The Gay Arab World

By Melissa

Gay International, their mission, to advance the rights of those belonging to different sexual orientations around the world. Missionaries from this organization produced literature on the Muslim world detailing the history of "homosexuals" in the Arab world and journalistic accounts of gays and lesbians in the contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds. Th discourse in the beginning of the article suggests that homosexuals, gays, and lesbians are universal categories that exist all over the world.

Arab men who engage in homosexual activities ruse the Western identification of gayness. Now the question exists, are these straight men really gay and overdue for liberation or are human beings bisexual by nature and Arab and Muslim men are better tuned into reality than Westerners? Personally, I believe we are all bisexual by nature and Arab and Muslim men are actually right on track with natural design.

Christians have portrayed Muslims as immoral and sexually deviant for centuries. In the Muslim world there is no exact word for homosexual, the concept doesn't exist, neither the concept of heterosexuality. Although Western colonization has affected the Arab world n many ways, the heterosexual regime on the Arab world has only effected the upper class and parts of the middle class. Th poor still hold their original beliefs on unnamed sexuality.

In the Arab world, engaging in homosexual activities doesn't make one gay. One is considered gay only when the relationship isn't only sexual, when love and a relationship actually begins to form. In order for gay activists to help homosexual individuals in the Arab and Muslim world, the people there must first label themselves as homosexuals. This system makes sense but I don't think its fair that people need to label their sexuality in order to have their basic human rights preserved.

The Gay International is supported by two phenomena affecting the international public sphere,the AIDS epidemic and the western homophobic identification of the "gay disease". The Muslim world was seen as a homosexuals paradise and so many gay europeans have converted to Islam. There is a huge marked for Muslims to sodomize westerners. It is seen as a kind of psychological relief for former " subject races" to now have a chance to take it out on their oppressors.

There was an instance sighted in this article of muslim men being "medically examined" for signs of sins against their religion and practicing debauchery. The issue of homosexual sex was considered a national security issue. I believe the government wanted to use these men as an example, that the Arab government would not stand for having homosexuals within their society. The press ate up this story and instantly activist from around the globe came to their aid demanding that they be released from their sentences.

Who is to say that a person's sexual desires turn them into societal deviants. The government has no right to make that assumption about people. I don't see how it was at all legal to imprison people for acting on their natural urges if they were consensual. I'm happy that some American politicians got involved in this international injustice.