How to Be a Real Gay

Graeme Reid is director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch in New York, USA. He has conducted research, taught and published extensively on gender, sexuality, LGBT issues, and HIV/AIDS. Before joining Human Rights Watch in 2011, Reid was the founding director of the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa, a researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research and a lecturer in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at Yale University. An anthropologist by training, Reid received a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Reid is the author of Above the Skyline: The Reverend Tsietsi Thandekiso and the founding of an African Gay Church, an ethnographic study of the early years of an African, gay Pentecostal-style Christian community in Johannesburg.

It is beautifully written up in a style which makes for entertaining reading and this book is, to my mind, a hybrid genre of oral history, life-stories and participating observations. - Ena Jansen Reid has woven together theory, method, research results and personal observations in an attractive way ... Throughout the book he discusses and tests theories. He does not put down the great story of the history of sexuality in South Africa in a dry way in broad terms, but embeds the most important events in a story. - Gert Hekma