India, Sept. 4 -- The just-published collected poems by Agha Shahid Ali, entitled The Veiled Suite (the name of his last long poem) makes no mention anywhere of his gayness. In many ways, of course, this is what Ali would have wanted. He apparently refused to let any Indian gay anthology publish his work in his lifetime (though the new edition of the Hoshang Merchant-edited Yaraana has poems by him, years after his death; Ali had refused them for the first edition) and, far as I know, no US gay anthology has him in it either.

I have always wondered whether this was because Ali did not want to be known as publicly gay or whether this was a critical refusal to engage with either the derivative and lazily assumed South Asian gay politics on the one hand or the easier identificatory politics of the '80s and '90s in the US on the other. In my mind, this remains a problem. Was Ali's merely a question of choosing not to be outed for the political reasons I've speculated upon above or was it the internalised homophobia of many writers whose sexual orientation is something they want to hide for dubious reasons? These reasons include a)...