Navigating fugitive geographies Care, kinship, and class among homosexual men in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Although there are numerous studies that have been conducted in Tanzania, most of them focused on understanding gay men from the angle of HIV. While appreciating the contribution of these previous studies my study attempts to understand the everyday lives of gay men in Dar es Salaam outside of their interaction with HIV intervention spaces. After conducting a one-year ethnographic research among gay men in Dar es Salaam from January to December 2017, I argue that although gay men in Dar es Salaam do have a comparatively high risk for contracting HIV, understanding this risk requires a broader consideration of the political, legal, social, and economic factors that contribute to that risk. In this thesis I bring into light the ways in which gay men’s desire for other men in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is considered against the norms thus resulting to pressure from the state and people around them. The five empirical chapters presented in this thesis shows how gay men in that I worked with becomes fugitive in the first place and how they have created several navigation techniques to survive. In the midst of constant societal pressure, forming new kinships, tactically performing multiple identities by displaying their best masculine behaviour whenever they are in places that they feel that their sexual identities would be unacceptable, emerged as a very crucial practice among them.