The Gay Archipelago is the first book-length exploration of the lives of gay men in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation and home to more Muslims than any other country. Based on a range of field methods, it explores how Indonesian gay and lesbian identities are shaped by nationalism and globalization. Yet the case of gay and lesbian Indonesians also compels us to ask more fundamental questions about how we decide when two things are "the same" or "different." The book thus examines the possibilities of an "archipelagic" perspective on sameness and difference. Tom Boellstorff examines the history of homosexuality in Indonesia, and then turns to how gay and lesbian identities are lived in everyday Indonesian life, from questions of love, desire, and romance to the places where gay men and lesbian women meet. He also explores the roles of mass media, the state, and marriage in gay and lesbian identities. The Gay Archipelago is unusual in taking the whole nation-state of Indonesia as its subject, rather than the ethnic groups usually studied by anthropologists. It is by looking at the nation in cultural terms, not just political terms, that identities like those of gay and lesbian Indonesians become visible and understandable. In doing so, this book addresses questions of sexuality, mass media, nationalism, and modernity with implications throughout Southeast Asia and beyond.

DIVAn anthropological examination of non-normative male sexuality outside of the "West," using Indonesia as a case study./div

The author, a gay Indonesian who feels he is "not much of a looker," immigrates to the USA and is inundated with shirtless joggers, same-sex public displays of affection, and the constant drive to psychoanalyze. In this poignant, witty, flippant, and trenchant collection of personal essays the author recounts his and two friends' paths to cross-cultural gay marriage and adjusting to very new lives in the USA. Yuska Lutfi Tuanakotta came from Indonesia to San Francisco in 2011 to study dance and creative writing, has two MFAs in Writing, has presented work at AWP, and was a 2014 Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow.

"koitz Gay Fire Island: It's Good to be Us'", also known as "Gay Fire Island" covers 14 summers of queer life on the two mostly gay and lesbian communities of Fire Island. The photographs Koitz presents in this book come from his work in both Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines, where for years he has documented local events, big and small, such as the Invasion of the Pines, the Pines party or the Underwear party. In addition to this public aspect, his friendships in both communities have given him exceptional access to capture private moments that define, always in Koitz's revealing and highly individual perspective, the singular atmosphere found only in Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines. Koitz continues in a distinguished line of tradition-challenging Fire Islanders like visual artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening, who, in their collaborative work under the name PaJaMa, also explored the beauty of the human figure in the stark, almost austere landscape of sea, sky and sand. What makes these photographs so celebratory is that they capture the spirit that has everyone welcoming the next ferry, the spirit that makes some of us dress in drag, or as pixies, or as house-blessing nuns, the spirit that allows some of us to dress as a framed Mona Lisa at happy hour and some of us to undress in places where we might otherwise have stayed covered up. A crowd at Low Tea, captured from above with fading light and a long exposure, looks as graceful and slippery as a school of koi. A pair of go-go boys, dancing in the foreground as Valley of the Dolls is projected onto a sheet behind them, looks simultaneously like dolls before giants and giants before dolls. A pack of friends wandering through the Meat Rack at night becomes an impromptu birthday party that is transformed, through Koitz's lens, into a stolen moment from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Gay Archipelago is the first book-length exploration of the lives of gay men in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation and home to more Muslims than any other country. Based on a range of field methods, it explores how Indonesian gay and lesbian identities are shaped by nationalism and globalization. Yet the case of gay and lesbian Indonesians also compels us to ask more fundamental questions about how we decide when two things are "the same" or "different." The book thus examines the possibilities of an "archipelagic" perspective on sameness and difference. Tom Boellstorff examines the history of homosexuality in Indonesia, and then turns to how gay and lesbian identities are lived in everyday Indonesian life, from questions of love, desire, and romance to the places where gay men and lesbian women meet. He also explores the roles of mass media, the state, and marriage in gay and lesbian identities. The Gay Archipelago is unusual in taking the whole nation-state of Indonesia as its subject, rather than the ethnic groups usually studied by anthropologists. It is by looking at the nation in cultural terms, not just political terms, that identities like those of gay and lesbian Indonesians become visible and understandable. In doing so, this book addresses questions of sexuality, mass media, nationalism, and modernity with implications throughout Southeast Asia and beyond.

In The Made-Up State, Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, who compose one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty. The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.