Description
Never a shrinking violet, Hoshang Merchant came out of the closet early in his youth. A bard, a teacher, and a lover who has lived many lives, he is the quintessential gay who once cross-dressed and yet defies categorization. In Secret Writings, he recounts his extraordinary life and splendid experiences across countries and cultures. His story is about the prejudice and neglect that are part of everyday gay life and how he channelled his despair into creating poetry. He quotes Rumi, Ghalib, and Mir and writes with searing honesty about his long and short love affairs, his ‘improbable’ sex life as both an initiator and a yielding partner, and his inner turmoil. Sex becomes love, and love becomes poetry in his writing. Merchant yells at the moral guardians of law and culture, asks uncomfortable questions, and shocks his readers. This rare book opens a window to the myriad worlds of an avant-garde.
ISBN 978-0199465965
Hoshang Merchant is India’s pre-eminent voice of gay liberation. Born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business family in Bombay, India, he graduated in 1968 with a major in English and a minor in the culture of India. On his mother’s side, he descends from a line of preachers and teachers.
Hoshang holds a master’s from Occidental College, Los Angeles, USA. At Purdue University, Indiana, USA, he specialized in the renaissance and modernism. After leaving Purdue in 1975, Merchant attended the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Centre, Massachusetts, USA, and lived and taught in Heidelberg, Iran, and Jerusalem, where he was exposed to various radical student movements of the Left.
He has studied Buddhism at the Tibetan Library, Dharamshala, India, and Islam in Iran and Palestine. Since 1979, seventeen of his books of poetry have been published. He recently retired from the University of Hyderabad, India, after twenty-six years of teaching.
