Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab

World
Joseph Andoni Massad

Public Culture, Volume 14, Number 2, Spring 2002, pp. 361-385 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/26284

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 Re-Orienting Desire:
The Gay International and
the Arab World
Joseph Massad

O
O ne of the more compelling issues to emerge out of the gay movement in the
last two decades is the universalization of “gay rights.” This project has
appropriated the prevailing U.S. discourse on human rights in order to launch
itself on an international scale. Following in the footsteps of the white Western
women’s movement, which had sought to universalize its issues through imposing
its own colonial feminism on the women’s movements in the non-Western world
— a situation that led to major schisms from the outset — the gay movement has
adopted a similar missionary role. Organizations dominated by white Western
males (the International Lesbian and Gay Association [ILGA] and the Interna-
tional Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission [IGLHRC]) sprang up to
defend the rights of “gays and lesbians” all over the world and to advocate on
their behalf. ILGA, which was founded in 1978 at the height of the Carter admin-
istration’s human rights campaign against the Soviet Union and Third World ene-
mies, asserts that one of its aims is to “create a platform for lesbians, gay men,
bisexuals, and transgendered people internationally, in their quest for recogni-
tion, equality, and liberation, in particular through the world and regional confer-

Mervat Hatem has urged me to write this article for over ten years, while Neville Hoad has urged
me to write it for seven. I thank them both for continuing to push me and hope that they are not dis-
appointed with the outcome. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Sawyer Seminar
conference Hatred: Confronting the Other, held at the University of Chicago on 12 February 2000. I
thank Elizabeth A. Povinelli for inviting me to participate.

Public Culture 14(2): 361–385

Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press

361
Public Culture ences.”1 As for IGLHRC, which was founded in 1991, its mission is to “protect
and advance the human rights of all people and communities subject to discrimi-
nation or abuse on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV sta-
tus.”2 It is these missionary tasks, the discourse that produces them, and the orga-
nizations that represent them that constitute what I call the Gay International.
Like the major U.S.-based human rights groups (Human Rights Watch,
Amnesty International) and many white Western feminist organizations, the Gay
International has reserved a special place for the Muslim world in both its dis-
course and its advocacy. This orientalist impulse, borrowed from predominant
representations of the Arab and Muslim worlds in the United States and Europe,
continues to guide all branches of the human rights community. As a relative
latecomer to this assimilationist project, the Gay International has had to catch up
quickly. To do so, supporters of the Gay International’s missionary tasks have
produced two kinds of literature on the Muslim world: an academic literature of
historical, literary, and anthropological accounts, written mostly by white male
European or American gay scholars, which purport to describe and explain
“homosexuality” in the past and present of the Arab and Muslim worlds; and
journalistic accounts of the lives of so-called gays and (much less so) lesbians in
the contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds.3 The former seeks to unravel the
mystery of Islam to a Western audience, whereas the latter aims to inform white
gay sex-tourists about the region. The larger mission, as I describe below, is to
liberate Arab and Muslim “gays and lesbians” from the oppression under which
they allegedly live by transforming them from practitioners of same-sex contact
into subjects who identify as homosexual and gay. The following remarks may be
taken as typical. Lisa Power, co-secretary general of ILGA, states that “most
Islamic cultures don’t take kindly to organized homosexuality, even though male
homoeroticism is deep within their cultural roots! . . . most people are too ner-
vous to organize, even in countries with a high level of homosexuality.”4 Robert

1. International Lesbian and Gay Association Constitution, sec. C, art. 2, clause i. Available on-
line at www.ilga.org.
2. International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, “Our Mission.” Available on-line at
www.iglhrc.org.
3. Bruce Dunne’s “Homosexuality in the Middle East: An Agenda for Historical Research,” Arab
Studies Quarterly 12, no. 3/4 (1990): 55–82 is a notable exception to this poor scholarship. It is worth
noting, however, that Dunne does not cite a single original Arabic source. Dunne’s anthropological
impulse, moreover, gets the best of him in a later article cited below.
4. Quoted in Rex Wockner, “Homosexuality in the Arab and Moslem World,” in Coming Out: An
Anthology of International Gay and Lesbian Writings, ed. Stephan Likosky (New York: Pantheon,
1992), 105. This article was reprinted in a number of U.S. gay and lesbian magazines including Out-

362
Bray, public information director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Re-Orienting Desire
and an officer of ILGA, understands that “cultural differences make the defini-
tion and the shading of homosexuality different among peoples. . . . But I see the
real question as one of sexual freedom; and sexual freedom transcends cultures.”
Describing his adventures in Morocco and southern Spain, Bray states that “at
least one guy expressed a longing to just be gay and not have to live within the
prescribed sexual behaviors, and he said that there were others like him.” Seem-
ingly convinced by this one conversation, Bray declares: “I believe this longing is
universal.”5
In contradistinction to the liberatory claims made by the Gay International in
relation to what it posits as an always already homosexualized population, I
argue that it is the discourse of the Gay International that both produces homo-
sexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses
same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual episte-
mology.6 I show how this discourse assumes prediscursively that homosexuals,
gays, and lesbians are universal categories that exist everywhere in the world,
and based on this prediscursive axiom, the Gay International sets itself the mis-
sion of defending them by demanding that their rights as “homosexuals” be
granted where they are denied and be respected where they are violated. In
doing so, however, the Gay International produces an effect that is less than lib-
eratory.
The Gay International, through its most well-known organization, ILGA,
launched a new and aggressive universalization campaign in 1994, coinciding
with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. After ILGA achieved
official NGO status at the United Nations in 1993 (which it later lost), its inter-
national activities intensified, including efforts to stop “the mass execution of
homosexuals in Iran,” an unsubstantiated propagandistic claim that was also
bandied about by an official of the U.S. State Department.7 Part of the commem-

lines, BLK, the Weekly News (Miami), and Capital Gay (London). It is notable that this “international”
anthology relies upon a white gay American to contribute an article on gays in the Arab and Muslim
worlds.
5. Wockner, “Homosexuality,” 116.
6. Because most of this literature deals with male homosexuality, my comments are likewise con-
cerned primarily with that issue.
7. Mark Unger, “Going Global, The Internationalization of the Gay and Lesbian Community,”
Metrosource: The Gay Guide to the Metropolitan Area, summer 1994, 49. See Wockner, “Homosexu-
ality,” 107–111 for evidence of the Gay International’s collaboration with the U.S. State Department
to malign the Iranian government. Citing a U.S. journalist and a U.S. State Department official who
investigated the case, Wockner claims that there were mass executions of homosexuals in Iran.

363
Public Culture orations of Stonewall was ILGA’s convening of its sixteenth annual World Con-
ference, 23 June to 4 July 1994 in New York. Whereas ILGA boasted delegates
from Western Europe, East Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the United
States, it “was working hard to bring activists from Africa, the Middle East, and
the Caribbean.”8 The commemorations included the “International March on the
United Nations to Affirm the Human Rights of Lesbian and Gay People,” which
called for, among other things, the proclamation of an “International Year of the
Lesbian and Gay People (possibly 1999),” and the application of the UN’s Uni-
versal Declaration of Human Rights to “lesbian, gay, bisexual, drag and trans-
gender people.”9 This aggressive campaign at the United Nations has continued
throughout the 1990s into the present.
Rex Wockner, the author of an acutely othering article on “gays and lesbians”
in the Arab world and Iran, which was reprinted in a large number of gay publi-
cations in the United States and Britain, appears baffled by Arab and Iranian men
who practice both “insertive” same-sex and different-sex contact and refuse the
Western identification of gayness: “Is this hypocritical? Or a different world?” he
marvels. “Are these ‘straight’ men really ‘gays’ who are overdue for liberation?
Or are humans by nature bisexual, with Arab and Moslem men better tuned into
reality than Westerners? Probably all the above.”10 It is precisely this perceived
instability in the desires of Arab and Muslim men that the Gay International
seeks to stabilize, as its polymorphousness confounds gay (and straight) sexual
epistemology. As I show below, the assumptions underlying the mission of the
Gay International demand that these resistant “Oriental” desires, which exist,
according to Wockner, in “oppressive — and in some cases murderous — home-
lands,” be re-oriented to and subjected by the “more enlightened” Occident.11
This essay surveys the literature of the Gay International with an eye to the poli-
tics of representation it enacts and its stated project of “defending gays and les-
bians.” Although I look at different kinds of literature — academic studies, jour-
nalistic accounts, and human rights and tourism publications—which are governed
by different professional demands, political configurations, markets, and audi-

Although the official’s investigation produced no documentary evidence, the official asserts that the
allegation of mass executions was “probably true”(108).
8. Unger, “Going Global,” 50. It should be noted that it is not clear whether these delegates were
indeed residents of the countries they represented or U.S.–based diaspora members of these regions.
9. See the list of “The Demands of Stonewall 25” in Metrosource: The Gay Guide to the Metro-
politan Area, summer 1994, 46–47.
10. Wockner, “Homosexuality,” 115.
11. Wockner, “Homosexuality,” 107, 115.

364
ences, I do not seek to flatten them by erasing these differences but rather to Re-Orienting Desire
demonstrate how, despite these manifest differences, a certain ontology and epis-
temology are taken as axiomatic by all of them.

Representing Arab and Muslim Desires

Western gay interest in and representations of sexuality in the Arab and Muslim
worlds coincided with the emergence of Western gay scholarship on sexuality.12
It was John Boswell who inaugurated a debate on the Muslim world in which
Western white gay scholars are still engaged. Boswell’s romantic and unsup-
ported assertion that “most Muslim societies have treated homosexuality with
indifference, if not admiration” was in fact a familiar claim: Christian portrayals
of the Muslim world as immoral and sexually licentious have been around for
centuries.13 Indeed, as Jeffrey Weeks informs us, “many Western gays, for a long
time now, have traveled hopefully to the Muslim world and expected to find sex-
ual paradise.”14 He explains, however, that “reality is more complex” (x). Draw-
ing upon the findings of a collection of articles edited by Arno Schmitt and
Jehoeda Sofer, Weeks asserts that “the sexual privileges allowed to men [in the
Muslim world] are largely at the expense of women” and that “those adult men
who do not fit readily into prevailing notions of true manhood . . . are often
looked down upon and despised” (x). Weeks views the present Muslim world as
undergoing transformation and concludes that there are two possible outcomes
of this change: “Only time will tell whether that culture will approximate more
and more to the secularised Western model, or come increasingly under the sway
of a new religious militancy. What can be said with some assurance is that it is
unlikely to stay the same” (xi). Weeks reflexively adopts the Western model as
the only possible—and universally applicable—liberatory telos.15

12. Although homoerotic and sexual representations of Arab men by Western male writers pre-
cede this period (examples include William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, T. E. Lawrence, André Gide,
Roland Barthes, and Jean Genet), these neither constituted a genre nor precipitated a full-fledged dis-
course among Western gay men about Arab male sexual desires. They were rather offshoots of stan-
dard orientalist representation of the Arab world. For a good survey of some of these writings, see
Joseph Boone, “Vacation Cruises; or The Homoerotics of Orientalism,” PMLA 110 (1995): 89 – 107.
13. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western
Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), 194.
14. Jeffrey Weeks, foreword to Sexuality and Eroticism among Males in Moslem Societies, ed.
Arno Schmitt and Jehoeda Sofer (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1992), x.
15. Michael Warner, one of the major queer theorists of the day, is attentive to the issue of the
internationalization of white U.S. sexual politics as far as “theoretical languages” are concerned but

365
Public Culture Boswell’s romantic descriptions are taken up by Schmitt, who challenges both
Boswell’s research and conclusions.16 Contra Boswell’s essentialist claims of the
timelessness of the categories of homosexual and gay, Schmitt asserts that in the
Muslim world “male-male sexuality plays an important role. But in these soci-
eties there are no ‘homosexuals’— there is no word for homosexuality — the
concept is completely unfamiliar. There are no heterosexuals either.” Schmitt,
generally a more nuanced writer than Boswell, makes the essentialist claim that
the absence of these categories in the Muslim world is a phenomenon that
remains constant over time. Although Boswell was careful to restrict his pro-
nouncements about Muslim societies to the classical period of Islam — the sev-
enth through fourteenth centuries — recent scholars, including Schmitt, tend to
extend whatever judgment they have to the whole of Arab Muslim history (this is
tantamount to using studies of the European medieval period to generalize about
all of Western history). Schmitt, like orientalist scholars who use the seventh-
century Qur 9an to study Muslims of the twentieth century, insists without any
scholarly evidence that “because the behavior of Muslims today can be seen as
modification of older behavioral patterns, the study of male-male sexuality in
Muslim society should start from the old texts — although most of these reflect
the viewpoint of the middle class only. Study of modern texts, conversation, and
encounters with them and observations of Arabs, Iranians, Turks help us to
understand not only the modern behavior, but the old texts as well.”17 Schmitt’s
ahistoricism is compounded by the limitations of the audience he imagines. Note
how the “us” in his text refers only to Westerners—gay and non-gay—but never
to the Muslim objects of observation. Indeed, Schmitt and Sofer’s book, which is
a collection of mostly orientalist if not outright racist views, is aimed at not only
Western scholars in a variety of disciplines but also “anybody in contact with
Arabs, Turks, or Persians — be it a tourist in Moslem countries, a social worker
‘in charge’ of immigrants, or just as a friend of an immigrant.” Anybody, that is,

does not question the internationalization of the epistemologies producing such languages: “As gay
activists from non-Western contexts become more and more involved in setting political agendas, and
as the rights discourse of internationalism is extended to more and more cultural contexts, Anglo-
American queer theorists will have to be more alert to the globalizing — and localizing — tendencies
of our theoretical languages” (Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social
Theory [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], xii).
16. See Arno Schmitt, “A Critique of John Boswell’s Writings on Muslim Gays,” in Schmitt and
Sofer, Sexuality, 169–78.
17. Arno Schmitt, “Different Approaches to Male-Male Sexuality/Eroticism from Morocco to
Usbekitstan,” in Schmitt and Sofer, Sexuality, 5, 20.

366
who is not an Arab, a Turk, or a Persian.18 Not only is the contributor who writes Re-Orienting Desire
about Iran not Iranian, he even makes a point of highlighting his disassociation
with the country, where he lived temporarily. He identifies himself as “a free-
lance writer now living in New York (and never again in Tehran).”19 The oriental-
ist method deployed in this book is one where Arabs and Muslims can only be
objects of European scholarship and never its subjects or audience (the inclusion
of native informants notwithstanding). Still the Schmitt and Sofer volume has
impressed the establishment of the Gay International so much that ILGA relies
on it as a corrective to its own research.20 An example of the research conducted
by ILGA is its entry on Egypt in the Second ILGA Pink Book, where the authors
inform us that “transvestite dancers, ‘Khawal’s’ [sic], who dance at feasts are
very popular.” ILGA’s researchers seem to confuse the nineteenth-century phe-
nomenon of the khawal with the present.21 Once again, time is not part of the
analysis when the topic is the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Even careful scholars of Islam and those who seek to challenge stereotypes of
Islam and Arabs commit errors of ahistoricism when the topic is Muslim Arab
sexual culture. Seeking to explain a puzzling change in Arab sexual categories
after the ninth century, Everett Rowson draws upon Arabic texts written in the
eleventh century to conclude that these texts’ “concepts can be taken as broadly
representative of Middle Eastern societies from the ninth century to the present.”22
Edward Lacey insists that “Islam . . . has always in practice been, and still is
(despite the present-day activities of certain bloodthirsty heretics who do not
even deserve to be called Muslims), far more acceptant and tolerant of homosex-
uality, far more receptive, indulgent and permissive toward it . . . than either of

18. Schmitt and Sofer, Sexuality, xiv.

19. Schmitt and Sofer, Sexuality, 194. The author’s name is David Reed.
20. Whereas ILGA’s Pink Book, for example, states without explanation that Jordan has laws
criminalizing homosexuality, ILGA’s Web site corrects the mistake by referring to Schmitt and Sofer,
who write in their book that “the Penal Code of 1951 makes no distinction between sexual intercourse
by persons of the same sex or persons of different sexes.” Schmitt and Sofer, Sexuality, cited on the
ILGA Web site; see www.ilga.org/information/legal_survey/middle%20east/jordan.htm. Indeed, this
is symptomatic of the shoddy and unprofessional “research” carried out by ILGA. For the Pink Book,
see Aart Hendriks, Rob Tielman, and Evert van der Veen, The Third Pink Book: A Global View of Les-
bian and Gay Liberation and Oppression (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1993), 297.
21. Second ILGA Pink Book/International Lesbian and Gay Association (Utrecht: Interfacultaire
Werkgroep Homostudies, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, 1988), 189.
22. Everett K. Rowson, “The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Ara-
bic Vice Lists,” in Body Guard: Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina
Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 72–73.

367
Public Culture the two other great monotheistic religions of the Western world.”23 For Lacey, as
for Boswell, Schmitt, and Rowson, an ahistoricism is embedded in the heart of
their arguments. Using medieval Arabic texts, Lacey affirms what he calls
the constants of human nature, the universal, unvarying qualities of tem-
perament, the unchanged, unchangeable, undying sexual appetites and
weaknesses that unite human beings throughout all ages and across all
gulfs of religious, cultural, and linguistic difference. . . . How edifying—
and humbling—to realize, for example, that the popular belief that the
size of a man’s penis may be gauged by the size of his nose was as wide-
spread in those remote times as it is today . . . or that most queens, in the
final analysis, preferred, then as now, a thick cock, whatever its length, to
a thin one.24
Contra Schmitt, As 3ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese political scientist who lives
and teaches in the United States, affirms that “homosexual” identities and what
he calls “pure homosexuals” have existed in Arab/Islamic civilization.25
AbuKhalil confidently asserts that the “idea that there were no self-declared les-
bians (suhaqiyyat) or gay men is false” (33). His evidence consists of one line
that he mistranslates from the famed physician al-Razi as cited by al-Tifashi.
While discussing hermaphroditism (al-khinath), which, according to al-Razi,
results from the equality in strength of male and female sperm (wherein if the
male sperm is stronger, a boy results; if the female sperm is stronger, a girl
results; and in the case of equal-strength sperm, the result is a hermaphrodite),
al-Razi also speaks of less extreme outcomes with cases where “you would find
masculinized women (nisa9 mudhakkarat) as you would find feminized men (rijal
mu9annathin) so much that some of these masculinized women either menstruate
less or do not menstruate at all, and some of whom might grow beards, as I have
seen weak beards and mustaches on many women. . . .”26 AbuKhalil mistrans-
lates the first part of this line as “You might find males as women and females as
men” (33) and neglects to include the remainder of the line.

23. Edward A. Lacey, “English Translator’s Introduction,” in Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Tifashi, The
Delight of Hearts, or, What You Will Not Find in Any Book (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1988),
31. Lacey translated only the five chapters of the book that deal with “homosexual” anecdotes. The
chapters were translated from a French translation and not from the Arabic original.
24. Lacey, “English Translator’s Introduction,” 30–31.
25. As3ad AbuKhalil, “A Note on the Study of Homosexuality in the Arab/Islamic Civilization,”
Arab Studies Journal 1, no. 2 (1993): 32–34, 48.
26. Shihab al-Din Ahmad al-Tifashi, Nuzhat al-albab fima la yuwjad fi kitab [A promenade of the
hearts in what does not exist in a book] (London: Riyad al-Rayyis, 1992), 303.

368
 Throughout his account, AbuKhalil refers to “homosexuals,” “gays,” “hetero- Re-Orienting Desire
sexuals,” and “homophobia” as transhistorical identities and phenomena and
anachronistically identifies people and practices with them. For example, he cites
medieval Arabic books that “contain collections of poetry and anecdotes by and
about gay men and women” (33). Unlike the ahistoricists, however, AbuKhalil
believes that changes have occurred in the Arab world, but they do not concern
identities, which he sees as transhistorically present, but rather “homophobia,”
which he believes is historically contingent: “The advent of westernization in the
Middle East brought with it various elements of western ideologies of hostility,
like . . . homophobia. This is not to say that there were not anti-homosexual . . .
elements in Arab/Islamic history, but these elements never constituted an ideol-
ogy of hostility as such” (34). Indeed AbuKhalil’s misreading of the evidence
extends to the European scene, which he mentions for contrast, arriving at unsub-
stantiated conclusions: “The professed homosexual identity among Arabs allowed
homosexuals historically a degree of tolerance that was denied for centuries to
homosexuals in the West. When homosexuals were hunted down as criminals in
much of medieval Europe, homosexuals were rulers and ministers in Islamic
countries” (33). This identitarian essentialism characterizes AbuKhalil’s entire
approach.
Bruce Dunne participates in this academic discourse with his essay “Power
and Sexuality in the Middle East.”27 He asserts that “sexual relations in Middle
Eastern societies have historically articulated social hierarchies, that is, dominant
and subordinate social positions: adult men on top; women, boys and slaves
below” (8). Presumably, in non–Middle Eastern societies such hierarchies did not
“historically” exist except in the celebrated cases of “Greek and late Roman
antiquity,” (9) but certainly not in the medieval, let alone the modern, “West.” The
“Middle Eastern” case is contrasted with the West; according to Dunne, the “dis-
tinction made by modern Western ‘sexuality’ between sexual and gender identity,
that is, between kinds of sexual predilections and degrees of masculinity and fem-
ininity, has until recently, had little resonance in the Middle East” (8).28 This

27. Bruce Dunne, “Power and Sexuality in the Middle East,” Middle East Report 28, no. 1 (1998):
8–11, 37.
28. A note on the designation “Middle East”: The term Middle East is a problematic one due to a
number of reasons, not least among them is its imperial pedigree, which locates the area in relation to
Europe. Other problems relate to the fact that the Muslim world extends beyond the “Middle East”
into Asia and Africa and that the “Middle East” includes non-Arabs and non-Muslims (e.g., residents
of the European settler colony of Israel and Armenia). It is not clear if what Dunne and others
describe as “Middle Eastern” applies to all these people or not.

369
Public Culture judgment is further illustrated by quotes from the two Egyptian native infor-
mants whom Dunne cites. The conclusion is inescapable: “Western notions of
sexuality offer little insight into our contemporary young Egyptian’s apparent
understanding that sexual behavior conforms to a particular concept of gender”
(9). Dunne’s approach is to demonstrate that in “Middle Eastern” society, unlike
Western society, non-“egalitarian sexual relations” predominate and sexuality is
seen as gender determined. For this reason, he says, citing IGLHRC, “many
homosexuals in Middle Eastern countries have sought asylum in the West as
refugees from official persecution” (11). Dunne’s work exemplifies a type of
anthropology that fails to problematize its own mythical idealized self, that con-
tinues to view the other as all that the self does not contain or condone, namely,
nonegalitarian sexual relations, the oppressive rule of men, gender-based sexual-
ity, patriarchy, and so forth. An anthropology that cannot abandon the mytholog-
ical West as a reference point will continue to use it as the organizing principle
for all of its arguments.
A more recent addition to this growing body of literature is Stephen O. Mur-
ray and Will Roscoe’s Islamic Homosexualities, a title indicative of their limited
knowledge of Muslim societies: as Islamic is an adjective referring to the religion
Islam while Muslim refers to people who adhere to it, it is unclear how Islam, the
religion, can have a homosexuality let alone homosexualities.29 Murray rejects
Schmitt’s claim that Arabs have no conceptions of homosexual persons because
(according to Schmitt) “Arabic synonyms for ‘to fuck’ have no form of reciproc-
ity.”30 Murray writes: “I do not know of such a verb in English or any other lan-
guage. To fuck and be fucked requires more than two persons, or sequential acts,
or use of a dildo: human anatomy precludes A’s penis being in B’s anus while B’s
penis is in A’s.”31 In fact, contra Murray and Schmitt, modern Arabic has the verb
tanayaka, which does indicate reciprocity: to say that two people yatanayakan is
to say that they are fucking each other.32 The language-based errors and mistakes
in both Schmitt’s and Roscoe and Murray’s books are too numerous to list here.
Suffice it to say that this is the ground on which the fight to represent the so-

29. Islamic corresponds to Judaic as Muslim corresponds to Jewish or Jew.

30. Schmitt, “Different Approaches,” 10.
31. Stephen O. Murray, “The Will Not to Know: Islamic Accommodations of Male Homosexual-
ity,” in Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, eds., Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Lit-
erature (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 33.
32. Historically, the verb tanayaka referred to the eyelids closing on each other, literally fucking
each other, as in tanayakat al-ajfan, or to indicate that people have been overcome with drowsiness as
in tanayaka al-qawm. See Aba al-Fadl Jamal al-Din Muhammad Bin Mukarram Ibn Manzur, Lisan
al-3Arab (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1990), 10: 502.

370
called real Arab or Muslim position on male-male sexuality is being staged. Re-Orienting Desire
Moreover, Roscoe and Murray — like so many others discussed here — are not
terribly concerned with historical specificity. After a range of quotes from sources
or stories dating back to the classical period of Muslim civilization and to con-
temporary oral reports by Arab native informants, including one “Omar, a cos-
mopolitan Saudi studying in the United States,” Murray concludes that “with
females segregated and tightly controlled, young and/or effeminate males avail-
able for sexual penetration are tacitly accepted — and very carefully ignored in
Muslim societies, past and present.”33 Indeed, time in the context of the Arab
world and Islam is not an agent of change but rather the proof of its lack.

Incitement to Discourse

The advent of colonialism in the Arab and Muslim worlds, its sponsorship of what
came to be known as “modernization” projects, as well as the proliferation and
hegemony of Western cultural products have indeed had their effects. Basim
Musallam has shown how such contact has influenced attitudes toward contracep-
tion and abortion: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, most schools of
Islamic jurisprudence—previously supportive of women’s rights to birth control
and abortion—adopted stances on these issues that were more in line with the
Christian Western position (both Catholic and Protestant).34 Indeed as Western
cultural encroachment continued, its hegemonic impact was also felt at the level of
language. For example, the Arabic word for sex, jins, appeared sometime in the
early twentieth century carrying with it not only its new meanings of biological
sex and national origin but also its old meanings of type and kind and ethnolin-
guistic origin, among others. The word in the sense of type and kind has existed in
Arabic since time immemorial and is derived from the Greek genus. As late as
1870, its connotation of sex had not yet come into usage.35 An unspecific word for
sexuality, jinsiyyah—which also means nationality and citizenship—was coined
in the 1950s by translators of the works of Freud (such as Mustafa Safwan, a

33. Murray, “The Will,” 42.

34. Basim Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control before the Nineteenth Century (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
35. Butrus al-Bustani, Muhit al-Muhit: Qamus mutawwal lil-lughah al-3Arabiyyah (Beirut: Mak-
tabat Lubnan Nashirun, 1987), 129. Al-Bustani’s dictionary dates from 1870, at which time the word
jins had still not acquired the meaning of sex. For medieval dictionaries that identify jins as genus, see
Ibn Manzur, Lisan al-3Arab, 6: 43, and Majd al-Din Muhammad ibn Ya3qub al-Fayruzabadi, al-Qamus
al-muhit (Beirut: Dar Ihya9 al-Turath al-3Arabi, 1997), 1: 738.

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Public Culture major psychoanalytic scholar based in France, and Jurj Tarabishi, the most promi-
nent Arab literary critic writing in Arabic today).36 More recently Muta3 al-Safadi,
translator of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, has introduced the more spe-
cific term, jinsaniyyah.37 This new term, however, is understood by only a few,
even among the literati. Words for homo- or heterosexuality were also invented
recently as direct translations of the Latin original: mithliyyah (sameness) in ref-
erence to homosexuality, and ghayriyyah (differentness) in reference to hetero-
sexuality. Arab translators of psychology books 38 as well as Arab behavioral psy-
chologists adopted the European expression sexual deviance in the mid-1950s,
translating it literally as al-shudhudh al-jinsi, a coinage commonly used in the
media and in polite company to refer to the Western concept of homosexuality.39
Although the advent of colonialism and Western capital in the Arab world has
transformed most aspects of daily life, efforts to impose a European heterosexual
regime on Arab men have succeeded among only the upper classes and the
increasingly Westernized middle classes. It is among members of these wealthier
segments of society that the Gay International has found native informants.40

36. See, for example, Mustafa Safwan, trans., Tafsir al-ahlam [The Interpretation of Dreams], by
Sigmund Freud (Cairo: Dar al-Ma3arif bi Misr, 1969; originally published in 1958), 181; Jurj Tara-
bishi, trans., Thalathat mabahith fi nazariyyat al-jins [Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality], by
Sigmund Freud (Beirut: Dar al-Tali3ah, 1983).
37. See Muta3 al-Safadi, trans., Iradat al-ma3rifah, al-juz 9al-awwal min tarikh al-jinsaniyya [The
Will to Know, Volume 1: The History of Sexuality], by Michel Foucault (Beirut: Markaz al-Inma9 al-
Qawmi, 1990).
38. A notable exception can be found in translations of Freud, in which the term mithliyyah was
introduced as the translation for homosexuality. See, e.g., Mustafa Safwan, Tafsir al-ahlam, 182, 301,
337, 390, 391, 396, and 400.
39. See, for example, the biologically essentialist and pathologizing account of homosexuality
provided by Nawal al-Sa3dawi in a chapter titled “al-Rajul wa al-shudhudh al-jinsi” [Men and sexual
deviance] in her al-Rajul wa al-jins [Man and sex] (Beirut: Al-Mu9assassa al-3Arabiyya lil-Dirasat wa
al-Nashr, 1986; originally published in 1977). As3ad AbuKhalil seems to think that the use of the term
shudhudh jinsi in the Arab press constitutes oppression of homosexuals in the Arab world today. See
his “New Arab Ideology? The Rejuvenation of Arab Nationalism,” Middle East Journal 46 (1992): 35
and 35 n. 52, where such use is the only evidence provided by AbuKhalil to support the charge of
antihomosexual oppression.
40. One such example is the short essay written by an upper-class, educated Jordanian lesbian for
a book compiled by IGLHRC. The author uses a silly and wrongly transliterated and orientalist pseu-
donym “Akhadar Assfar.” Properly transliterated, the pseudonym would read Akhdar Asfar (Green
Yellow), words that are not used as names in Arabic. See Akhadar Assfar, “Jordan,” in Unspoken
Rules: Sexual Orientation and Women’s Human Rights, ed. Rachel Rosenbloom (New York: Cassell,
1996), 103–4. Although the author is careful to say that her statement “was written to reflect my per-
sonal, individual perspective and not to speak on behalf of other lesbians in Jordan” (103), she ends
her essay by affirming that “lesbians in Jordan are without a mention, without recognition, very mar-
ginalized . . . YET WE EXIST” (104). A Tunisian native informant, who identifies himself as a “lib-
eral intellectual” living in England, provides information to Françoise Gollain in her “Bisexuality in

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Although members of these classes who engage in same-sex relations have more Re-Orienting Desire
recently adopted a Western identity (as part of a more general, classwide adop-
tion of everything Western), they remain a minuscule minority among those men
who engage in same-sex relations and who do not identify as “gay” or express a
need for gay politics. (The literature of the Gay International points to examples
of same-sex contact as proof of cross-cultural, cross-class gay identity, but in real-
ity there is no evidence of gay movements anywhere in the Arab world or even of
gay group identity outside of the small groups of men in metropolitan areas such
as Cairo and Beirut.)
It is this minority and its diaspora members who staff groups such as the U.S.-
based Gay and Lesbian Arabic [sic] Society (GLAS), founded in 1989 by a Pales-
tinian in Washington, D.C. Indeed, as members of the Gay International, this
minority is one of the main poles of the campaign to incite discourse on homo-
sexuality in the Arab world. GLAS defines itself as “a networking organization
for Gays and Lesbians of Arab descent or those living in Arab countries. We aim
to promote positive images of Gays and Lesbians in Arab communities world-
wide. We also provide a support network for our members while fighting for our
human rights wherever they are oppressed. We are part of the global Gay and
Lesbian movement seeking an end to injustice and discrimination based on sex-
ual orientation.”41 GLAS’s newsletter Ahbab declares that “since we started this
site, we have witnessed the development of a global family of Gay/Lesbian Arabs
and friends.”42 According to the founder of GLAS and its current outreach direc-
tor, Ramzi Zakharia, “since the concept of same-sex relations does not exist in
the Arab world, being ‘Gay’ is still considered to be sexual behavior. . . . Just
because you sleep with a member of the same sex does not mean that you are
Gay . . . it means that you are engaging in homosexual activity. Once a relation-
ship develops beyond sex (i.e., love) this is when the term gay applies” (empha-
sis added).43 Indeed for Zakharia, the issue of time is crucial. In the Arab world,

the Arab World: Interview with Muhammad,” in Bisexual Horizons, Politics, Histories, Lives, ed.
Sharon Rose and Chris Stevens and others (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996), 58 – 61. See the
interview conducted by the two gay editors (one is an Israeli Jew and the other an American Jew) with
an upper-middle-class Palestinian Israeli man named Walid who identifies as gay in Amir Sumaka9i
Fink and Jacob Press, eds., Independence Park: The Lives of Gay Men in Israel (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 197–219.
41. See GLAS’s Web site at www.glas.org.
42. See the Ahbab Web site at www.glas.org/ahbab/home.htm.
43. Nur Sati, “Equivocal Lifestyles,” Arabia (Web publication available on-line at www.arabia.
com) 30 July 1998. Posted on the Ahbab Web site, www.glas.org/ahbab/Articles/arabia1.html.

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Public Culture being gay is “still” considered sexual behavior. The implicit statement is that the
Arab world has not yet caught up with the liberatory Western model of gay-
ness — and this is the transformation that GLAS seeks to expedite. GLAS’s
Western sexual epistemology is clearest in its claim to represent those Arab men
who practice same-sex contact but do not identify as gay or seek to be involved in
gay politics through GLAS or any other organization.44
The Gay International and this small minority of Arab same-sex practitioners
who adopt its epistemology have embarked on a project that can best be
described as incitement to discourse.45 As same-sex contact between men has not
been a topic of government or journalistic discourse in the Arab world of the last
two centuries, the Gay International’s campaign since the early 1980s to univer-
salize itself has incited such discourse. The fact that the incited discourse is char-
acterized by negativity toward the mission of the Gay International is immaterial.
By inciting discourse on homosexual and gay and lesbian rights and identities,
the very ontology of gayness is instituted in a discourse that could have only two
reactions to the claims of universal gayness: support them or oppose them with-
out ever questioning their epistemological underpinnings. Indeed it is exactly
these reactions that anchor and strengthen and drive the Gay International’s uni-
versal agenda. In a world where no one questions the identification of gayness,
gay epistemology and ontology can institute themselves safely. The Gay Interna-
tional’s fight is therefore not an epistemological one but rather a simple political
struggle where the world is divided between the supporters and opponents of gay
rights.
The Gay International is aided by two other phenomena accompanying its
infiltration into the international public sphere: the spread of AIDS on an inter-
national scale, with the Western homophobic identification of it as the “gay” dis-
ease, and the rise of Islamism in the Arab and Muslim worlds, with its stricter

44. In an article discussing the gay-bashing of a Pakistani living in Chicago, an otherwise careful
observer, Alexander Cockburn (who argues persuasively against hate crimes legislation as a mis-
guided strategy that does not deal with the causes of hate crimes or with the legal inequalities of gays
and lesbians in U.S. society) urges the U.S.-based Al-Fatiha Foundation, which he identifies as “an
international gay Muslim organization,” not to “wast[e] time on hate-crimes issues in Chicago when
their Muslim comrades round the world are confronted by forces of intolerance even grimmer than
[Chicago] Mayor Daley’s Blue Knights. . . . Seven Islamic nations prescribe the death penalty for
homosexuality” (Cockburn, “Beat the Devil,” The Nation, 21 May 2001, 10). When Al-Fatiha turned
its attention to the people who actually created it, Cockburn urges the organization to represent peo-
ple who never sought its creation, much less its “defense” of their rights.
45. I borrow the notion of incitement to discourse from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexual-
ity, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 17–35.

374
sexual mores. The Gay International has succeeded in inciting discourse by Re-Orienting Desire
attracting antigay Islamist and nationalist reactions to its efforts.46
While the premodern West attacked the Muslim world’s alleged sexual licen-
tiousness, the modern West attacks its alleged repression of sexual freedoms.
Representations of the Arab world in the discourse of the Gay International,
which includes the popular publication Spartacus, an “International Gay Guide,”
range from the horrific to the splendid, the latter on account of the availability of
Arab men willing to engage in insertive anal intercourse with Western (read
white) gay men. In the context of an Arab anticolonial nationalism or the more
recent Islamism seeking Western technological modernization while preserving
its version of cultural or religious authenticity, the Gay International is correctly
perceived as part of Western encroachment on Arab and Muslim cultures. The
fact that the Gay International relies on the same organizations (e.g., the U.S.
State Department, the U.S. Congress, U.S.-based human rights organizations, the
American media), practices, and discourse that advance U.S. imperial interests is
certainly a cause for suspicion. This is an issue for not only the Arab world but
also many Muslim countries as well as other national and cultural contexts out-
side of Europe and North America.47 Faisal Alam, the Pakistani American
founder of the Al-Fatiha Foundation, a new U.S.-based organization for gay and
lesbian Muslims, tells his Western audience that Islam is “200 years behind
Christianity in terms of progress on gay issues.”48 Alam, not surprisingly (like
Robert Bray, who was quoted above), is a field associate with the National Gay
and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C.
The representation of the Muslim world as a homosexual paradise has led
some European gay men to convert to Islam. Khalid Duran, a Moroccan social
scientist, reports on such occurrences in Britain and Germany: “Such converts

46. For one of the earlier and measured Islamist responses to Western scholarship on homosexu-
ality in Arabic, see Muhammad Jalal Kishk’s engagement with the work of John Boswell in his
Khawatir Muslim fi al-mas9alah al-jinsiyyah [A Muslim’s thoughts on the sexual question] (Beirut:
Dar al-Jalil, 1992; originally published in 1984 in Cairo).
47. On the case of southern African nationalist responses, see Neville Hoad, “Between the White
Man’s Burden and the White Man’s Disease: Tracking Lesbian and Gay Human Rights in Southern
Africa,” GLQ 5 (1999): 559–84. On the case of Cuba and the reactions to the Gay International in the
context of the Cold War, see Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich, “Homosexuality, Homophobia,
and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience,
Part 1,” Signs 9 (1984): 683–99, and part 2 of their essay in Signs 11 (1985): 120–35.
48. David Goldman, “Gay Muslims,” Southern Voice, summer 1999 (available on-line at www.al-
fatiha.net/svoice.html). Alam has become increasingly important in Washington circles; he was fea-
tured in an article on gay Muslims in the Washington Post (Emily Wax, “Gay Muslims United in Face
of Rejection,” Washington Post, 3 April 2000, B1).

375
Public Culture are drawn to Islam by the erroneous assumption that Muslims are more tolerant.
. . .” Indeed it is such beliefs that account for why “Morocco has become a
favorite playground for European gay men.” As a result, religious circles “are
reacting with increasing bitterness to this type of prostitution engendered by
tourists from affluent societies. The long-standing indulgence was certainly not
rooted in Islam. On the contrary, an Islamic backlash is gaining momentum,
despite the abject poverty.”49 Still, the phenomenon Duran discerned in Europe
seems to be reproducing itself in the United States. The founder of a new U.S.
group called Queer Jihad is a white American convert to Islam who goes by the
name Sulayman X.50
As a result of this touristic assault, writes Duran:
A dispassionate discussion of the human rights of homosexuals is particu-
larly hard to initiate in Muslim societies confronted with a kind of West-
ern homosexual aggression. An instance in point is a representative of a
European political foundation who was stationed in North Africa for
many years. Extremely extroverted, he projects his homosexuality as a
mark of distinction above and beyond his redoubtable academic merits.
Such Western extravagances make the task of human rights activists
among Muslims very difficult indeed. (186–87)
Duran understands that gay sex-tourism in Morocco incites a discourse that has
negative effects. However, he falls in the Western gay epistemological trap that
identifies as homosexual only those Arab and Muslim practitioners of same-sex
contact who are “passive.” Duran describes “active” partners as having “no other
homosexual inclinations” or as suffering from “emergency homosexuality.”51 It is
the passive ones who are gay and therefore at risk for human rights violations.
49. Khalid Duran, “Homosexuality and Islam,” in Homosexuality and World Religions, ed. Arlene
Swidler (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993), 186.
50. See the site of his group Queer Jihad on-line at www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/
Heights/8977/aboutqj.htm and the “Confessions of Sulayman X” posted on-line at www.geocities.
com/WestHollywood/Heights/8977/confessions.htm. Note that Sulayman X’s pretensions are made
possible within a post–World War II context of African American appropriations of Islam and the
appropriation in turn by white U.S. youth culture of African American popular culture. Note also that
Faisal Alam, the founder of Al-Fatiha, met one such convert. He tells the Washington Post reporter
that his first homosexual encounter was a “relationship with an older male convert to Islam” in the
United States (Wax, “Gay Muslims”).
51. Although Duran does not clearly define what he means by “emergency homosexuality,” the
sense is of men who have sex with men when there are no women available. His notion of “emer-
gency homosexuality” seems related to Freud’s notion of “contingent homosexuality.” See Sigmund
Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books,
1962), 3.

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Duran notes that Western “gays seeking active partners in North African coun- Re-Orienting Desire
tries usually do not realize that their local lovers are often motivated by a hostile
attitude toward them as citizens of nations that had once been colonial masters.
To sodomize a Westerner provides a kind of psychological relief for some people
from among the former ‘subject races’ who now have a chance to take it out on
their oppressors. This also holds true of some other African regions; to do it to a
white man is like taking revenge, along with having a source of income” (189).
By reducing the desire of Moroccan men who are “active” in same-sex contact to
the economic, anticolonial, or “emergency” realm, Duran need not account for
the different workings of sexual epistemology and sexual desire to which Moroc-
can men subscribe; sexual desire is simply and conveniently eliminated from his
account altogether.
Duran’s semianthropological study, which is punctuated by data that he pro-
vides as a native informant, differentiates between what he considers “the more
genuine, or genetic type of homosexuality . . . [which is] generally less common
among the peoples of the ‘Islamic belt’ than in Europe” and the more prevalent
“emergency homosexuality” that he thinks exists in the Arab world and Iran
(187 – 88). Like AbuKhalil, Duran seems to think that the categories of “gay” or
“straight” are transhistorical; he writes of “two important historical figures [who
are] known to have been gay, Sultan Mehmet Fatih, the Ottoman conqueror of
Constantinople (Istanbul), and Sultan Mahmud Ghaznawi, who invaded India
from Afghanistan” (190).
Since the early 1980s, in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the rise of
Islamism in the Arab world and the beginnings of the internationalization of the
Western gay movements, a steady, albeit infrequent, discourse about Western
“sexual deviance” and later about AIDS could be found in the Arab press. Much
of it represented the Western gay and lesbian movements, following Western
conservative and fundamentalist Christian descriptions, as part of the degrada-
tion of Western sexual mores in general. Still, this limited discourse rarely men-
tioned sexual deviance in the Arab world and remained infrequent until the
1990s when it became more vociferous, although still infrequent, in response to
the crusading efforts of the Gay International.
An example of this is the exchange that took place between the editor of the
prestigious London-based Arabic newspaper, al-Hayah, and a representative of a
U.S.-based Arab gay and lesbian group. Railing against Western cable and satel-
lite channels for broadcasting programs containing violence, sexual material, and
gay and lesbian weddings, Jihad al-Khazin, editor in chief of al-Hayah, referred to

377
Public Culture gays by the Arabic term meaning sexual deviants.52 Al-Khazin’s conservative and
procensorship argument chastised Arab liberals who fight government control of
television and defended Arab governments as the bearers of “the responsibility to
protect their societies from the worst aspects of degeneration.” Al-Khazin, who
often espouses Western conservative opinion on social matters, concluded his
tirade by quoting Western sources that sexual deviants constitute no more than 1
to 2 percent of Western society and by asserting that the focus of television rep-
resentations on “violence without punishment or pain has led to the spread of
violence in society. The danger now [lies in the possibility] that the focus on
deviance, among women and men, might lead to the acceptance of deviance as a
normal, not a deviant, issue, its subsequent spread in the West, and then its reach-
ing us.”53 Incensed by the use of the term deviant but not by the procensorship
argument, Ramzi Zakharia, the founder of GLAS, wrote a letter to the editor in
protest. Zakharia insisted that the term deviant “insults me as an Arab who desires
people of the same sex as it insults millions like me.” Zakharia explained how
deviance does not describe people like himself since homosexuality is “genetic”
and since his relationship to his sexual partner is not based only on sex but also on
love. After hinting at the withdrawal of his company’s advertising in al-Hayah,
Zakharia declared that his group’s goals in the Arab world are like those of the
feminist movement, namely, to “remove the old and tribalist patriarchal system
which has strangled and continues to strangle our people. . . . This system is based
on the use of ‘traditions,’ and ‘honor,’ as weapons to repress pluralism in our soci-
eties in order to make democracy in them practically impossible, and to maintain
the tribalist mentality whose effects are very clear in the contemporary Arab
world.”54 In response to Zakharia, al-Khazin, whose own concern about “degener-
ation” is borrowed wholesale from late-nineteenth-century European discourse,
asserted that he did not intend to insult anyone by his comments but was simply
using the Arabic term for homosexuals. The other term that exists, he correctly
added, is mithliyyah (sameness), a term that is hardly known to most readers.55 Al-

52. Jihad al-Khazin, “ 3Uyun wa adhan” [Eyes and ears], al-Hayah, 9 February 1996, 24.
53. al-Khazin, “ 3Uyun wa adhan.”
54. Ramzi Zakhara, “al-Nizam al-abawiyy wa aslihatuhu al-qam3iyya” [The patriarchal system
and its repressive weapons], al-Hayah, 3 March 1996, 18.
55. I should note here that in the last few years, in their coverage of gay- and lesbian-related
news, al-Hayah and other Arabic newspapers have begun to employ intermittently the expression
mithliyyah, indicating a transitional, ambivalent phase in language use between shudhudh and mith-
liyyah. See, for example, “Mithliyu al-jins ila al-qafas al-dhahabi fi Kanada . . . wa al-baritaniyyun
yantazirun al-faraj” [Canada’s homosexuals (enter) the golden cage (of marriage) while the(ir) British
(counterparts) are still waiting (to follow in their footsteps)], al-Hayah, 13 April 2000, back page.

378
Khazin concluded by asserting that although most of Zakharia’s long letter was Re-Orienting Desire
published, “the editor in chief and al-Hayah are both against sameness (mith-
liyyah), or deviance (shudhudh), or whatever the reader would like to call it, for
reasons of traditions, religion, and inherited conventions, but without insulting
anyone and without coercion, imposition, or oppression and without making a
case out of it, as this was not the intention. . . . moreover, the editor in chief admits
his ignorance of this issue more generally as he did not realize that this issue was
on the table.”56 Indeed it was not, as al-Khazin’s concern was with the spread of
“deviance” from the West to the Arab world and not its actual existence in the
Arab world. Neither the editor of al-Hayah nor the newspaper itself would have
declared explicit opposition to “sameness” in the Arab world had Zakharia, a res-
ident of the United States, not incited this condemnation—which will affect not
him but people in the Arab world. Zakharia’s letter elicited another response from
a physician in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, who felt it incumbent to assert that the pun-
ishment for homosexuals is death and to respond to Zakharia’s claim of the genetic
basis of “sexual deviance” by calling it a “disease.”57
Such incitement has not been confined to the pages of al-Hayah; in the mid-
1990s it exploded on the pages of many Arabic newspapers. At the UN-spon-
sored International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994
and the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the agenda of the Gay
International — produced by American and European NGOs — was forcefully
promoted to a global audience. In many cases, translations of platform texts and
resolutions were distorted, thus concealing the more controversial aspects from
conference participants. The scandal of distorted translations of texts of plat-
forms and other resolutions became a major issue in the preparation of both con-
ferences. It was in this context that Arab columnists began to rail against the
“lobby of deviants” in America who want to impose their debauchery on the rest
of the world.58 At the 1999 International Conference on Population and Develop-
ment in The Hague, a follow-up to the 1994 conference, this “deviant lobby”
showed its less than peaceful face. Repeating the same performance of 1994, the
conference organizers denied most delegates translations of conference resolu-

56. Response of editor in chief (al-Khazin), al-Hayah, 3 March 1996, 18.

57. Dr. 3Abdullah Bin Hamad, “al-Shudhudh al-jinsi marad wa laysa amran mafrudan” [Sexual
deviance is a disease, not an imposed fate], al-Hayah, 15 March 1999, 18.
58. See, for example, Zaynab 3Abd al-3Aziz, “Kawalis mu9 tamar al-mar9ah fi bikin” [Behind the
scenes at the Women’s Conference in Beijing], al-Sha3b (Cairo), 7 July 1995, 11; and Zaynab 3Abd al-
3Aziz, “Tafakhur al-shawadh . . . wa Mu9tamar al-Mar9ah” [The pride of the deviants and the Women’s
Conference], al-Sha3b, 28 July 1995, 11.

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Public Culture tions by producing texts in French, English, and Spanish only.59 The resolutions
included statements about guaranteeing for the youth the “freedom of [sexual]
expression and sexual orientation.” The word orientation was subsequently trans-
lated into Arabic in newspaper coverage as tawajjuh (direction, which has no
idiomatic meaning whatsoever) and translated for readers as “sexual deviance.”60
Bashshar al-Jammali, a Belgian journalist of Muslim Arab origin working as a
correspondent for the Islamist magazine al-Mustaqbal al-Islami, alerted the Arab
youth delegations to these ambiguous terms and their meanings, prompting the
delegations to oppose them and to ask that they be removed from the resolutions.
As punishment for his efforts, the UN conference coordinator denied al-Jammali
journalistic access to the conference and instructed the UN security guards to
take his press card and beat him. Unconscious and handcuffed, he was found and
released by the Dutch police. Al-Jammali pressed charges against the UN, sent
letters to the 187 UN delegations, and involved members of the U.S. Congress
and the Dutch police in what became a cause célèbre condemning the machina-
tions of the Gay International. Articles and interviews with al-Jammali appeared
in the Arabic press with all the gory details of his beating.61
More recently, the Egyptian authorities have begun to crack down on Cairo
locations where Westernized Egyptian gay-identified men and their European
and American tourist cohorts congregate. On 11 May 2001, the police raided a
discotheque housed in a boat on the Nile in the upper-class neighborhood of
Zamalik and arrested fifty-five people.62 Women and foreign (i.e., mostly Euro-
pean and American) men who were detained were released on the spot, and three
Egyptian men found to be the sons of prominent people were released shortly
afterward.63 The arrested men—all Egyptian—were reportedly roughed up and
insulted by the police. They were later subjected to so-called medical (read rec-
tal) exams to verify their “deviance.”64 The official charges brought against these

59. See Danya Amin’s report, “Muntada fi lahay jama3a mu9assasat hukumiyyah wa ahliyyah” [A
symposium in the Hague includes government and private organizations], al-Hayah mulhaq al-
shabab, 30 March 1999, 1.
60. Amin, “Muntada fi lahay.”
61. See Muhammad al-Shaqa9, “Hal yasma3 Anan anin Bashshar?” (Does Anan hear Bashshar’s
groaning?), al-Hayah mulhaq al-shabab, 18 May 1999, 20.
62. Thirty-four of the men were at the disco at the time of the arrests, and the rest were arrested
in their homes.
63. The arrested men were alleged to be members of a cult that considers the medieval Arab/Per-
sian poet Abu al-Nuwwas their “prophet.” This allegation was based on a book found at the home of
one of the suspects that elaborates this view and wherein same-sex practitioners are enjoined to go on
a pilgrimage to the Dead Sea annually to commemorate the death of the people of Lot.
64. For journalistic coverage of the arrests, see Muhammad Salah, “ 3Abadat al-shaytan yastal-

380
men by the state prosecutor were those of “offending religion” (one of the Re-Orienting Desire
accused had allegedly written a text that advances a “heretical” interpretation of
Islam as a religion that revels in same-sex contact) and of “practicing debauch-
ery”—Egyptian law has no provisions against same-sex practice. Because Egypt
has been under emergency regulations since the early 1980s, the men were tried
by a special emergency state security court—an indication that the state consid-
ers this a national security issue. One person (the alleged author of the “heretical”
text) was sentenced to a five-year prison term with hard labor, and his associate
received a three-year term. One person received a one-year prison term, and
twenty others were found guilty of practicing debauchery and were sentenced to
two-year prison terms with hard labor, while the remaining twenty-nine were
found innocent of all charges and released. IGLHRC representative Scott Long
(misidentified by al-Hayah as ILGA’s representative or, more precisely, accord-
ing to al-Hayah, “The International Association of Sexual Deviants”) was at the
trial and spoke with journalists. He condemned the court decisions and asserted
that the “government exploits religion in an attempt to oppress the suspects.” The
court had declared that “Eastern society” as well as all monotheistic religions
“condemn deviance and perversion/delinquency” (shudhudh and inhiraf ).65
This crackdown followed an increasing visibility of Westernized, Cairo-based,
upper- and middle-class Egyptian men who identify as gay and consort with
European and American tourists, as well as the related increase in Internet activ-
ity among these men to arrange for meetings. It should be noted that the police

himun qawm Lut” [Satan worshipers receive their inspiration from “the people of Lot”], al-Hayah, 14
May 2001, 7, and al-Hayah’s subsequent coverage on the following dates: 15 May 2001, 7; 16 May
2001, 7; 29 June 2001, 5. Note that originally it was reported that fifty-five people had been arrested;
by late June the number was reduced to fifty-two — the three upper-class men who were released in
the meantime were dropped unceremoniously from the count. See also Muhammad Salah, “ ‘Qawm
Lut al-judud’ yabkun fi al-jalsah al-ula li-muhakamatihim” [“The new people of Lot” cry at their first
trial hearing], al-Hayah, 19 July 2001, 4, for coverage of the first trial hearing; and Bonnie Eslinger
and Hossam Bahgat, “Egypt Steps Up Anti-Gay Campaign: 52 Men Face Obscenity Trial,” San Fran-
cisco Chronicle, 19 July 2001, A12. See also Hossam Bahgat, “Explaining Egypt’s Targeting of Gays,”
Middle East Report, 23 July 2001 (press information note available on-line at www.merip.org). See
also al-Hayah, 16 August 2001, 1, 5, 6; 28 August 2001, 15; 29 August 2001, 6; 30 August 2001, 6. On
rectal exams performed on the suspects, see “ ‘Qawm Lut al-judud’ al-difa3 yata3ahhad taqdim
watha9iq li-tabri9at al-muttahamin” [“The new people of Lot”: The defense promises to provide docu-
ments to exonerate the suspects], al-Hayah, 5 September 2001, 6. Apparently no exams were made on
the penises of the men (for traces of fecal matter, for example) to ascertain if they were “deviant.”
65. See Muhammad Salah, “ ‘Qadiyyat qawm Lut al-judud’ fi Misr: al-ashghal al-shaqqah li 23
muttahaman wa tabri9at 29” (The “case of the new people of Lot” in Egypt: Hard labor for 23 suspects
and the acquittal of 29), al-Hayah, 15 November 2001, 8.

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Public Culture were able to pursue these men mostly through monitoring their Internet corre-
spondence. The most prominent of the Web sites, gayegypt.com, is in English
and features tips for European and American gay tourists coming to Egypt.66
Clearly most Egyptian men who practice same-sex contact neither know English
nor have the wherewithal to afford Internet access, much less know how to use it.
This is important in that the police do not seek to, and cannot if they were so
inclined, arrest men practicing same-sex contact but rather are pursuing those
among them who identify as “gay” on a personal level and who seek to use this
identity as a group identification through social and public activities. The cam-
paign of the Gay International misses this important distinction. The point being
that it is not same-sex sexual practices that are being repressed by the Egyptian
police but rather the sociopolitical identification of these practices with the West-
ern identity of gayness and the publicness that these gay-identified men seek.
The arrests prompted a torrent of media collusion with the government, con-
demning the practice of “deviance” as a new Western imposition—ironically, the
hysteria that gripped the Gay International and their local agents only further
ignited the rhetoric. IGLHRC was joined by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International in condemning the arrests and in orchestrating a letter-writing cam-
paign to Egyptian officials.67 They were joined by GLAS and by Al-Fatiha’s now-
infamous founder Faisal Alam who not only called for worldwide demonstrations
in support of the arrested men, but also solicited the signatures of members of the
U.S. Congress, who were recruited by openly gay Massachusetts congressman
Barney Frank and by the anti-Arab and anti-Egyptian Tom Lantos to sign a peti-
tion threatening a cutoff of U.S. aid to Egypt if the government failed to release
the men.68 Western diplomats and the Western press, who are usually silent about

66. For example, the site has a Web page called “Gay Arabic” in which it states the following:
“Welcome to gayegypt.com’s gay arabic page—perfect for gay tourists wishing to use a few words in
their encounters with Egyptians. Even remembering a few of these phrases will raise eyebrows and
enhance your prospects of a profitable holiday.” The rest of the Web site acts as a guide to gay tourists
visiting Cairo and Egypt more generally.
67. See also Bahgat, “Explaining Egypt’s Targeting of Gays,” and Howard Schneider, “Cultural
Struggle Finds Symbol in Gay Cairo: Arrests of 52 Men Reflect Tension between Islamic Tradition-
alists, Secularists,” Washington Post, 9 September 2001, A24.
68. A GLAS flyer circulated via e-mail called for the 15 August 2001 demonstration in New York
City at the Egyptian consulate. The flyer called on people to “join us for a rally outside the office of
the Egyptian Consulate as we send a clear message that Gay Rights are Human Rights and that our
tax dollars will not continue to fund the brutal oppression of our brothers and sisters in Egypt or any
other Arab country.” Al-Fatiha’s Faisal Alam issued an Action Alert on 14 August 2001, entitled
“International Day of Solidarity and Mourning in Support of 52 Detained Men in Egypt,” calling for
the 15 August worldwide demonstrations and asserting that “the Egyptian government [should] know

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most human rights abuses in Egypt as well as the poverty that afflicts the country, Re-Orienting Desire
flocked to the trial hearings in droves and registered their horror at the proceed-
ings. The reaction of the Egyptian press and of the Egyptian government was
swift: more vilification campaigns of deviant sex as an imperialist plot, as evi-
denced by the real alliances that the Gay International makes with imperialists—
Al-Fatiha’s activities were seen as particularly egregious. Indeed, the vilification
campaign against these men intensified precisely as a result of the actions of the
Gay International and the Western politicians whose support it solicited. During
the hearings, the prosecution frequently referenced the Gay International’s cam-
paign, pledged to defend the “manhood” of Egypt against attempts to “violate” it,
and wondered what would become of a nation who sits by idly as its “men become
like its women” through “deviance.”69 The press and conservative Islamists have
begun to call for explicit laws criminalizing same-sex practice.70 The Gay Inter-
national and its activities are largely responsible for the intensity of this repres-
sive campaign. Despite the overwhelming evidence that gayness, as a choice, is
proving to bring about more repression, not “liberation,” and less sexual freedom
rather than more for Arab men practicing same-sex contact, the Gay Interna-
tional is undeterred in its missionary campaign.
By inciting discourse about homosexuals where none existed before, the Gay
International is in fact heterosexualizing a world that is being forced to be fixed
by a Western binary. Because most non-Western civilizations, including Muslim
Arab civilization, have not subscribed historically to these categories, their impo-
sition is producing less than liberatory outcomes: men who are considered the
passive or receptive parties in male-male sexual contacts are forced to have one

that the world will not sit back and watch injustice and oppression take place!” On Alam’s call to
members of Congress, including Barney Frank, to sign the threatening petition, which many, includ-
ing Frank, did, see al-Hayah, 15 August 2001, 1, 6. See also the Washington Post, 9 September 2001,
A24, and al-Ahram al-3Arabi, 25 August 2001 (on-line version). Alam had already met Frank at least
a year earlier when he “presented a copy of the Koran to a group of Jewish gay leaders, including U.S.
Representative Barney Frank.” See Wax, “Gay Muslims.” Lantos’s anti-Arab and anti-Egyptian views
are noted in al-Hayah, “al-Mithliyyun fi al-3alam yatahaddun li nasrat qawm Lut fi Misr” [Homosex-
uals in the world (launch a) challenge in solidarity with the “people of Lot” in Egypt], 15 August
2001, 1, 6. His unwavering support of Israel and enmity to Arab countries and the Palestinians is dis-
cussed in Janine Zacharia, “Lantos’s List,” Jerusalem Post, 13 April 2001 (on-line version).
69. See Khalid Miri, “Ma3rakah sakhinah bayn al-niyabah wa al-difa3 fi qadiyyat al-shawaz” [A
heated battle between the prosecution and the defense in the case of the deviants], Al-Hawadith
(Cairo), 6 September 2001 (on-line version).
70. See, for example, “al-Qanun la yu3aqib al-shawaz” [The law does not punish deviants], Al-
Ahram al-3Arabi (Cairo), 25 August 2001, which includes calls for the criminalization of same-sex
contact among men in the country.

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Public Culture object choice and identify as homosexual or gay, just as men who are the “active”
partners are also forced to limit their sexual aim to one object choice, women or
men. Most “active” partners see themselves as part of a societal norm, so hetero-
sexuality becomes compulsory given that the alternative, as presented by the Gay
International, means becoming marked outside the norm—with all the attendant
risks and disadvantages of such a marking.71 Also, most Arab and Muslim coun-
tries that do not have laws against sexual contact between men respond to the
Gay International’s incitement to discourse by professing antihomosexual stances
on a nationalist basis. This is leading to harassment by police in some cases and
could lead to antihomosexual legislation. Those countries that already have
unenforced laws have begun to enforce them.72 Ironically, this is the very process
through which “homosexuality” was invented in the West.73
It is not the Gay International or its upper-class supporters in the Arab dias-
pora who will be persecuted but rather the poor and nonurban men who practice
same-sex contact and who do not identify as homosexual or gay. The so-called
passive homosexual whom the Gay International wants to defend against social
denigration will find himself in a double bind: first, his sexual desires will be
unfulfilled because he will no longer have access to his previously available sex-
ual object choice (i.e., exclusively active partners, as in the interim they will have
become heterosexual); and second, he will fall victim to legal and police persecu-

71. On compulsory heterosexuality’s coercion of women in the West, see Adrienne Rich’s classic
“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5 (1980): 631–60.
72. E.g., in April 2000 the Lebanese vice police harassed the managing director of an Internet ser-
vice provider in Beirut for allowing a Web site for “gay” Lebanese; the general manager and a human
rights activist were charged with defaming the Lebanese army and Lebanese flag, interrogated by the
police, and arraigned before a military court. IGLHRC’s intervention in this case is exemplary of the
incitement to discourse that contributes to even further criminalization and harassment. In one of its
campaign mailings, IGLHRC enjoined its supporters to write letters to the Lebanese authorities
demanding an “end [to] discrimination and harassment against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
people in Lebanon.” The Gay Lebanon Web site — featuring a buff blond European man on the first
page — itself incited discourse on gay issues in the press. Even human rights activists in the country
ran a gay-unfriendly article on the topic. See Nada Iliyya, “Luwat Lubnan wa suhaquhu aydan” [The
male homosexuality of Lebanon and its lesbianism too], Hurriyyat, February 2000, 39. The Web site
content, like the corresponding Egyptian Web site, is in English exclusively and includes cruising tips
for not only Lebanese men who identify as “gay” (and who obviously must be able to read English
and must have Internet access) but also foreign visitors (read white Europeans and Americans) who
are duly informed in the tradition of Lebanese chauvinism that homosexuality in Lebanon (a country
which, unlike many of its neighbors, has colonial French laws from the 1930s criminalizing homo-
sexuality) is “more tolerated” than in other “Middle Eastern” countries. The Web site address is
http://surf.to/gay.lebanon.
73. On the invention of homosexuality, see Foucault, History of Sexuality.

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tion as well as heightened social denigration as his sexual practice becomes a Re-Orienting Desire
topic of public discourse that transforms it from a practice into an identity.
When the Gay International incites discourse on homosexuality in the non-
Western world, it claims that the “liberation” of those it defends lies in the bal-
ance. In espousing this liberation project, the Gay International is destroying
social and sexual configurations of desire in the interest of reproducing a world
in its own image, one wherein its sexual categories and desires are safe from
being questioned. Because it has solicited and received some support from Arab
and Muslim native informants who are mostly located in the United States and
who accept its sexual categories and identities, the Gay International’s imperialist
epistemological task is proceeding apace with little opposition from the majority
of the sexual beings it wants to “liberate” and whose social and sexual worlds it is
destroying in the process. In undertaking this universalizing project, the Gay
International ultimately makes itself feel better about a world it forces to share its
identifications. Its missionary achievement, however, will be the creation not of a
queer planet but rather a straight one.

Joseph Massad teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia
University. He is the author of Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity
in Jordan (2001) and numerous articles on Palestinian and Israeli society and pol-
itics.

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