Dispelling "heterosexual African AIDS" in Namibia: same-sex sexuality in the township of Katutura.

This paper questions international public health theories that characterize AIDS in Africa as an unambiguous heterosexual epidemic. It does so by describing the daily sexual lives of a community of Namibian youth who engage in same-sex sexual practices. The author outlines how the ongoing vilification of "homosexuals" by ruling State officials serves as a stigmatizing backdrop against which young people experience and practice their sexuality. Drawing upon 20 months of ethnographic research, the paper discusses the HIV sexual risk perceptions and practices of young men, highlighting the complexities in sexual subjectivity that form within the cultural politics of competing masculinities, state-sponsored anti-homosexual rhetoric and transnational queer rights protest. Bounded and monolithic notions of gender and sexual identity do not lend themselves to HIV risk and vulnerability analysis in this community.