhena. He slaps the table. Elena applauds. No fucking way. It’s 3, 4 in the morning, we’ve been talking for hours and we’re giddy.

That’s not right; what we’re feeling, Zhenya and I will agree later, is relief. Because Zhenya and I, man, we’re tired, we’ve been doing this for a week already!  Collecting these sad stories. And it’s a real burden for us, listening to other people describe all these beatings. Especially if, like Zhenya, you have beatings of your own. “The badge of the gay,” he said my first night in Moscow, grinning and pointing to his broken nose, and Igor Iasine—remember him? The broken jaw?—sitting next to him, a stoic man, Igor smiled and pointed to own. It’s sort of what brought them together.

No fucking way! It’s fucking joyous.  

I was going to post some of my photographs of the "bad guys" -- oh, hell, they don't need scare quotes, they're very scary people -- but I think I'll leave it there, with this happy picture. Or maybe, actually, with this video Elena pulled up on her phone shortly after it was taken.

It begins with video of a demonstration at which a queer activist who'd had enough of the homophobic goons who'd showed up to attack him decided to throw a punch of his own. The hater on the receiving end is outraged! He is a victim! He says, Zhenya translated for me, "I am a simple Russian guy! Attacked by a homosexualist!" Two queer kids thought that was so funny they turned it into a song. It was around 3 am when we watched it in this cafe -- right around the corner from one of Pussy Riot's old hideouts, as it happens. There were still a few customers left, but we thought it was so funny we played it over and over, and then we began to sing, pounding the table, "I am a simple Russian guy! Attacked by a homosexualist!" Elena -- whose childhood dream had been to be the next Alla Pugacheva, the Madonna of the USSR -- stood up and belted it out, Zhenya and I collapsing in laughter. It really was fucking joyous.

So I'm ending this with the bad guys, after all -- reduced to proper size.

Two Liberal Questions About My Story on Russian Queer Life

In response to a recent story in GQ, "Inside the Iron Closet," on being queer in Russia, I've heard two questions more than once.

1. Why Russia? The most honest answer is because readers are willing to think about these matters now in relation to Russia because of the Olympics. Then there are two variations: "Isn't it worse in, say, the American South?" And: "What about Uganda/Nigeria/Saudi Arabia?"? (I got the same question when I reported on homophobia from Uganda.) The answer is: If you're getting beat up, or kicked out of your home, or fired from your job, it doesn't matter whether you're in Vladivostok, Alabama, Kampala, or Manhattan: It's horrible. These things happen to queer people everywhere. But Russia matters now because it is the biggest, most powerful state by far to enthusiastically embrace (by a vote of 436-0 in the Duma) official homophobia. And they back it up with a state media apparatus that's like Fox News, all around the dial. Does that mean we should just call Putin bad names and ignore homophobia in the U.S.? Does that mean we have to accept Glenn Beck, "championing" LGBT rights as part of an attempt to reactive the Cold War? Of course not. We can't do much about Putin. We might be able to do something about what's happening here. But we need to have as broad a grasp as possible of what's at stake. Telling stories is a very limited form of solidarity, but it's better than a blind eye or left nationalism.

2. Why GQ? Bunch of lefty friends and acquaintances were puzzled by my "decision" to publish the story in a men's fashion magazine, the February issue of which offers as its biggest selling point on the cover Katy Perry's breasts. There's a literary answer -- GQ has been publishing great longform narrative nonfiction in with the fashion spreads and the sex advice for years now -- but the more relevant answer is that GQ was the magazine with the resources to make such a story possible. And it was the magazine that decided to dedicate the resources to this subject. It costs money to go to Russia, it costs money to work with translators. And, yes, it costs writers money to drop everything else they're doing and work around the clock on a story.

I should say I got help from one of the more identifiably left corners of the media world, The Nation Institute Investigative Fund, which paid for some of the background research that made this story possible. But too many liberal and lefty media outlets are squandering their resources on a shotgun approach. Instead of investing in the expensive work of longform investigative journalism, some publications dribble out their resources on a sprinkling of clip jobs and quickie phone-reported stories. It's not the journalists' fault; that's what publications that are always hedging their bets will pay for.

And maybe the literary answer is important, too, after all: Unlike some other wealthier slicks my pals probably subscribe to, GQ didn't ask me to busy up my story with "expert" talking heads or "the view from nowhere," aka the view from the elites who are used to talking to media. Don't get me wrong -- there's great, important journalism along these lines. My grief isn't with the journalists who write those kinds of stories -- it's with an elite media landscape that can "see" a story only when it's presented in those terms.

Shorter version: Why Russia? Because it's there. Why GQ? Because they paid for me to go there.

Medium-Type Friends

My review-essay on Aman Sethi's A Free Man in the context of other recent literary nonfiction about India appears in the Fall 2013 issue of Literary Journalism Studies. It's available free online as a PDF, but I'm posting it here for accessibility. I really want people to read Sethi's book, and in making the case for it I get a little closer to my own rag-and-bone theory of the genre.

* * *

Halfway through this subtle heartbreak of a book, Muhammad Ashraf, the “free man” of the title, phones Aman Sethi—author and co-protagonist, attentive ego to Ashraf’s titanic id—to tell Sethi that Satish is sick. Who is Satish? The one who is sick, of course. Why must you ask so many questions, Aman bhai (brother). And just like that, Sethi’s profile of Ashraf changes direction for thirty pages, becoming an account of sick Satish, whom Ashraf expects Sethi to look after. That’s the price of following Ashraf; sometimes Ashraf’s story is someone else’s story. Sometimes it’s Sethi’s.

A chronicle of the “mazdoor ki zindagi, or laborer’s life, in Delhi” (226), A Free Man will inevitably be compared to Katherine Boo’s third-person omniscient account of Mumbai poverty Behind the Beautiful Forevers, winner of the National Book Award in 2012. But A Free Man—wittier, candid in its confusion, written in a style that might be called “first-person flummoxed”—is a far more intimate book, a romance of sorts. It earns its clichés: Ashraf and Sethi, subject and author, were made for each other; they complete one another. The book they made together is a love story, a document not just of “life and death in Delhi,” as the subtitle holds, but also of the power that inevitably flows back and forth between the narrator and the narrated—freely given and taken, sometimes resented, longed for when it disappears.

A homeless day laborer, Ashraf claims to have a “business-type” mind. But deep into a bottle of his spirit of choice, a rotgut aptly called Everyday, he sounds more like Joe Gould, the genius crank documented by Joseph Mitchell across two decades at The New Yorker. In A Free Man, Ashraf narrates his own oral history of the contemporary world, just as deceptive as Gould’s but seen from Bari Tooti Chowk, an intersection in a Delhi market that passes as Ashraf ’s home. Sethi tries to write it all down. And Ashraf—unlike narcissistic Gould—tries to redirect him. “For you this is all research,” he scolds his biographer. “A boy tries to sell his kidney, you write it down in your notebook. A man goes crazy somewhere between Delhi and Bombay, you store it in your recorder. But for other people this is life” (114).

Like Gould, Ashraf can talk longer than Sethi can listen. Like Mitchell, Sethi sometimes dodges him. Fortunately, Ashraf has Sethi’s cell number. When he calls one night about Satish, Ashraf does not need to ask for help. Sethi’s obligation is implicit. Sethi, “Aman bhai,” has become at least a “medium-type friend,” one who loans rather than gives aid. It is not a matter of stinginess but of mutual respect. “‘Get it?” Ashraf asks Aman bhai. “You’ll lend it,” help, that is, “and I’ll return it. So it’s contractual” (65). That way neither is ever forced to feel like a chootiya, a “pussy,” even if one is a “pavement dweller” and the other a presswallah, a journalist with a press card and a motorcycle.

But a motorcycle is no way to take the sick friend of a friend to the hospital. To get to Bara Hindu Rao, where Satish needs to go, you take a bus of the damned or, at least, severely distressed, their open wounds unbandaged, their skin fungus festering. “The driver plays his part in enforcing the no-talking rule; the person breathing down the back of his neck could be a pukka tuberculosis case” (134). That’s the problem here, “the two dark sails of Satish’s lungs” (141), revealed by X-ray to be afflicted by lesions. So it’s off by auto rickshaw to the tuberculosis hospital, an eighty-rupee ride. Extra for the risk of disease. How to win a bed once you arrive? Sethi assembles a chorus of nameless voices to answer: bring relatives, come alone, cry, don’t cry. It works! Satish is in.

Bhagwan Das, the barber, will shave him. His story begins with “the pipe, the pipe” (147), the one through which he had to piss for three years, installed by doctors after the minivan ran him over. A situation like that makes a man think, and while Bhagwan Das was laid up in bed, Ram Babu was there to help him. Who’s Ram Babu? A “virtuous man” (151). Perhaps a figment of Bhagwan Das’s imagination. But that’s not what’s important. Just like a presswallah to try to pin down the facts that don’t matter instead of the truths that do—such as Bhagwan Das’s divine calling as tuberculosis hospital barber. Ten rupees a customer for a shave and five minutes of friendship, eighty to 100 customers a day. Not a bad way to make a living, so long as you don’t catch tuberculosis and die. Satish does die. Poor Satish! We never really knew him. “Now there is only Singh Sahib in Bed 56.” Who’s Singh Sahib? Don’t ask. The sheets, meanwhile, “still bear unwashable traces of their many previous occupants. A man-sized sweat stain darkens the length of the bedsheet—a trailing afterimage of countless coughing, sweating, retching bodies” (157).

* * *

I know; you see what I just did there. I aped the free-associating style of A Free Man. That’s usually a cheap trick in a book review, but here I mean it differently, or differently enough, I hope. Mimicry, in the practical rather than theoretical sense, has long been a strategy of particular importance to literary journalism, one of the means by which writers establish their own contractual relationship with readers. The writer-as-mimic proposes a kind of authenticity or, at least, fluency. The writer-as-mimic says, “Look how well I speak the local language. That means you can trust me.” At its worst, as in, say, Tom Wolfe’s “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” it borders on minstrelsy. At its best, as in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, it becomes a form of crossing over into the world of the subject, still intact as one’s self and yet identified as a worthy student of another’s life, not as ethnographer but as a “creative” writer whose loyalty—to her own story—is made clear.

A Free Man belongs in this latter category. The book begins with Sethi sitting in while Ashraf shares a joint with his chief cronies, Lalloo and Rehaan. Sethi, determined to keep his wits about him, has imbibed heavily as cover for not taking a toke. Now his wits are gone and it’s his turn. “This joint,” he writes, “like everything else that follows, shall be for research purposes only” (5). It’s a gonzo beginning, seemingly in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson, but Sethi takes a hit and then veers outward to context. The background that in a more formulaic book would constitute the second chapter gets a page and a half here: Sethi had met Ashraf in 2005 while reporting for The Hindu on a proposed health insurance plan for construction workers. “Ashraf had been a terrible interview,” Sethi writes (6). Instead of answering Sethi’s questions, he told stories, spun theories, pronounced on the world. Sethi knew what to do: Get himself a fellowship and a book deal and return to Ashraf, this time to listen.

Sethi spent much of the next five years in the company of Ashraf and his friends. He gets high with them, yes, and drunk, and once almost arrested. He loans money and on one occasion borrows it. He confesses to dutifully asking “undeniably boring questions” (37) and revels in those moments when Ashraf rescues him from his dutiful but shallow pop sociology with an implausible story. “I often toy with the idea of verifying Ashraf ’s stories,” he writes toward the end, “but why should I? How would that change anything between us, except convince Ashraf that I mistrust him and that his story is more important to me than he is?” (195)

Of course, the story is more important to Sethi than Ashraf is; we wouldn’t have this book before us if Sethi had not ultimately given his loyalty first of all to his story; not Ashraf ’s but rather the one Sethi tells about him. Sethi crosses over into Ashraf ’s world, but he never pretends to be Ashraf. He learns a great deal from Ashraf about telling stories through digression and distraction, but he mixes Ashraf’s methods with his own and those of the literary journalists who come before him. Hunter Thompson, sure; and probably Joseph Mitchell. (Sethi spent a year in the midst of his research at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, over which Mitchell justly looms.) There are echoes of Ben Hecht’s 1001 Afternoons in Chicago here, too, in the way Sethi folds his stories-within-stories up into bittersweet fables that end abruptly. But perhaps that’s Ashraf’s influence: He is a master of the unresolved vignette. Sethi is his understudy.

Together, Ashraf and Sethi return many times to Ashraf’s self-styled creation myth, his almost-life as a medical student. His mother, a widow, had taken work in the house of a Dr. Hussain. “Depending on which interview tape I consult, Ashraf came to Dr. Hussain’s house when he was five/eight/ten,” Sethi writes (24). No, the reader can imagine Ashraf saying as he peers over Sethi’s shoulder, watching him type. LISTEN, Aman bhai. Aman bhai does. For a page he writes as if watching teenage Ashraf, sent to school by the good doctor, attend to his lessons. Then comes the book’s only real villain, the doctor’s tenant, a gangster named Taneja, who tries to steal the doctor’s house from him and in so doing, Ashraf speculates, sets into motion the chain of events that led him to Bara Tooti Chowk.

“Of course,” writes Sethi, finding the right rhythm for the story, a series of rapid-fire point-of-view shifts. “Ashraf knew all along that Taneja was not to be trusted. Because Ashraf knows everything. ‘I told Dr. Hussain when they made out the lease: never trust Punjabis. But no one? listens to me.’ Except for me, it seems” (27). First, we are with young Ashraf; then, in the present, with all-knowing Ashraf, who is mildly mocked by Sethi. Ashraf speaks to Sethi; Sethi speaks in an aside to the reader. A Free Man spirals out to Bara Tooti Chowk and beyond in similar fashion, through the days and nights of Ashraf and his friends, some of them seemingly born to lose, others tragic heroes, none left with much of a chance.

Through their eyes—or rather, through the eyes of Sethi, sitting beside them, we see medicine, market, and law, Delhi from the bottom up. This is not how the other half lives, it’s how these men live, no more, no less. Sethi writes neither with the telescope of theory nor with the calm gaze of the journalist observing. His view is close-up and blinking. What he sees changes shape before his eyes. He attempts to construct a timeline of Ashraf’s life, but not until he has known Ashraf for several years does Sethi realize that Ashraf had led a respectable life until his late twenties—until, that is, he was as old as Sethi is at the time of writing.

Could Sethi wind up like Ashraf? It seems a reasonable question. And if Sethi were a less-honest writer, or a more paternalistic one, he might let us wonder. But A Free Man—in ways that Boo’s resolutely third-person Behind the Beautiful Forevers can never be—is a book about class. Not the underclass, but class as a current in every relationship, class as a press card, a book contract, a reluctance to taste Everyday liquor and the ability to see Satish through to the hospital. It is a matter of wit—how one tells a story, how one disassembles a building, how one tells another to go to hell—and, of course, resources. When Ashraf is robbed he must borrow two rupees from a friend to use a pay toilet; when a pickpocket steals Sethi’s wallet, Ashraf spots him some tea money until he can connect with a family friend who loans him 6,000 rupees.

That we see these negotiations is what sets this book apart from Boo’s magisterial narrative. That Sethi resists drawing conclusions about a “new India” is what sets A Free Man apart from much of the recent wave of big-picture Indian literary journal- ism—Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Atash Kapur’s India Becoming, Suketu Mehta’s lyrical Maximum City. Fine books, all. But each is bound to its time as A Free Man is not. Even when Sethi gives voice to his anger in a passage on the geography of the Delhi of the poor—the name of each neighborhood followed by a drumbeat, “before it was demolished by the Municipal Corporation,” “before it was demolished,” “before it was demolished” (66)—it’s not so much a sociological indictment as a roll call of the missing, neighborhoods razed, chootiyas gone.

In the end, only Ashraf survives. Maybe. One scheme after another collapses for Ashraf and we begin turning pages with the expectation of coming upon his dead body. Instead, thankfully, Sethi loses sight of him. His vanishing is a blessing; the entire book turns out to be a vignette without resolution. Sethi’s American publisher has categorized the book as biography, but that slights its great achievement as a book made to honor a free man. It is anti-biography, a book that feels closer to life itself than to the after-the-fact business presswallahs and critics like to call a story. 

Fundamental Assumptions

"Generic differences are not simply formal differences. They are cultural constructs and reflect those most fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality, including the nature of the person and the nature of language."

--Vincent Crapanzano, Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago, 1980). I wish I'd remembered this statement when I was trying to explain "creative nonfiction" in my tenure statement.

On Filing, 2013

A note I wrote last night:

Tonight I'm putting to bed a long reported essay on Russia's vicious state anti-gay crusade. This morning I woke to the news that four years after I reported on Uganda's so-called Kill-the-Gays Bill--inspired by Americans--it has finally passed. No death penalty; "just" life imprisonment, and a license for vigilantes. This week India, home to a far more vibrant LGBT community than Russia's, went a step further and recriminalized homosexuality. It's time to recognize that a global homophobic movement has emerged. Each country is distinct; but the rhetoric is strikingly similar. I've reported firsthand on this from Uganda, Russia, Kenya, and the U.S. I keep coming across the same crooked statistics, the same obsession with Soros money, the same conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia. It's not a conspiracy. I'll say it again: It's not a conspiracy. It's worse. It's a movement, a monstrous one.