On Becoming a Male Sex Worker in Mysore

Robert Lorway Department of Community Health Sciences University of Manitoba Sushena Reza-Paul Department of Community Health Sciences University of Manitoba Akram Pasha Adarsha (Mysore-Based Male Sex-Work Collective) On Becoming a Male Sex Worker in Mysore: Sexual Subjectivity, “Empowerment,” and Community-Based HIV Prevention Research Growing public health attention has been placed on the HIV vulnerability of males who sell sex to males in India. However, there is little research that outlines the trajectories through which males come to be involved in practicing sex work in India. Locating “male sex work” within a vibrant social, political, and erotic landscape, this article explores the intertwining of “sexual subjectivity” and “sex work.” The authors refer to 70 sexual life histories generated from research conducted in Mysore to unsettle dominant public health notions that regard male sex work as rooted solely in poverty or as a decontexualized “behavioral risk factor.” Such perspectives are countered by demonstrating how male sex work in Mysore encompasses a complex interplay between self-realization, sexual desire, social interaction, and public health discourse. Local conceptualizations of selfhood are discussed to suggest the limitations of prevailing empowerment discourses that advance Western notions of individuality. Keywords: [male sex work, HIV prevention, Indian homosexualities, subjectivity, community-based research] Interviewer (community researcher and sex worker): How did you become involved in Dhandha [sex work]? Respondent (32-year-old male sex worker): I could have been 10 or 12 years old. I used to hang out with the girls all the time . . . draw rangoli and go with them to wash the vessels. All the feelings of my heart were that of a girl. . . . During my puberty, I was spotted by the boys. I looked like an object of lust in their eyes. They tried to make out with me. Not that they just tried, it happened. Thus I got into this line around my 13th or 14th year. MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 142–160, ISSN 0745C 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights 5194, online ISSN 1548-1387.  reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1387.2009.01052.x 142 Male Sex Workers in Mysore 143 My first time was very sexy. I used to be 10 or 12 years old. If anyone paid me ten rupees, I would get it done between my thighs. Or I would ask for a chocolate or a sweet and let them do me. When you are young you would need the eats not the money. Sexual minority rights organizations have delivered targeted HIV-prevention programs to males who have sex with males (MSM) in India since the early 1990s. However, it is only more recently that the international public health scientific community has come to acknowledge the alarming HIV vulnerability of MSM in India (UNAIDS 2006:30). This recognition relates to the high HIV prevalence, ranging between 12 and 18 percent, found among MSM [mainly STI (sexually transmitted illness) clinic attendees] in the large urban centers of Mumbai, Chennai, Pune, and Bangalore (Go et al. 2004; Gupta et al. 2006; Hernandez et al. 2006; Ramesh 2007; Shinde et al. 2003).1 As a consequence, public health scientists have increasingly placed attention on the sexual risk-taking behavioral patterns of MSM in India (Dandona et al. 2005; Go et al. 2004; Setia et al. 2006). Dandona et al. (2006) conclude, from a large sample of MSM in Andhra Pradesh, that selling sex is not only widely practiced but also is a significant “risk factor” in the transmission of HIV “within and outside” MSM communities. When compared against a similarly large sample of women selling sex, they determined that males were “at a much higher risk” of acquiring and transmitting HIV (Dandona et al. 2006). These same authors therefore assert that men who sell sex warrant significant attention within broader HIV-prevention programs (also see Shinde et al. 2009). Yet, there is little research that outlines the trajectories through which males come to be involved in selling sex in India (Khan 1999 is a notable exception here). By locating “male sex work” within a vibrant social, political, and erotic landscape, this article explores the intertwining between sexual–gender difference and transactional sex exemplified in the interview excerpt introduced above. Specifically, we refer to some of the findings from a research project conducted in the South Indian city of Mysore to interrogate what is often taken for granted in public health literature pertaining to male sex work: that it is rooted solely in poverty or that it can be understood as an objective, “behavioral risk factor” without reference to social or cultural context.2 By highlighting a set of narratives generated from a community-based research project connected to a larger HIV intervention, we counter such perspectives by demonstrating how the exchange of sex for money and other material items between males in Mysore, in addition to providing a significant source of financial income, encompasses a complex temporal interplay among self-realization, social interaction, sexual desire, and public health discourse. In this article “male sex work,” then, is not defined as strict, predictable, rationalized exchanges, because this definition seems to fade amid the complexities of narratives such as the one presented above. Rather, an understanding of male sex work, in the case of our study, requires examination of the subjectivities and social relations that form within the discursive terrain where “sex work,” “sexual risk,” and “selfempowerment” assemble under the banner of epidemic prevention. In other words, this article attempts to reveal how the category “male sex worker” allows certain individuals to remember their sense of sexual–gender difference into unfolding narratives of becoming for the purpose of political mobilization (even in instances 144 Medical Anthropology Quarterly when participants claim not to understand entirely how or why they became a sex worker).3 Modernist health promotion discourses of self-possession form an influential cultural interpretive backdrop here. Yet, running across our participants’ narrative is a consistent (although tacit) notion of self that stands in contrast to Western, autonomous, and bounded notions of individuality—the self is perceived as being far more socially permeable (Gellner 1999:435). We tease out this distinction by referring to anthropological debates concerning South Asian notions of self (or the purported lack thereof; Sökefeld 1999). Carefully considering local ways of thinking and feeling about the self in relation to sex work, we argue, is crucial for designing appropriate HIV interventions. Without such attention, empowerment initiatives, which have become an imperative within HIV-intervention policy for sex workers in India, may prove ineffective given their current emphasis on liberal, individualistic notions of self-determination. Sexual Subjectivity and MSM in India The authors employ the term sexual subjectivity in place of sexual identity, following recent anthropological approaches to the study of sexuality in health development (Boyce 2007; Nguyen 2005), to avoid the suggestion that sexual desire is a fixed property of the individual—either permitted or prohibited its true expression by larger social and juridical forces (Foucault 1990). Thinking through sexual subjectivity allows us to move beyond the notion of a primordial sexual self or a natural, biologically determined essence that is ontologically prior to culture and society. We follow a poststructuralist reading of sexual subjectivity—the sense of one’s interior experience of gender–sexual difference—by seeing it as constituted in the discursive regimes of power that pattern the uneven relationships among individuals, communities, and institutions (Foucault 1990). Particularly germane to our study is the “relationship of individuals with themselves” (Cruikshank 1999; Dean 1999; Rose 1999) cultivated by public heath discourses that compel individuals to reflect on the nature of their sexual being. Intended as morally neutral, public health scientists have introduced the term sex worker through public health interventions in an attempt to mitigate the social stigma that encircles the lives of people selling sex. However, our participants find moral salience in the term as it allows them to “discover” interconnections among their same-sex desires, gender nonconformity, selfhood, and various economic aspects of their everyday lives. Furthermore, the fashioning of selfhood through the narrative of “becoming a sex worker” extends beyond the pragmatic relationship of participating in public health programs, as it also “helps to construct both social and sexual networks” (Nguyen 2005).4 This article builds on the work of anthropologists who chronicle the emergence of “indigenous” Indian same-sex sexual identities at multiple knowledge-production sites that are transnational and transhistorical in dimension (Boyce 2007; Cohen 2005).5 Boyce (2007:197) aptly describes how kothi (effeminate male) subjectivities are socially iterated through both the dissemination of sexual identities in HIV-prevention work and the engagement with and reassertion of those identities by local actors. Conceiving sexual selfhood, according to Boyce, occurs at the intersection where contradictory discursive practices place kothis at the center of Male Sex Workers in Mysore 145 community-based prevention while simultaneously rendering them as fixed cultural subjects within a typological scheme that can be traced to Western positivistic public health practices (Boyce 2007:196–198; Reddy 2005). As such, Boyce demonstrates the production of kothi subjectivities as being neither a fully conscious, rational process nor a passive acquiescence to the forces of structural violence. Our elaboration of “male sex work” in Mysore, centering on narratives of desire, being, and becoming, similarly intends to provide a nuanced version of the relationship among agency, structure, and concepts of self that tends not to be afforded in mainstream HIV-prevention discourse. Public health empowerment programs tend to privilege notions of a reflexive, independent, and bounded self (Lupton 1995:58–59). To confront one’s HIV vulnerability, health promotion empowerment discourse directs citizens to recognize the potentialities of individuality and compels them to harness the resources of selfhood (choice, control, and responsibility). However, the narratives of “becoming a male sex worker” produced in our project raise significant questions about the commensurability of such empowerment discourses with local conceptualizations of self. According to interviews with male sex workers, ‘self’ is understood to be socially produced, thus contributing to the question that scholars have long debated concerning personhood in South Asian cultural contexts: is there a concept of an autonomous and integrated self? Louis Dumont (1972) and McKim Marriott (1976) drew considerable criticism for purporting a radical difference between South Asian notions of the person (as socially enmeshed) and Westerns concepts of the individual (as a bounded, discrete entity). Indian ideologies of the person, Dumont (1972) asserts, devalue “the individual” in favor of social collectives that are enshrined in hierarchical religious notions of caste. Emphasizing transactions and relatedness, Marriott (1976:109– 113) insists that Hindu conceptualizations of personhood are more aptly described as porous, socially interconnecting “dividuals”; the nature of the person is continually transforming, absorbing, and giving out influences through the exchange of heterogeneous particles (e.g., knowledge, food, money) between actors. Indian thought about transaction differs from much of western sociological and psychological thought in not presuming the separability of actors from actions. By Indian modes of thought, what goes on between actors are the same connected processes of mixing and separation that goes on within actors. Actors’ particular natures are thought to be results as well as causes of their particular actions (karma). Varied codes of action or codes for conduct (dharma) are thought to be naturally embodied in actors and otherwise substantialized in the flow of things that pass among actors. [Marriott 1976:109–110] Although subsequent anthropological studies contend that an autonomous self is recognized in South Asian society (McHugh 1989; Mines 1988; Morris 1978; Sökefeld 1999) and that the theories of Dumont and Marriott are overdrawn, they maintain the distinctiveness of South Asian notions of selfhood. The intent in this article is neither to reopen nor settle this larger theoretical conversation by weighing in on one side or the other with our study. However, 146 Medical Anthropology Quarterly we do borrow the idea of the “self enmeshed in the world” as an analytic frame that helps to make sense of a set of narratives that otherwise confound discourses of fixed sexual types that currently proliferate through HIV-prevention projects in India (Boyce 2007; Reddy 2005). In particular, we examine the following recurring theme on becoming a male sex worker: transactional sex between men usher in understandings of sexual desire in ways that unite sexual conduct (practice) and subjectivity (i.e., one’s sexual nature is considered to be formed by what one does and by what one has had done to them). Although many of our participants recounted their induction into sex work as occurring at a young age and at the hands of older men, the experience was described neither as altering, damaging, or corrupting some prior sexual self-integrity nor as having inhibited the potential expression of a “true” self. Rather, they described their entry into sex work as a socially unfolding experience of transactions, sexual desire, and self-recognition. Clarifying “Sex Work” This new term “sex work” seems to carry a sense of choice, suggesting that sex work is just another job, something that can be left at any time. It oversimplifies what is a complex issue and dehumanizes the struggles that the vast majority of male and female sex workers go through just to survive. . . . For most it is a practice enforced by poverty, degradation, homelessness, hunger and powerlessness, a form of slavery to economic, social and cultural deprivation, stigmatization and marginalization. [Khan 1999:196] The authors indeed strongly acknowledge that the practice of selling sex between males in Mysore occurs within a cultural context often characterized by extreme forms of physical violence, exploitation, and stigma. The community research team and most of our research participants described incidents of regular sexual harassment, including coerced condomless anal sex at the hands of police officers and rowdies (men who extort money and “free” sex from sex workers). There are, however, important reasons why we have chosen to use the terms sex work and sex worker in reference to our study: first, because of its political significance to our participants. The males who participated as community researchers and interviewees in Mysore have not merely adopted the term male sex worker through their affiliation with public health programs but redeploy it as a political identity in their advocacy strategies outlined during meetings held by collectives and communitybased organizations they have formed. Also, many feel strongly that selling sex is a form of work that should be legitimately recognized and respected in Indian society like other forms of work. Although they certainly recognize that sex work, like other kinds of labor, is subject to exploitation, they believe that it should and can be made safer. Second, there is a strong overlap between sex work–related networks and social networks, and as such, many participants did not express a desire to leave sex work, claimed to enjoy it, and found it self-affirming, even while they struggled to cope with the violence that surrounded its enterprise. Thus, because of how the term sex worker is used to invoke a sense of solidarity in local social movements in Mysore, our use of the term is commensurable with local action that strives to Male Sex Workers in Mysore 147 transform the reality of violence, exploitation, and HIV vulnerability that surround its daily practice. Methodology Setting and Project Overview The project was four and a half months long and conducted in Mysore city in the South India state of Karnataka. Although Mysore is located in close proximity to the capital city of Bangalore, increasingly sharing the spillover from the rapid IT expansion, it is far less cosmopolitan. With approximately 820,000 people, daily urban life is much slower than Bangalore and people are more tightly interconnected through kinship networks (patrilineal castes) that can be traced to the surrounding villages and talukas (subdistricts). Mysore, unlike Bangalore and other major urban centers in India, has no nightclubs or discos where MSM can congregate; instead MSM are confined to more secretive public meeting spots such as parks, toilets, bus stands, and lodges (small hotels) under looming threats from police and rowdies.6 However, with the recent improvement in the road system between Mysore and Bangalore, participants can now more readily travel between the two cities. Several of the men who participated in our study regularly traveled to Bangalore, wearing saris (“dressed as hijras”) to conduct basti work (blessing shops) in the mornings while in the evenings returning to Mysore to sell sex at the bus stands wearing panthisatla (men’s clothing). In Mysore, our participants moved between various cruising locations and therefore differing contexts of sexual risk. Our study proceeded under the larger umbrella of the HIV-intervention project formed by the Indo–Canadian partnership involving the University of Manitoba and Karnataka Health Promotion Trust (KHPT), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition to producing qualitative knowledge that could help explain how MSM come to be vulnerable to HIV infection in their everyday lives, we sought to understand why, according to KHPT’s clinical statistics in Mysore, almost 50 percent of MSM contacted through community outreach programs were unwilling to access STI testing and treatment facilities. After a series of community consultations, we concluded that stigma was not only a significant barrier to accessing STI clinical services for MSM but it would also pose a major methodological hurdle to gathering sensitive information about HIV vulnerability, given the secrecy that enshrouds the sexual lives of MSM in Mysore. We reasoned that MSM community leaders were in an ideal position to gather information from their community, including those unwilling to attend an STI clinic, if provided with the necessary training in qualitative research. Moreover, there was a sizeable group of community leaders in Mysore who worked for and were affiliated with KHPT as well as the sexual minority rights NGOs known as Sangama and Geleya.7 When approached with the idea of being a significant force in carrying through a research project in their community, MSM leaders expressed considerable enthusiasm, claiming that it would be empowering for their community to contribute directly to the information-gathering processes, data analysis, and dissemination. They wanted, also, to be centrally involved in disseminating the findings to their community and to other MSM communities in Karnataka. Following this meeting, 148 Medical Anthropology Quarterly we developed a training program that took into account the existing knowledge, skills, and experiences of MSM leaders. These leaders had already possessed the skills to deliver safer-sex information in “hard to reach locations,” and many of the leaders had already participated in other kinds of research and community-based knowledge-creation activities.8 In September 2006, the training project formally began with the selection of community researchers, as recommended by the community advisory committee comprised of MSM leaders. In total, we selected 11 who spoke and read Kannada to conduct the interviews; one individual was chosen to interview participants who spoke Hindi; and three well-respected individuals were selected to assist with the interview recruitment process. In an effort to access a diverse sample, we chose interviewers who were connected to differing social networks (according to age, cruising location frequented, and economic status). The recruiters organized the training session schedules, booked the interview locations, ensured the receipt of honorariums, and organized transportation to the clinic for research participants who requested free health checkups. KHPT provided translation services for the training session; purchased audiotape recorders for the interviews; supplied the materials and meeting space for the training; and covered transportation costs to KHPT clinic for participants who wanted to receive testing and treatment for STIs. On the first day of the training, suspicion arose between MSM leaders in relation to their different NGO affiliations: some leaders were affiliated with organizations suspected of excluding male sex workers from their policies and programs. Initially two factions formed within the trainees, and they were unwilling to sit at the same table. These political inflammations finally began to subside, however, when an influential MSM leader and sex worker, respected by both groups, implored everyone to consider the needs of “the whole community,” which included both MSM and MSWs. The groups decided that they needed a name to instill a sense of unity and solidarity. Adarsha was chosen because of its positive meanings in Kannada: icon, idol, and role model. Overall, the interview training and data collection process took place over a six-week period, between September and October 2006. The first training session was completed in two weeks, while the recruitment of research participants and the booking of interviews took approximately one week. The recruitment of participants took place in parks, bus stops, the railway station, lodges, and major intersections where MSM regularly congregate. Recruitment overlapped with the regular community outreach rounds in which condoms and STI information were provided. Although the recruitment phase proceeded without impediment, one day was referred to as “slow” because of an incident of police harassment that took place the preceding evening; few MSM congregated at their regular meeting places that day. We also halted one of training sessions when one of the community members was severely beaten and sexually assaulted by rowdies. The 12 community researchers each conducted five to six in-depth interviews over a four-day period (for a total of 70 interviews). Interviews ranged from approximately 40 minutes to two hours. Originally, the research team allotted seven days for interviewing and aimed for a smaller sample size of 60 respondents. However, because of the community researchers’ enthusiasm and the strong rapport they already possessed with respondents, they were able to conduct more interviews Male Sex Workers in Mysore 149 within a shorter time frame. Furthermore, respondents spoke candidly with the community researchers during the interviews around the details of their sexual practice including sex work. The community research team chose a relatively inexpensive lodge (small hotel) as the location for the interviews because of its close proximity to the main cruising areas, KHPT, and other NGOs such as Galeya and Sangama. Moreover, the lodge was considered to be a discreet location for MSM and politically neutral, because it was unaffiliated with NGOs working with sexual minorities. This was an important consideration because the project strove to recruit participants who were unlikely to frequent such organizations. Furthermore, the chosen lodge was also ideal because the owner was considered to be “MSM-friendly,” was trusted by the wider MSM community, and provided a generous discount on the rooms. Six rooms were rented from October 16 until October 19. Five rooms were exclusively kept for conducting interviews. The sixth room was used for organizing the tapes, tape recorders, interview guides, and consent forms and for recording the interview times. More importantly, this room provided a safe space where MSM could socialize, share experiences, exchange information, and continue to talk after the interviews were completed. Training resumed around methods of data analysis—transcription coding and thematic analysis—using a sample of the interview transcripts.9 Under the guidance of the first and second author, the community research team identified themes and devised a coding scheme after analyzing seven sample transcripts. The research team also formulated a series of preliminary recommendations. In 2007, following the first author’s analysis of the remaining 63 transcripts, the community researchers reanalyzed 20 of the transcripts. We conducted several group analysis sessions, which led to revisions of the first author’s analysis. A summary of the findings were then put into an aural–visual presentation format and then presented by the community research team before more than 50 members of the MSM community in Mysore. Description of Respondents Twenty-six percent of respondents had never attended KHPT’s STI clinic. The age of respondents ranged from 18 to 40 years old; however, most were between the ages of 21 and 23 (mode = 20; mean 22). Seventy-three percent of respondents received income from sex work. (In part, this may be related to the networks to which the recruiters were connected and the purposive sampling technique they employed.) Of the 51 respondents involved in sex work, 63 percent received their main source of income from sex work. Interestingly, those who drew income from dhandha were not just from lower-level educational backgrounds; respondents with university diplomas, including bachelors and graduate degrees, also drew income from sex work (see Table 1). Only five respondents reported that they were unemployed and relied on sex work as their sole source of income; most drew additional income from other sources. For respondents with lower levels of formal education, sex work generally supplemented their meager wages derived from basti work (blessing shops), maintenance, agricultural labor, and selling vegetables, incense, and lottery tickets. Most 150 Medical Anthropology Quarterly Table 1. The Diverse Educational Backgrounds of Participants Practicing Sex Work Completed education N = 70 Sex work as Sex work as secondary No income from primary income source of income sex work N = 32 N = 19 N = 19 Bachelors-MA 18 PUC I and II 17 Std 10- SSLC 14 Std 7–9 9 No formal education-Std 5 12 7 9 8 2 6 2 4 4 5 4 9 4 2 2 2 Note. PUC = pre-university college; SSLC = school standard leave certificate; Std = standard/grade. respondents, practicing sex work with higher levels of education held relatively well-paying jobs in business, teaching, and computer–information technology and at NGOs, suggesting that survival and desperation were not at the heart of their practice of dhandha. The Moral Economies of Male Sex Work To set the stage for an analysis of how emergent sexual subjectivities intertwine with the practice of sex work, we first characterize the cultural field of transactional sex into which our participants became sexually inducted. Group analysis and informal conversations with male sex workers (incl. the community researchers) throughout the project indicated that moral economic practices governed sex work. Participants’ narratives generally confirmed this: they vividly described their exchanges of sex for money, food, lodging, and other material items with “clients” (panthis) as accommodating mutual affection and sexual pleasure. This does not deny the reality that participants and their family members financially rely on the material resources acquired from sex work, but the social relationships produced through selling sex, even those that were temporary, cannot be viewed as conditioned by the larger globalizing market rationalities that increasingly encroach on social life in Mysore. In fact, many of the transactions between sex workers and clients may be better understood in anthropological terms of “gift exchange” because sex-work interactions are often understood as manifestations of social relationships rather than “rational self-interested mercantile exchanges” (Godbout 1998:5–9; Godelier 1996; Mauss 1990). Furthermore, sex workers do not only receive gifts from clients but also give gifts to clients for whom they feel particular affection (not only to permanent partners). To reveal this aspect of male sex work, the community researchers felt strongly that the interview guide should include the following question: “Have you ever given or received gifts in exchange for sex?” Some of the responses to this question are presented below (all names are pseudonyms). Mahendra, who was 22 years old at the time of being interviewed, receives his primary source of income from sex work and blessing shops (basti work) while wearing a sari. During the interview, he discussed how he provides gifts of jewelry Male Sex Workers in Mysore 151 and food to secure the relationship with his permanent male partner, whom he affectionately refers to as his husband (although his partner is married to another woman). Such intimate economies, however, are not confined to Mahendra’s primary relationship. They actually flourish in his relationships with clients. M: Clients have given me bangles, saris, and earrings. They give me them with love and affection because I talk with them nicely and with love. They speak to me very nicely because I also enjoy sex with them with full pleasure, so they only come in search of me to have sex. If I speak to them in love only, it’s possible for me to have good relations with my clients. I: Is there any instance of giving and taking gifts when you go for sex? M: Yes, it has. As I have given and taken gifts at many instances. I: What type of gifts? M: If I need money then I will go for money as a gift and sometimes they will provide us with eatables like sweets and sometimes they give us dresses. Mahendra, like many others who were interviewed, certainly recognizes that sex work furnishes his livelihood. However, a moral economic logic underlies his narrative: gift exchange (receiving and giving) enhances intimacy between clients and sex workers and increases the value of the transactional sexual encounter, which in turn ensures the flow of money through repeat customers. By presenting Mahendra’s narrative, our attempt is not to imply that male sex workers in Mysore simply manipulate the affections of their clients for their own financial gain (particularly because many of our participants frequently offer gifts to and share sexual intimacy and pleasure with clients). The point that we want to emphasize, rather, is that our participants consistently describe an ideal moral form (an aesthetic) for practicing sex work that stands in contrast to more direct and socially detached commercial transactions. Moral economic principles are also at play when sex workers choose not to fix prices for the sexual acts they perform with clients. Although the following three participants rely on sex work as their primary source of income and state that poverty is a significant concern in their life, they leave it to the client to decide on the payment: No I am not greedy for money, but even I don’t say no to money, if my clients offer me. I never hesitate to take it, even if it is five or ten rupees also. If they give a hundred rupees also I will take it. [Rakesh, 30-year-old sex worker and incense vendor] I have gone to the hotel and will have lunch or provide lunch for him and have not demanded any money from them; but they will still put 50 or 100 rs into my pocket. There is no demand from my side. I don’t have any permanent partners . . . I don’t have any husbands as such. But if I love someone then I love to have sex with them . . . sometimes they will give me 50 to 500 rs also. [Venu, 35-year-old sex worker and wedding-canopy maker] 152 Medical Anthropology Quarterly Yes, for some customers who have had sex with me, I have given them some small gifts till one year. To maintain the relationship strongly, they give me a gold chain or ring on my birthday or some functions. [Sala, 24-year-old computer technologist] Many respondents also stated that if a client were very “smart looking” (physically attractive) then they would generally have sex with him without pay. Transactional sex thus offers a dual opportunity of drawing an income and expressing same-sex sexual desires. In the next section, we discuss how subjectivities arise to establish connections rather than separations between sexual desire and the practice sex work. On Becoming a Male Sex Worker The first author proposed the following introductory question for the interview guide: “Do you identify with any of the following terms: kothi, panthi, or doubledecker?10 If so please explain why.” However, the researchers asserted that their community would more likely respond to the introductory question “how did you come to this field or line [of work]?” They explained that they often posed this question—an indirect reference to sex work—on befriending someone in a cruising area. But if this research question referred to sex work, then why did all interviewees, including those who stated that they did not derive an income from selling sex, respond to the question with their accounts of sexual–gender self discovery?11 Initially, the first author considered the possibility that the question itself was somehow too ambiguous and, as a result, led to the conflation of sex work with sexual selfhood; but group discussions and informal conversations with male sex workers suggested otherwise. For instance, when several community researchers and participants informally asked the first author “where does the gay community in Canada normally go to practice sex work?” it became clearer how closely their sense of sexual being and community was entangled in the practice of sex work. This became further evident when participants described their early sexual experiences. Tilak remembers how money and clothing accompanied his first sexual encounter. I: How did you come to this field? T: One person who used to stay near my home watched me hanging out with women all the time and he used to call me. One day he took me, gave me his penis and asked me to suck it. Even though I refused, saying no, still he insisted saying “come on, come on, I will give you money.” He gave me money. As there was a desire in me too, I got it done. Then I realized that I could get money too. I had the desire to have sex since my young days. I was interested in it, but I had no guts to do it. When I went to college, I met a teacher in the train who used me. From then I started. A person whom I knew took me to his room and tried sex with me. Initially I was frightened, although I had the desire. After doing it, he presented a T shirt to me. [Tilak, 35-year-old sex worker] Male Sex Workers in Mysore 153 What we draw attention to is how sexual subjectivity emerges in the context of transactions. Tilak’s narrative interweaves descriptions of sexual desire with references to material gain. The promise of money offered by his neighbor helps to set up the sexual tension and thus serves as an important ingredient in the erotic intensity and pleasure he enjoys. Tilak’s statement “Then I realized that I could get money too” is also significant here. He claims that the exploration and enactment of his same-sex desires simultaneously open up an awareness of the economic returns for having sex with men. Put another way, Tilak regards his early same-sex sexual practices and desires as leading him to the field of sex work. Most of our participants echoed a similar causal relationship. When the community researcher asked 18-year-old Samir about his main source of income, he stated “sex work.” He relates his entry into sex work to childhood episodes in which he began to explore his same-sex sexual desires. I: In the beginning . . . how did you come to this occupation of sex work? S: When I looked at a person I wanted to have a physical relationship with him. I wanted to be one with him and it continued. I: At what age did it start? S: In my eleventh year. I: How did you acquire your first male partner? S: The first partner was very handsome to look at, I liked him, I felt like having sex with him all the time and that continued. . . . I enjoyed it when I had sex for the first time. I [then] had the desire to have sex with different people, so I am continuing to do dhandha [sex work] till today. According to this account, the unfurling of Samir’s same-sex sexual desires propels him along the inevitable path toward sex work. In general, participants’ narratives contained the following main themes: (1) sexual desire and pleasure, (2) gender nonconformity, and (3) social induction. Respondents utilized various combinations of these themes to construct a casual route to the practice of sex work. For example, 22-year-old Rani, who completed two levels of preuniversity college (PUC), attributed his sense of gender–sexual nonconformity and entry into sex work to the reactions and name calling of others: When I was studying at SSLC, my interest gradually started to grow on men, and then the people started to call me as “sangha” [male sex worker]. And meanwhile I started to lose interest in females and I started to apply lipstick, kajal powder to myself and also started to wear saris and slowly my interest grew on having sex with men only. People are the main reason for me to be in this field. When I was studying in 10th std., they started to call me as “sangha” [MSW] and gradually my interest started to turn on men only, rather than with women. For Rani, his sexual subjectivity is made by others in the way that they speak to and regard him. His portrayal of an unfolding sense of sexual–gender difference 154 Medical Anthropology Quarterly demonstrates his conceptualization of a socially permeable self. Although later in the interview he recalls how name calling upset him, he neither blamed others for becoming a sex worker nor bemoaned his arrival in the field. Interestingly, Rani does not express regret over what his life could have been, had he not been called names. Sudama also attributes the emergence of a sense of gender–sexual difference to name calling (and, like Rani, he equates becoming a feminine being with developing same-sex desires). Even though Sudama is quite poor and received far less formal education than Rani, sexual desire features prominently in his narrative of coming to the field: I had utter poverty at my home and also I had the intension of becoming MSW . . . also I met a person at the park and I got drawn towards him and told him that I would like to become like you, then he took me and made me wear a sari. I myself don’t know why this desire came in me, but whenever I used to walk on the road people use to call me as akka [sister] and even I used to feel, “why I am not like them.” One day when I was walking on the road, I took a lift from a man, but he took me to a park and indulged me in sex, and since then I have been in this sexual profession. [Sudama, 21-year-old basti and sex worker, emphasis added] Although Sudama only recently learned the acronym “MSW” after joining a sexual minority rights NGO, he uses the term to make sense of the history of how he became a sex worker. He understands his sexual initiation by an older man as marking the moment at which he enters the profession of sex work. Many participants claimed that they were “brought to the field” by adults, including relatives, while they were still young boys or during early adolesence (see also Asthana and Oostvogels 2001:712). When I was studying in 6th standard I had developed the character of a girl. During that time my walking style, my body structure all resembled a girl’s and once my own [adult] cousin had taken me to his room and had anal sex with me. During my childhood days I had received sweets as gifts and now I receive money, lockets, and golden ornaments as gifts. [Alok, 22-year-old sex worker] Through a human rights lens, such narratives of induction portray scenes in which consent and “the rights of the child” are clearly violated. Yet, however unequal these relationships appear with respect to age and sexual experience, our participants’ accounts do not read as though they had been victimized as young inductees. They do not express anxiety over the “exploitation” of their desires; nor do they purport that some sense of self-integrity has been damaged. In fact, the narratives are suggestive of pleasurable, erotic tensions between the sexually experienced and the naı̈ve individual. The embodiment of a different conceptualization of selfhood, one that is understood to be produced in and through social relations, proffers a contrasting narrative to Western testimonies of childhood sexual trauma. Male Sex Workers in Mysore 155 Discussion For most men and women who sell their bodies for cash, for clothing, for food, for shelter, it is their only option. —Khan, 1999 Although Kahn (1999:197, 209) does not altogether deny that selling sex may afford Indian men pleasure, affection, and sexual expression, his position, which remains firmly ensconced in the discourse of structural violence and survival sex, serves to deemphasize the significance of this dimension. It fails to account for the complex ways that social inequalities become entangled and iterate within local moral economic worlds (Reddy 2005:256) and subjectivities—the recognition of which is vital to the successful reception of community-based HIV interventions. On becoming a male sex worker in Mysore, neither “desperation” nor “survival” is the principle leitmotif. Instead the narratives echo a growing understanding of sexual–gender nonconformity that unfolds as the individual moves along an “inevitable” path to becoming a sex worker. This fatalistic notion is understandable when one considers that cruising spaces, places where transactional sex regularly occur, provide the field of possibilities for exploring one’s same-sex sexual desire in Mysore. And in this milieu, textured by interwoven intimate and material economies, sexual–gender difference and sex work become inexorably intertwined in emerging sexual subjectivities. What is significant about most of the narratives is that they rarely describe entering into sex work as a moment in which they consciously decide (or had to decide) to become a sex worker. It is the precipitation of bodily desires brought on by external, social influences that compels their entry. Marriott’s (1976) understanding of personhood—as uniting, rather than separating, “actors and actions”—helps to unravel the causal linkages made by participants between transactional sex and the constitution of the person. The notion of “karma,” in particular, is useful in understanding why our participants rarely expressed blame or regret in relation to “being made” a sex worker by others, and perhaps why they narrate even fearful moments of induction as bringing about sexual excitement, pleasure, and intimacy. Beyond supporting the theoretical articulations of scholars who purport the socially contingent quality of conceptions of selfhood in India, what relevance does this case study hold in relation to HIV-related empowerment work conducted on an ongoing basis in this region? First, we refer to the unintended effects of the dissemination of public health discourses of “sex work” in Mysore. In an effort to be less judgmental, the intention of deploying the discourse has been to shift focus from types of sexual beings (prostitutes) to something that people do (sex work). However, in a rather unexpected turn, local MSM have appropriated and reinterpreted this term as a way to think about and understand their sense of gender and sexual difference. The local meaning of sex work (or dhandha), undergirded by relational understanding of selfhood, allows respondents to put a range of personal historical events—involving sexual initiation, gender nonconformity, eroticism, fear, love, and the exchange of sex for money and material items—into a coherent narrative form. Furthermore, the consistency across narratives readily allows solidarity to develop, and the modifications made to the project by the community researchers affiliated 156 Medical Anthropology Quarterly with the larger public health project helped to foster this process of political mobilization. Following the group analysis (transcript coding and interpretation) of the narratives, Adarsha formally launched itself as a collective that supports the rights of male sex workers: they elected a president, secretary, and treasurer; they formulated an action plan based on the findings of this research project; and they enlisted a growing number of community members. They also established their collective as a wing of the larger sex worker community-based organization known as Ashodaya Samithi, which was initiated by KHPT and is now run by local sex workers (mostly female sex workers). Currently, Adarsha has begun to build political networks with “MSM” collectives in two other regions of Karnataka, placing “male sex worker health and human rights” at the center of their platform. And the narratives generated from our research project reiterate as testimonies within Adarsha’s political mobilization work. Thus, we must therefore view the narratives produced in this project, and the sexual subjectivities they suggest, as also located within the domain of tactics and political strategy (Nguyen 2005:247), where “men having sex with men” strive to amplify their influence within public health arenas by forging a political identity that accommodates transactional sex as a significant region within their sexual lives. Conclusion Notable strengths of the community-based approach taken in this project relates to the rapport that already exists between the community researchers and participants. Participants spoke candidly with the community research team about sexual practices within a relatively short timeframe. Outside researchers would have taken considerably longer to build the rapport needed to learn details around criminalized sexual behaviors. This process was also successful in the way it fed into local community mobilization efforts. However, there are inherent limitations in this approach that must be acknowledged. Because the community researchers selected participants from within their defined perimeters of “the community,” a significant gender–sexual perspective and set of trajectories are missing from our picture of transactional sex: the perspective of clients. How do they come to engage in transactional sex? What meanings does sex work hold, if any, for their understandings of sexuality? And how will empowerment projects that mostly engage feminine subjectivities affect the lives of men who neither engage in gender nonconformity nor align themselves with the political programs and identities that disseminate through sexual minority rights and public health NGOs? What is perhaps clear from this project is that public health practitioners conducting empowerment projects with male sex workers need to consider carefully the complexities among sex work, sexual subjectivity, and social relatedness. Given the ambiguities in gift exchanges, the flexible prices, and the overlapping sexual and social networks, empowerment projects that operationalize atomistic and entrepreneurial notions of self may be rejected by male sex-worker communities or they may produce tensions and fortify social divisions between sex workers and their clients. Without this consideration, the many panthis and other MSM who do not identify with sexual minority communities, who already pose a challenge to the Male Sex Workers in Mysore 157 reach of prevention efforts, may become further occluded from clinical services and health promotion programs. Notes Acknowledgments. We are grateful for the generous funding support provided by the International Centre for Infectious Diseases at the University of Manitoba and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grant #43136, Avahan, India AIDS initiative). Many thanks are also owed to John O’Neil, Stephen Moses, James Blanchard, and the health promotion teams at Ashodaya (sex-worker collective in Mysore), the Emmanuel Hospital Association, and Karnataka Health Promotion Trust for providing support throughout the study. 1. This prevalence range is significantly higher than India’s national average, which stands just below 1 percent (UNAIDS 2006). 2. This article follows on what Aggleton (1999) articulates regarding “men who sell sex” across diverse cultural contexts; that is, it may not be reducible to economic necessity because identity, desire, and pleasure may also be involved. 3. Problematizing the deployment of “indigenous” Indian homosexualities in public health programs, Boyce (2007:186–187) makes the point that “people rarely reflect on newly conceived forms of sexual subjectivity . . . rather, such categories are experienced as corresponding to who and what people understand themselves to be already” (2007:187). 4. In his study conducted in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Nguyen (2005) asserts that AIDSprevention discourses, which feature significantly in the reconstitution of a sexual modernity, provide substance for the renegotiation of sexual identities, offering new possibilities for socioeconomic mobility within the context of a failing postcolonial political economy. 5. Cohen (2005) outlines the discursive terrain in which contemporary “Indian” samesex sexual subjectivities emerge by referring to the heated rivalry that developed between London-born Shivananda Khan and Mumbia journalist Ashok Row Kavi, both of whom have been instrumental in initiating development projects that strive to improve the wellbeing of sexual minorities. A major bone of contention related to the deployment of the sexual-identity categories—kothi (effeminate male) and panthi (real man)—as “authentic” Indian homosexualities. Indeed, these terms have radiated from the human rights and HIV-prevention projects orchestrated by the sexual minority rights organization, the Naz foundation, founded by Khan. Cohen stated that he only heard these categories in north India, where he conducted his fieldwork, in the mid-1990s. 6. In the year following this study, the incidence of police violence declined because of negotiations that took place between the local sex-worker collective, Ashodaya, and the police. The community researchers were among the local leaders who were instrumental in initiating this process. 7. KHPT hired MSM community leaders on a part-time basis to work on the intervention as outreach educators and community mobilizers. Because they continued to practice sex work, most remained actively a part of the sociosexual networks of the wider sex-work community. 8. They had participated in survey research projects not only as respondents but also as contributors to the methodology. Unlike most of the female sex workers, many of the males were literate and had received some formal education. 9. All names were omitted from the transcripts. 10. Double-decker refers to a male who is sexually versatile—insertive or receptive during anal sex. This recently invented term has accompanied the proliferation of homosexual identity categories from HIV-prevention and human rights development projects in India over the last decade. 158 Medical Anthropology Quarterly The community research team decided not to include hijras as participants because they felt that hijras shared a different social network and it would be more appropriate if hijras themselves were trained to conduct research on their own community in a separate project. 11. Such candid responses, of course, relate to the positionality of the community researchers who shared the sociosexual networks of the research participants who were being interviewed. 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