Male commercial sex workers in India. Conspiracy of silence?

[Guest guest]

Dear All

I am a retired Britisn social worker/social work educator spending most of the

year in India. For the last ten years of my working life I was training around

social work and social policy implications of the epidemic. I also did training

around preventive work. In the past I have done a little bit of stuff around

the epidemic in India but purely from a personal interest point of view. I have

been a member of this group for a while mainly to keep vaguely in touch with my

old interest.

One thing that has struck me over all this time is the almost wilful denial of

the existence of male commercial sex workers within Indian society. All

references to commercial sex workers refer to " she " or " her " , never to " he " or

" him " . In Britain I lived and worked in a large metropolitan area where male

commercial sex workers were a target of our preventive work strategies as much

as female workers. There may have been numerically fewer of them but they were

still a necessary focus of our endeavours. Male commercial sex workers are

probably on average younger than their female colleagues and so abuse prevention

was also a necessary focus. Dealing with a 14 year old boy who has been earning

his living in this way for 4 years and then tests positive is difficult but

became part of my reality for a while. At times my colleagues and I were also

called upon to negotiate between the male workers and the female workers over

" territorial disputes. "

In 1997 when I was in India for a holiday and doing a little light research I

asked a prominent epidemiologist here, now dead, about male workers and he

hastily changed the subject. I know there are male commercial sex workers in

India as I have been approached by some over the years of either visiting here

or living here. I get the feeling that there is a conspiracy of silence on this

issue and I wonder why - I would love to be enlightened.

Best wishes - Rod Daldry

E-mail: <daldry@...>

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[Guest guest]

I think that there is now a fair amount of discussion around male sex-workers

and they form an explicit 'target' group for the NGO's working in the context

of both sexual and masculine cultures. However, bio-medicine has never been

able to deal fully with cultural and social complexity, so the denial in those

circles is not entirely unexpected; and bio-medicine, we should remember ,

continues to be the dominant force in discussions about 'health'.

Though I expect that even here things are changing, just as there is greater

acknowledgement of non-heterosexual cultures in India in the 'mainstream'

press. In terms of scholarly work -- by medical anthropologists, and

anthropologists in general, for example -- the body of research is steadily

growing.

Best wishes,

Sanjay Srivastava

E-mail: <sanjays@...>

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[Guest guest]

I thought the suggestion was that 'commercial' shouldn't be used. I think

this is a suggestion worth thinking about, though, on the other hand (and

among things), its use also highlights the fact of equivalence between

'sex-workers' and 'non-sex-workers'.

Sanjay

E-mail: sanjays@...

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