Tom Boellstorff's book on same-sex desires in contemporary Indonesia is a welcome and sophisticated contribution to the scholarship on Indonesia, sexuality, and anthropological theory. The islands that compose the nation of Indonesia are home to a number of ethnic groups and diverse same-sex practices that made the region a source of academic interest over the twentieth century, yet until Boellstorff's research, these have been generally analyzed as ritual and professional expressions, or sites of often romanticized sexual ease, rather than studied as forms of sexual identity per se.

That there are Indonesians who now publicly identify as “gay” yet who are not blindly following a global gay identity is, according to Boellstorff, evidence of the Soeharto New Order regime's most successful nation-building efforts. Gays in Indonesia are first and foremost national, according to Boellstorff. They desire members of the same biological sex and gender identity, and they do so in...

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