ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the view that being gay is a personal, social, and cultural phenomenon that has multiple implications in people's lives. It demonstrates that being gay goes beyond discourses of sexuality and gender and reaches to realms of political, socio-economic, religious, legal, psychological, and global significance. Some stories narrated might resonate with other LGBTQIA+ people's experiences of feeling, exploring, and struggling for being part of a population that has been discriminated against, disadvantaged, colonised, and often oversimplified and understood only in terms of our desire. Studies that used to see gay life as a progression of stages with particular milestones and used those models to explain and predict gay men's sexual behaviour are now finding in qualitative studies voices from the inside; voices from the native experts who might not find themselves represented in those studies.
