Book Fury: Gandhi’s Gay? JFK Jr. Affair?

What do Gandhi and JFK Jr. have in common? The two infamous men have recently been featured in books and these titles are making headlines. In, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India, some reviewers have come to the conclusion that Gandhi may have had a homosexual relationship and insights into JFK Jr.’s five year love affair are making their debut in Coming to the Edge.

Haag’s five years  of love with JFK Jr.

Christina Haag has just released her new book Come to the Edge which goes into her insights about her five year relationship John F. Kennedy Jr. The actress and the politician’s son dated from 1985 to 1990 and knew one another since they were both 15 years old. The two grew up in the same Upper East Side of Manhattan neighborhood and intermingled with the same group of prep school friends. Haag and JFK Jr. even went to Brown University together, but it was not until after college that the two began their romance. After being cast in an off-Broadway play together, the two embarked in a five year love affair. Come to the Edge is described as a “portrait of a young man with an enormous capacity for love and an adventurous spirit that drove him to live life to its fullest” by MSNBC’s Today Books.

Book about Gandhi’s alleged homosexual affair

Pulitzer-Prize winning author Joseph Lelyveid has just released a new book about Mahatma Gandhi, but unfortunately the Gujarat’s state government in western India has already put a ban on the new book. Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India has been banned based on the reviews of US and UK book reviewers that hint at Gandhi’s alleged homosexual relationship. This is just the beginning, more state governments through out India are suggesting banning the book as well. In India, homosexuality was illegal until 2009, but the stigma of homosexuality is still prevalent.

The book has not been released in India so almost no one has read Lelyveid’s book first hand. The Indian state governments are basing their conclusions of Lelyveid’s work off the reviews coming out of the US and UK that have dramatized the passages in the book to suggest had an intimate relationship with a German man named Hermann Kallenbach. It has been said that the book has been taken out of context and in no way does the book ever mention homosexuality or bisexuality. Reports in Britain and later in India outlandishly have ran headlines like “Gandhi ‘left his wife to live with a male lover’ new book claims” or “Book claims German man was Gandhi’s secret love.” According to CBS News, Ranjit Hoskote a writer and general secretary for the freedom expression group PEN India notes that Kallenbach and Gandhi’s relationship is old news; the correspondence between the two have been available in library archives for decades. “There’s no secret or any sort of scandal,” says Hoskote.

Will you be buying Lelyveid’s new book Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India or Come to the Edge?

Image from Wikimedia Commons.