Coming out of the closet, the write way

Reading has been a true companion and besides other things I enjoy reading works that explore the many facets of homosexuality. I read Quarantine by Rahul Mehta recently. The book is a collection of gay theme stories. The author has accumulated some interesting short stories of Indian-American gay men who shed their pretensions and allow their sexuality to come out of the closet.

These are real life issues, yet they take a candid course.

And, of course, there is Armistead Maupin’s work, Tales of the City that was first published as a series in the San Francisco Chronicle. Call it a classic or the most widely read work on the subject, it is one-of-a-kind.

Published as a series of seven novels between 1978 to 2007, the books present a slice of San Francisco, and they also stands witness to the life and times of the gay community during that period. Realistic to the core, Armistead’s thoughts ride high on humour. They remain an amazing and completely engrossing peace of work. What sets a veteran Armistead or the new kid on the block, Rahul, stand out, is their handling of the issue in focus. No heavy duty stuff here, they convey their message in the most effortless manner. Yet the impact of the message doesn’t lose steam in their casual approach.

Full report here Deccan Chronicle

Rahul Mehta's Quarantine is a slice of gay life

Rahul Mehta’s brassy debut short story collection Quarantine unravels the lives of openly gay Indian-American men — men who are strident in their sexuality, not hiding in pseudo marriages or behind the guise of bisexuality. However, that doesn’t prevent them from being damaged by the various complexities of life — infidelity, heartburn, shady gigolos, past lovers or small-minded relatives.

On his 21st birthday, Rahul came out to his mother about his sexual preference. Now, years later, was this book his way of coming out to the world? “No, I never thought of this book as a coming out (although, in effect, it is kind of functioning that way when it comes to my relatives in India, who, unlike my relatives in America, don’t know that I’m gay),” says US-based Rahul, who is a lecturer in English at Alfred University. “But that’s certainly not why I wrote the stories. Instead, the book came from a desire to tell stories. In the end, I hope that the stories speak.”

With the camp classic Dostana and the recent Supreme Court ruling, does he see the emergence of a stronger gay-themed genre in Indian pop culture? “I hope so. And I hope that we continue to see more and more realistic representations of LGBT characters rather than reductive stereotypes. I think it’s so important in helping us move toward a more tolerant and socially-just society,” he says.

Full report here DNA

‘I've always been a writer'

With his first short story collection, Quarantine, being released recently, Rahul Mehta talks about sexuality, writing and acceptance.

Rahul Mehta's short-story collection Quarantine is about young gay men and their relationships with their families and lovers. Written with unusual tenderness and insight, the book represents a coming out of sorts for Mehta, a U.S.-based lecturer whose relatives in India don't yet know that he is homosexual.

When did you first develop an interest in writing, and specifically creative writing?
I've always been a writer. Even when I was 13 or 14, I was telling people that I was going to be a writer. In ninth grade once, we had to do a research project on a career that we were interested in. When we had to submit our proposals for our projects, I chose “writer”, and my teacher wrote back, “That's not a career. Choose something else.” So I shadowed an advertising executive.

To be fair to my teacher, I don't think she was necessarily trying to discourage me. I think she was just trying to get me to be practical, to save me from a difficult path. Much later, in grad school, one of my professors said a similar thing. She said she always tells her students who want to become writers, “If you can do something else, do it. If you can't: God help you, and welcome.”

Full report here Hindu

Not just gay writing

The week I start making notes for this essay is the same week my mother is reading for the first time the manuscript for my short story collection, Quarantine...,” Rahul Mehta writes in an essay, “Coming Out”, just after the publication of this debut collection.

“What I didn’t say then was that I, in fact, don’t want (my parents) to read it. And now that my mother is, I am terrified. I am worried that she will object to the family stories I have stolen and altered and bent to suit my purposes. I am worried that she won’t understand what ‘fiction’ means, and that every time she reads a passage in which a young, gay Indian-American man is having sex (and there is, in fact, a fair amount of sex in the book), that she will think it is me: me having rough sex in an alley, me masturbating in the back of the family car, me having unprotected sex in a loft in New York with a one-night stand.”

More, almost, than the nine stories in Quarantine, this essay marks the pleasures and pitfalls of Rahul Mehta’s writing. This is one of the most surprising collections I’ve read in recent months: honest, spare, moving in the tenderness with which he chronicles the fault-lines and the epiphanies of relationships, but narrow in its scope and ambitions.

Full report here Business Standard

Geography is history

Two books that reveal the international Indian. One shows how to do it right...

After the exit: Rahul Mehta's Quarantine

Most Indian fiction in English in the last two decades falls under what is disdainfully referred to in literary circles as “mango pickle” writing. These are elaborately written stories of being raised in an archetypal corner of exotic India, of walking through paddy fields, lying awake in the festering summer heat and the haunting memory of grandmother’s cooking. Smack your lips a last time, because mango pickle stories are now on the wane.

Much like our peripatetic countrymen, Indian writing has also gone places. The works of two new authors releasing this month augment this trend. The first is Rahul Mehta’s Quarantine, a book of nine short stories about gay Indian Americans. In Mehta’s world, the big story is not about coming out of the closet; it is what happens after the grand exit. His characters are cast adrift from the original American dream of big money, big house and big car. They inhabit cockroach-ridden apartments with dirty linoleum floors and have complicated relationships with other men. None of his protagonists long for India or an idea of India, they are American, comfortably ensconced in both their nationality and sexuality. Sure, there is anxiety about their family’s acceptance of their homosexuality, but it is societal, not cultural.

The script-turned-book: Manisha Lakhe's The Betelnut Killers

Manisha Lakhe’s The Betelnut Killers begins with detective Franklin D. Wade walking into a sanatorium in Portland, Oregon, US. For the rest, the book shifts to the home of Chimanbhai Shah, a Gujarati who runs an Indian shop. When Supriya, a hottie who was Shah’s assistant, starts her own store on the other side of the mall, Shah feels the “heat” of the competition. The Shah family, determined to get rid of Supriya, hatches a plan to bring Osmanbhai, a Mumbai don, to the US. But of course, things go wrong from the start.

Lakhe lived in Portland and she knows the topography of the place well. Also on cue are some of her observations about Indian Americans. What lets Betelnut Killers down is what comes across as Lakhe’s contempt for Indian Americans such as Shah. She caricatures them to such an extent that it is impossible for the reader to care about the plot.

Full report here Mint

Gay men in grey tales

Rahul Mehta's debut collection of short stories, Quarantine, launches in India this month. In simple, fluid prose, Mehta weaves intimate tales of ‘ordinary' Indian-Americans trying to find meaning in their lives and relationships. Many of his characters are gay men, who appear to have come to terms with their sexuality a long time ago. Thus, ‘gayness' is part of every story's normal landscape. Mehta, the son of Gujarati immigrants from Mumbai, was born and bred in Virginia and teaches English at Alfred University in New York state. He talks storytelling and sexuality with Amit Bhattacharya by email. 

Your stories portray family dynamics among Indian immigrants in the US with great intimacy. How autobiographical are they?
The work is certainly shaped by personal experience (but) I would definitely resist any attempt to characterize it as "autobiographical". The work is definitely fiction, not memoir.

Gay relationships are a common thread in your stories. In some of them, parents are comfortable with their son's homosexuality. Does that accurately reflect attitudes within the Indian-American community?
I'm not sure the Indian-American community as a whole is any more accepting of homosexuality than similar communities in India. In fact, in some ways, Indian communities in America might be even more conservative than in India. There is a perception that many Indian immigrants from the first big wave of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s still cling to an idea of "Indian values" that is essentially 50 years out-of-date. However, I've been very fortunate that all of the people in my life – my parents, my brother, my uncles, aunts, cousins, and my parents' family-friends – have been incredibly supportive, not just of my being gay, but of my being a writer, my choosing a path that may be different from the standard stereotype of the Indian-American doctor or engineer or banker.

Full interview here Times of India