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Taunted As A 'Sissy Boy,' Siddharth Dube Shares His Life Story In New Memoir

The public health advocate came of age in India when homosexuality was outlawed. He reflects on his experiences in An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex.
Siddharth Dube, a longtime public health advocate, has written a memoir: <em>An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex.</em>

He says he knows what it's like to live the life of an outcast.

Siddharth Dube came of age as a gay man in India in the 1990s — a time when a law dating back to 1864, Section 377, criminalized homosexuality, calling it an "unnatural offense." (The law was struck down by India's Supreme Court in September 2018.)

Now a specialist in poverty and public health policy, Dube has written a memoir, An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex.

The book is not just about his own quest to find love and societal acceptance. It's also an account of the activism of India's marginalized sex workers and LGBT community as they battled violations of their human rights in the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic — having blood drawn without consent, for example.

A graduate of Tufts University, the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and the Harvard School of Public Health, Dube has worked and consulted for the

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