Kriya Pushpa is a Christian organization that performs street plays about HIV

In 1998, Gere was invited to be a fellow of the University of California Humanities Research Institute as a participant in the Interdisciplinary Queer Studies Group, and in 2000 he was Sage Cowles Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota Dance Program. He has also written extensively about dance. He co-edited Looking Out: Perspectives on Dance and Criticism in a Multicultural World (Schirmer, 1995) and Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). His essays have appeared in Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS (Living Out) and Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage (both University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

Gere’s latest book, How to Make Dances, has brought “a fresh perspective to the issue of dance and AIDS,” adds Jowitt, also an author and former dancer. “The way he juggles the narrative strategies is quite brilliant. He doesn’t swathe it too heavily in theory or erode it in personal rhetoric. His experience as a critic allows him to provide eloquent, lucid descriptions.”

Besides his writing, speaking, teaching and preaching, one of Gere’s most cherished roles is as father to his two children, Isadora, 4, and Christopher, 5, whom he adopted with his partner of 10 years, Peter Carley, a psychotherapist. Even fatherhood was serendipitous, Gere says. The day after he and Peter discussed the possibility of raising a child together, “we learned of a birth mother.”

Although both David and brother Richard have strong ties to India, they usually work independently. “Luckily, it’s a big country,” David quips. But during the Make Art project Richard attended some of David’s meetings with artists and government officials. “I’ve always been a little coy about Richard being my brother,” David says. “But in India, our work converged, and it was exciting having him there. He has a brilliant way of listening and then pulling together threads of ideas.”

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