In the months following September 11, 2001, the mainstream Western media’s gaze shifted for the first time in decades to the multi-ethnic Central Asian nation-state called Afghanistan. In addition to coverage of the latest U.S. military strategy and new theories about the al-Qaeda network, American and British newspapers started running “color” feature stories describing this region of the world that most Euro-American readers had previously been unable to distinguish from any other “–stan” nation. On October 5, 2001, The Times of London ran a feature, pointedly titled “Repressed homosexuality?” which described “a rich tradition of homosexual passion, celebrated in poetry, dance, and the practice of male prostitution” among the Pashtun-speaking peoples in and around the city of Khandahar. The article’s author argued that “in Pashtun society, man-woman love was the one that dared not speak its name: boy courtesans conducted their affairs openly,” and speculated that the separation of girls and boys starting at age seven was the root of both this same-sex sexuality and of “Taleban misogyny” and “gynaeophobia.” This article in The Times of London was only the first of several British and American newspaper accounts of male same-sex sexuality in Pashtun Afghanistan, as major newspapers, wire services, and the gay press picked up the story.
This patchwork of British and American news media accounts has offered an incomplete, problematic and sensationalist characterization of this mode of same-sex relationality. The only accounts available to Western readers have failed to convey a coherent or complete description of this relational mode and its cultural context, largely because they try to apply Euro-American terms and assumptions to a form relationality that is not at all Euro-American. The histories associated with Euro-American terms such as “homosexuality,” “pedophilia,” “sugar daddies,” “male prostitution” and “rape” are very different from the historical background and cultural context of male same-sex sexuality in Pashtun Afghanistan, but the media accounts use these terms uncritically, without acknowledging their historical development and culturally-specific significance. Additionally, the mainstream British and American media has sensationalized this topic, as they tend to do with any story that involves sex. With a story to which the media can attach the especially juicy and scandalous labels of “pedophilia” and “prostitution,” accounts often read like their authors are trying to pique the interest of Euro-American readers more than provide information about ways of life in Afghanistan.
Euro-American scholarship and news media offer such problematic and inconsistent accounts of relationality in Pashtun culture that it is difficult to know with any certainty what relational modes exist in Pashtun culture. This example of Pashtun culture shows the difficulties of cross-cultural understandings of relationality and of describing relationality in general. Relational modes are not universal, but are culturally and historically contingent. While Western discourses such as news reports often presume their own universality and objectivity, they lack an adequate lexicon of relational terms to describe the way people relate to each other in non-Western cultures.
Different respected British and American newspapers use different terms and explanations to describe these male same-sex relationships that occur in Afghanistan. The Times of London refers to the younger males in these relationships as “ashna,” which it translates as “beloveds,” and describes as “young boys they have groomed for sex.” The New York Times uses the terms “haliq” and “beardless boys” to refer to what seems to be likely the same category. Perhaps the linguistic difference between “ashna” and “haliq” constitutes a difference in meaning between the two Pashtun words. None of the English-language articles explain these terms with respect to each other, so the Euro-American reader is left without knowing the full meaning of these words. The limited picture offered in each of these newspaper accounts prevents the Euro-American reader from fully understanding the cultural context of Pashtun Afghanistan. One journalist categorizes the male practices of dyeing fingernails with henna and lining eyes with kohl as indicative of “a streak of dandyism among Pashtun males.” However, this term “dandyism” refers to a historically and culturally specific performance of gender that does not match with the practices of these Pashtun men.
Additionally, the newspapers often take up these words as identity categories to signify Afghani “homosexuals,” but there is no indication that people self-identify or are perceived in Pashtun culture as having something like a “homosexual” identity. Indeed, a few newspaper articles mention evidence to the contrary. A story in London’s Independent argues that “homosexual” is “the wrong word—they are not homosexuals in the Western sense,” but it does not explain why this is the wrong term, or what differences exist between Pashtun male same-sex sexual relationships and those in Western culture.
Most accounts in the mainstream British and American media describe these relationships as problems or vices, and present a generally negative attitude toward them. These non-normative relationships differ greatly from the approved mode of Western heterosexuality, and instead of exploring that difference the media indicts it. The New York Times describes this mode of relationality as a “problem” in need of fixing and a vice in which people are “indulging.” The story’s rhetoric implicitly supports the Taliban’s practice of pushing walls on top of men accused of “homosexuality”, when the article states, “The Taliban took care of that problem.” The Associated Press refers to “homosexuality,” along with opium and gambling, as among the “vices” that are returning to Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban. The article uses terms from the Judeo-Christian Bible—that central text of Western culture, which does not bear the same significance in Pashtun culture—to characterize the situation in Afghanistan as “Babylon with burqas, Sodom and Gomorrah with sand.” Equating Afghanistan with Sodom and Gomorrah implies that Afghanistan should be smote down by God—and perhaps implies that the U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan was doing just that.
Several Western newspapers indicate that homosexuality is a product (or symptom, perhaps) of a social situation in which men are separated from women. The New York Times article implies that such a separation of men from women and a non-presence of women in public spaces such as markets is unnatural, and that this deviance from the Western order results in the implicitly horrible practice of pedophilia. The journalist writes:
Most men here spend the vast majority of their time in the company of other men and rarely glimpse more than the feet of any woman other than their mother, sister or wife. The atmosphere leaves little room for romantic love, let alone recreational sex between men and women. But alternative opportunities are not hard to find.
The New York Times portrays male same-sex sexual relationships as a second-best alternative to a Euro-American notion of heterosexual “romantic love”. The author ignores that both “romantic love” and “heterosexuality” as such are fairly recent constructions of Euro-American culture. The Los Angeles Times uses the Euro-American discourse of psychiatry to make a similar argument on the origins of “homosexuality” in Afghanistan. Justin Richardson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, tells the journalist:
"In some Muslim societies where the prohibition against premarital heterosexual intercourse is extremely high--higher than that against sex between men--you will find men having sex with other males not because they find them most attractive of all but because they find them most attractive of the limited options available to them," Richardson says.
The use of psychiatry shows that the media pathologizes these relationships.
Several newspaper accounts draw connections between the non-sexual modes of male same-sex relationality that are fully accepted and even glorified in Pashtun Afghanistan and the sexual relationships on which these articles focus. However, only one of these articles ever goes into detail about these non-sexual relationships, and none of them explain the cultural interplay of sexual and non-sexual male relationality. The New York Times article states that the “homosexuality” of Pashtun Afghanistan is “cloaked in the tradition of strong masculine bonds that are a hallmark of Islamic culture and are even more pronounced in southern Afghanistan’s strict, sexually segregated society.” Another newspaper article describes how men in Afghanistan will “kiss, hold hands and drape their arms around each other while drinking tea or talking” and that “hugging doesn’t mean sex, locals insist.”
The British and American media report a disparity in ages between the people involved in these male same-sex relationships. The New York Times article states that “pedophilia has been [Afghani homosexuality’s] curse” a phrasing that portrays the disparity in age (“pedophilia”) in a relationship as destructive and supernatural and the sameness in gender (“homosexuality”) as harmless and natural. The New York Times describes the younger person in such a “homosexual” relationship as a “boy”, indicating that he is very young, and presumably—according to Euro-American cultural understandings of consent and development—he cannot give informed consent to sex. The story describes how the Taliban were able to “rescue” one such “boy” from two commanders who were pursuing him for sex. The Times of London describes “the rape of young boys” and portrays these same-sex sexual behaviors as pedophilic, non-consensual, and not part of a relationship. All these accounts indicate that the older man in the relationship has power and control over the adolescent male. However, another Times article gives a contradicting story—that “relations between men are seldom hierarchical.” These conflicting stories and characterizations of difference and power in same-sex sexual relationships indicate that these relationships in Afghanistan are quite different from sexual relationships in Euro-American culture.
The New York Times article describes Ahmed Fareed, a Pashtun 19-year-old who began a sexual relationship with a 22-year-old when he was 12 years old. This description of Fareed orientalizes him in a way that is usually reserved for Middle Eastern women. The article describes Fareed as a “19-year-old man with a white shawl covering his face except for a dark shock of hair and piercing kohl-lined eyes.” Feminists have criticized Western newspapers for describing the physical appearances of women and not men, implicitly propagating the Western associations of women with bodies and men with minds. These descriptions of women are often made “ethnic”. The Western media has received specific criticism for focusing on Muslim women’s veils while ignoring their voices, and for portraying them as strange, foreign, and in need of Western “freedom”—to be saved from brown men by white men. The New York Times describes the “haliq” in similar terms, defining him in terms of a shawl (not a far cry from a veil) and sexualized descriptions of his hair and eyes. In this way, the author interpellates Fareed as a feminized, orientalized subject.
The American gay press has also reported on “homosexual” relationship in Afghanistan, with a slightly different but just as uncritical spin on these relationships as the mainstream British and American media. The gay newspaper The Washington Blade reports that Afghanistan is famous for “homosexuality, particularly pederast relationships.” Syndicated columnist Paul Varnell writes in The Blade that the existence of these relationships is due to the “strong male bonding that Islamic warrior cultures tend to generate” as well as to the segregation of women from men.
Varnell critiques The Times of London as being “sensationalistic, almost comic in its lurid exaggerations” in its account of “homosexuality” in Afghanistan. Varnell argues that while the mainstream media pegs these relationships as exploitative of the younger person and harmful to both parties involved, an analysis of how The Times article “contradicted itself” shows the relationships to be positive experiences for both people and the power dynamics to be equally balanced. He then compares these Pashtun relationships to two models of male homosexuality with which its readership is familiar—the contemporary Euro-American mainstream model of gay equal partnership between two people of similar age and status, and the current understanding of relations between adolescent males and older men in ancient Greece.
Varnell makes a case minimizing the disparity in age and power between people involved in “homosexual” relationships in Afghanistan. The Blade article refers to the two men, who are now 19 and 29 but began their sexual relationship when they were 12 and 22, and whom the New York Times interviewed for its story on “pedophilic” relationships in Afghanistan. Trying to associate the relationship between these men with the more politically palatable, mainstream American gay culture, the Blade article all but ignores the age at which the interviewees began their sexual relationship and instead focuses on their current age at the time of the interview. Varnell argues, “since the men are now 29 and 19, the relationship hardly seems pederastic at this point, much less ‘pedophilic.’” These ages are within the range that American culture deems legitimate for two people to engage in a sexual relationship. As Varnell tries to force the model of American equal-partner “homosexuality” onto these male same-sex relationships in Afghanistan, he ends up illustrating how inadequate this Euro-American model is for understanding this Pashtun mode of relationality.
Perhaps recognizing the failure of this model, Varnell goes on to equate male same-sex Pashtun relationships with relationships between adolescent males and adult men in ancient Greece. The example of the Greeks serves as a rhetorical device to show similarities between American gay male relationships and Pashtun “homosexual” relationships—if American relationships are like Greek ones, and Greek like Pashtun, then a deceptive use of logic can show that American and Pashtun homosexualities are alike. Varnell writes,
None of this [Pashtun “homosexuality”] should be shocking or surprising for those familiar with ancient Greece, the foundation, after all, of our own civilization. Just as Afghan men tended to look for potential lovers at the soccer stadium or movie theater, ancient Greeks spent their leisure time at the gymnasium, which served as a social center as well as a school of athletics.
These Greek relationships have been the object of more recent Western scholarship than have Pashtun relationships, but many of the same problems of describing relationships through twentieth century Western discourse about sexuality apply in discussing these Greek relationships. The Blade article presents a particular reading of Greek male homosexuality, one that is politically motivated by the goals to argue for both the universality and diversity of male homosexual relationships, and to present all of these relationships with a positive spin. The author reads in connections between these Greek relationships and mainstream American views of non-pederastic homosexuality, to show similarity, if not sameness, among American and Greek “homosexual” relationships. He writes, “Some Greek vase paintings even show men courting physically mature, well-built young men who look like high school football players.” With his rhetorical techniques and references to limited evidence on painted vases, Varnell refutes associations between Greek male homosexuality and power disparities and pedophilia. He refers to the younger parties in the Greek relationships not as “boys” but as “handsome young men” and notes that they aged “commonly between 15 and 17” years. He also states that “the youths were clearly in control”—drawing this counter-intuitive conclusion solely from a single vase painting that depicts a youth turning away from a man with a gift.
In the article’s closing sentence, Varnell directly states his project of pushing for the universality and timelessness of modes of homosexuality, stating that his analysis of Greek and Pashtun relationships “confirms that there is little new or truly foreign in human relationships.” While the collection of information gleaned from the various Western accounts of these same-sex relationships in Afghanistan is minimal, a reader should be able to at least determine that these relationships are very different from both the modern concept of homosexuality, and the prehomosexual categories that operated in ancient Greece.
The gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender website PlanetOut.com also ran a story on male same-sex sexual relationships in Afghanistan, which was even less critical than the Blade article. While Varnell’s column goes through some extremely tenuous argumentation to force similarities between this Pashtun mode of relationality and Euro-American homosexuality, PlanetOut simply praises that now that the Taliban is gone, the region’s “traditions of homosexuality are re-emerging.” The story fails to acknowledge any problems associated with the financial and age disparities in these relationships, or to inquire how these relationships might be different from the author’s Euro-American understanding of homosexuality. The PlanetOut story contained such uncritical cheerleading that the gay and lesbian magazine LGNY deemed it the winner of its Blind Homosexual Patriotism in Journalism award. LGNY criticizes Planetout, writing:
One might point out that similar customs are illegal in the United States, and that PlanetOut has referred to the North American Man-Boy Love Association as "one of the most reviled organizations on the continent" and "the pariah of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement." And NAMBLA promotes strictly consensual intergenerational sex, a fine point PlanetOut doesn't even consider in its rush to applaud the situation in post-war Afghanistan.
While PlanetOut may go out of its way to embrace same-sex sexuality in Afghanistan, LGNY makes a point to distance gay and lesbian sexual identities from this mode of relationality. We can read PlanetOut’s angle as a strategy of including and absorbing as many people under its umbrella as possible, so their seemingly large numbers and broad scope can provide political capital for the mode of Euro-American gay and lesbian identity that they support. We can read LGNY as taking a different tactic toward the same goal of promoting Euro-American gay and lesbian identity; here the magazine tries to define gay and lesbian identity as something very similar to Euro-American heterosexuality, so as to be perceived as socially and politically legitimate to the Euro-American heteronormative establishment.
Analysis of these articles reveals many problems, usually owing to an uncritical reliance on Euro-American terms and privileging a political spin over more precise and informative writing. What is needed is a strategy for describing relationality that is different from the Euro-American models. Such a strategy would not assume universality of a certain mode of heterosexuality or of a binary of hetero- and homosexuality. It would not assume that all forms of relationality in the word that are not Western heterosexuality must be similar to Western modes of homosexuality. Writers on topics of sexuality need to be very aware of their own linguistic background and political agenda and be aware of those when writing about sexualities that differ from their own. Instead of lumping modes of sexuality into categories such as “homosexual,” “queer,” “gay,” etc., a more informative strategy would be one of providing more specific ethnographic information about how people relate to one another. More information would more promote a better understanding of the differences between different modes of relationality. Finding such a strategy requires going beyond the lens of journalism to the fields of anthropology, historiography and queer theory.
Of these, I’ll first discuss the anthropological lens. Recent reconfigurations of anthropology have made great strides in self-awareness of the cultural moorings from which scholarship is produced. This rethinking has minimized the Eurocentric and heteronormative assumptions of previous anthropological scholarship. However, as of yet, these new kinship theories have not been applied to this specific context of Pashtun male same-sex relationality, nor have they offered a theory for fully conceptualizing same-sex sexuality in non-Western cultures.
Kinship studies is a subfield of anthropology that deals with systematically mapping the genealogies of different social arrangements. Recent developments in social relations have created a crisis in this field of kinship studies. The formal mapping of kinship structures and the categorization and labeling of familial ties as "consanguineous", "fictive", or "adoptive" that were once the essence of kinship studies have become insufficient to account for new social relations. Anthropologist David Schneider argues that kinship studies falsely assumes universality in kinship relations, and imposes Euro-American ontological categories onto all peoples in a disturbingly Eurocentric or colonialist way. Kinship studies incorrectly assume “that Blood is Thicker Than Water”, privileging genealogical relations as both unique from and more important than all other social relations. Through a set of internally consistent but somewhat tautological categories and definitions, kinship studies defines kinship as “entailing those ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ facts that it is at the same time said to be ‘rooted in’ or ‘based on.’” These underlying assumptions of ethnocentrism and biologism (which includes presumptions of binary gender and heterosexuality) are historically entrenched in the anthropological study of “kinship”, making any use—even in a slightly modified or “reconfigured” form—of this lens of viewing social relations inherently problematic and dangerous.
Since the postmodern crisis in anthropology and the field’s simultaneous counter-Reformation, in which widespread critique about the field’s Eurocentric assumptions led to the shift away from structural-functionalism to “more self-critical and reflexive approaches”, Schneider’s critiques have caused other anthropologists to look for ways to reconstitute kinship studies in a new and less problematic form. Kath Weston, who documented kinship structures in gay and lesbian communities in San Francisco, advocates reconfiguring kinship studies as a Foucaultian productive shift of power. I interpret this contention as the argument that doing new kinds of kinship work under the kinship heading and within the kinship tradition could destabilize the idea of kinship, because new modes of kinship and kinship studies would be so different from previous models. The history of kinship studies would show how the term kinship is deployed in very different ways in different cultures and historical moments, and how power and knowledge are co-productive.
Relations between adolescent males and adult men in Pashtun culture is a mode of relationality that falls outside both the Eurocentrism and heteronormativity of the traditional kinship studies model. The ability of kinship studies to describe this relational mode would seem an apt test of these new reconfigurations of kinship studies. However, despite recent work to do more critical kinship studies, recent studies of Pashtun kinship follow the traditional structural-functionalist model, with its Eurocentric and heteronormative assumptions. This model allows a limited set of relationships to count as “kinship,” and thus to qualify as legitimate subjects of kinship studies. Thus, it is not surprising that these anthropological studies of Pashtun culture do not include any references to male same-sex sexual relationships, or of any male same-sex relationality outside of the traditional family model.
The Pakistani anthropologist Sarah Safdar has written one of the few English-language works on the topic of kinship in Pashtun (or Pukhtoon) society, which was published in 1997. Her extensive discussion of kinship and marriage in Pashtun culture contains no references to homosexuality or any male same-sex relationality other than blood kinship. Safdar’s work on kinship among the Pashtun people in Pakistan and Afghanistan appears after these debates and reconfigurations began, but her discourse and methodology do not reflect any change from traditional anthropological understandings of kinship. In defining her conception of kinship on the first page of her book, Safdar writes, “Kinship refers solely to relationship based on descent of marriage [sic].” Safdar writes that kinship “has little to do with biology” and “is first and foremost a cultural construct.” A postmodern reading of this statement could preface a critical reconfiguration of kinship studies methodology, but Safdar proceeds to reinscribe Claude Levi-Strauss’ traditional structural-functionalist kinship categories and to ignore all other forms of relationality. Safdar limits her consideration of such culturally constructed bonds to those that fall into the two traditional categories—“consanguineous kind individuals are thought to be biologically related by blood, and affinal kind individuals are related legally through marriage.” American Anthropologist Audrey Shalinsky provides an ethnographic account of gender and sexuality in Afghanistan that also makes no reference to non-heterosexual forms of relationality. She argues that in Afghanistan, “a crucial component of gender ideology includes the idea that a person uses reason and moral character to contain desire, and that the struggle against desire and self-indulgence is conducted in everyday life under constant evaluation by the self and others.” Shalinsky refers this “desire” only as a sexual desire for the opposite gender in a strictly gender-segregated society. Shalinsky explores four different forms of male-female relationality in Northern Afghanistan (marriage, incest taboo, adultery, and veiling), but does not label or describe any modes of same-sex relationality (sexual or otherwise). While these anthropological accounts do not provide and direct information on male same-sex sexuality and do not advance a strategy for better understanding non-Western sexualities, they do give information on the cultural context regarding kinship, gender, and heterosexual sexuality in which these relationships occur.
For a more useful approach to non-Western sexualities, Euro-American scholars can look to genealogical historiography and queer theory. The queer theorist and classicist David Halperin’s genealogical approach to the history of male same-sex sexual desire can be applied to cross-cultural analysis of relational modes such as male same-sex sexual relationality in Pashtun Afghanistan to give a more nuanced view than that of either Euro-American news media or anthropological accounts. Halperin provides a strategy for a conceptual and historical understanding of male homosexuality “by acknowledging the existence of transhistorical continuities but reframing them within a genealogical analysis of (homo)sexuality itself.” This strategy is part of a genealogical project to destabilize terms such as “homosexual” by showing them to be culturally and historically specific and socially constructed. Halperin outlines several “prehomosexual discourses, practices, categories, patterns, or models” (noting that he is “really not sure what to call them”), including effeminacy, sodomy/active pederasty, friendship/love, and passivity/inversion and contrasts them to “homosexuality nowadays.” He shows how this modern concept of homosexuality unconsciously restricts contemporary Euro-American inquiries into same-sex sexuality and denies the many forms of relationality and sexual desire that have existed in other historical moments.
While Halperin’s strategy most directly regards inquiry into male same-sex desire in previous historical moments within the Western tradition, his analysis can also provide a framework in which to consider male same-sex sexual desire in non-Western cultures. While Halperin works from and in contrast to previous sociological and historical models, his genealogical analysis can also be useful with other disciplines (such as journalism) that attempt to describe male same-sex sexual desire. Halperin’s idea of “homosexuality nowadays” can be further complicated through geographic, cultural, and discursive differences. Modern Euro-American conceptions of homosexuality do not encompass all forms of male same-sex sexual desire that exist at the present time. Problematizing the British and American media’s accounts of male same-sex sexual relationality in Afghanistan through Halperin’s genealogical approach can bring about a more critical understanding of this mode of relationality as well as further the queer project of destabilizing Western categories of sexuality.
This inquiry shows that existing Western lenses on male same-sex relationality in Pashtun Afghanistan to be inadequate and problematic, and that drawing from queer genealogical strategies in conjunction with reconfigurations of kinship studies can provide a framework to analyze these relationships. Halperin applies his strategy to historical primary sources written in the native language of their cultural and historical moments. None of the accounts available to Euro-American English-readers are equivalent to those documents—both the journalistic and anthropological accounts are already being read through the Western lenses and thus do not provide an internal account that can be usefully contrasted with Euro-American homosexuality. Likewise, new kinship studies could provide anthropological accounts of male same-sex sexuality in Pashtun culture that could also help to destabilize the hegemony of Euro-American sexual categories, but that would also require new studies of kinship in Afghanistan. Without any new research or field work on the topic of male same-sex sexuality in Pashtun Afghanistan, it seems extremely difficult to understand or think about this mode of relationality and compare it with Euro-American modern homosexuality and Western prehomosexual categories. I hope for this strategy for understanding male same-sex sexual relationality in Pashtun culture to provide a theoretical foundation for critical field research in Afghanistan.
Endnotes
1. Griffin, Michael. “Repressed Homosexuality?” The Times (5 October 2001), Lexis-Nexis.
2. Reid, Tim. “Khandahar Comes Out of the Closet.” The Times (12 January 2002), Lexis-Nexis.
3. Reynolds, Maura. “Kandahar’s Lightly Veiled Homosexual Habits.” The Los Angeles Times (3 April 2002), Lexis-Nexis.
4. Hensher, Philip. “The Lost City.” The Independent (12 October 2001), Lexis-Nexis.
5. Smith, Craig. “Shh, It's an Open Secret: Warlords and Pedophilia.” The New York Times (22 February 2002), A4.
6. Smith, A4.
7. “Sin City Makes A Comeback.” Associated Press (22 February 2002), Lexis-Nexis.
8. “Sin City”, AP.
9. Smith, A4.
10. Reynolds, Lexis.
11. Smith, A4.
12. Reynolds, Lexis.
13. Smith, A4.
14. Smith, A4.
15. Griffin, Lexis.
16. Smith, A4.
17. Varnell, Paul. “Pederasty isn’t Greek to post-Taliban Afghans.” The Washington Blade (8 March 8 2002), online.
18. Varnell, online.
19. Varnell, online.
20. Varnell, online.
21. Varnell, online.
22. Varnell, online.
23. Varnell, online.
24. Varnell, online.
25. Pursley. “Media Daze.” LGNY: a magazine for gay and lesbian New York (17 January 2002), online at
26. Pursley, online.
27. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies Ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon. (Duke University Press, 2001) 2.
28. Relative, 2
29. Safdar, Sarah, Kinship and Marriage in Pukhtoon Society (Lahore, Pakistan: Pak Book Empire, 1997) 1.
30. Safdar, 2.
31. Safdar, 1.
32. Shalinsky, Audrey C. “Reason, Desire, and Sexuality: The Meaning of Gender in Northern Afghanistan. Ethos 14.4 (December 1986), 323.
33. Halperin, David. “How To Do the History of Male Homosexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6.1 (2000) 89.
34. Halperin, 89.
35. Halperin, 90.