In 1997, Kanga moved to England permanently. He has subsequently lived in a home for disabled people in Islington, London. His health has not permitted him to do much writing since then, although in 2005 he wrote a short piece on homosexuality in India for the BBC website.

Sponsor Message.

In 1997 Kanga's work was included in the canon-shaping Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997, edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West.

Firdaus Kanga occupies a unique place in gay literature because of his claim to the dual marginality of being gay and being disabled. His nationality also makes him an important figure in the fields of postcolonial literature and Indian diaspora literature.

While his literary output is small, consisting of not much more than two books and a few articles and reviews (in his review of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy [1993] he identified a gay subplot missed or ignored by most Indian reviewers), he can be seen as a pioneer in the field of Indian gay fiction and one of the most important writers to address the intersection of two forms of marginality.

Disabled queers not only face physical obstacles and the prejudices of the larger society, but also sometimes feel marginalized and isolated within the glbtq community.

The dominant religion of modern India, Hinduism is no longer as tolerant of same-sex sexual relations as it seems to have been in the past.

Although film may be a director's rather than a writer's medium, gay and lesbian screenwriters have made significant contributions to both mainstream and independent film.

Although the treatment of homosexuality is rare in South Asian literatures in either the ancient or the contemporary period, the South Asian diaspora has recently produced a number of both gay and lesbian writers.

Travel has afforded gays and lesbians both freedom from the restraints of their own cultures and the erotic stimulus of exotic sexual customs and partners.

James Baldwin, a pioneering figure in twentieth-century literature, wrote sustained and articulate challenges to American racism and mandatory heterosexuality.

Truman Capote's fiction and autobiographical works helped establish what might be called the quintessential homosexual writing style of the 1950s and 1960s.

Indian playwright, screenwriter, dancer, director, and actor Mahesh Dattani is an important figure in South Asian gay culture by virtue of his recurrent depiction of queer characters.

Award-winning Harvey Fierstein is one of the finest gay male playwrights currently working in the American theater.

Actor Harvey Fierstein has had phenomenal success as both a performer and a playwright, and has been steadfastly committed to the cause of glbtq rights.

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Noted for his elegant prose style and subtle representations of moral ambiguities, Alan Hollinghurst has in recent years emerged as Great Britain's most significant contemporary gay novelist.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

Although he does not employ the idiom of identity politics, Hanif Kureishi frequently gives gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals significant roles in his works.

The multifaceted Gore Vidal is important in the gay literary heritage because of the straightforwardness with which he has pursued gay themes and included gay characters in his work.

One of the most prominent and highly acclaimed figures of contemporary gay literature, Edmund White works in many distinct categories of fiction and nonfiction.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.