Gay Rights Victory in India

Gay rights activists in India won a major victory today when the Delhi high court overturned a 148-year-old colonial era law criminalizing homosexuality. The BBC reports that the ruling "promises to change the discourse on sexuality in a largely conservative country, where even talking about sex is largely taboo." For a glimpse at homosexual life in India in an earlier era, readers may want to check out our new translation of stories by Pandey Bechan Sharma titled Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Homoeroticism. Published under the pseudonym "Ugra," in 1927, the stories were first work of Hindi fiction to focus on male same-sex relations, and its publication sparked India’s first public debates about homosexuality.  An introduction by Ruth Vanita places the stories and their author in a historical context.