After the nationalisation of white-owned farms during the implementation of President Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa Policy of African Socialism in 1964, the family emigrated to South Africa.
He enrolled at the University of Notre Dame in the United States where he studied with Joseph Buttigieg, the translator of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks.
In 1996, at a Cape Town conference on Truth and Reconciliation, he used his podium as keynote speaker to discuss his history in the South African military and his campus spy status.
Praised by Felice Picano in the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide for its epic quality, universal reach and insistence on complexity it was reviled in The Sunday Times by Tim Trengrove Jones as a "baggy monster of overstated anxiety."
Kate Saunders in The Times reviewed it as: "Superbly written, thoughtful and unflinching, this terrific novel explores the mentality of the Afrikaner male – with wonderfully poetic use of the Afrikaans language."
Novelist Christopher Hope, reviewing for The Guardian (January 2010), noted the spirit of Chekov's "The Cherry Orchard" and called the novel "one of the most moving to come out of South Africa in many years."
In Spring 2007, the journal The Truth About the Fact published "People Like Us," which is an extract from a lecture Behr gave at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada in 2003.
In Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everyone Must Read, Behr looks at the impact of Alice Walker's The Color Purple on his own political and psychological development.
Behr's work is extensively translated and has received awards from the Los Angeles Times, the United Kingdom British Society of Authors, and the Academy of Science of South Africa.