‘Unspeakable Love’ delves into the political, religious and social reason behind the mistreatment of gay men and lesbians in the Middle East. Photo courtesy of University of California Press.
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By GREGORY HAMM
Friday, January 12, 2007
Early on the morning of May 11, 2001, Egyptian police boarded the Queen Boat, a gay-friendly disco moored on the River Nile in Cairo, and rounded up some 50 men suspected of cross-dressing, devil worship and “immoral acts.” The men—whose real crime was to flaunt their sexual orientation in a society that does not suffer deviants kindly—were arrested, tortured and put on trial in what became the first in a series of brutal crackdowns in Egypt against gays and lesbians.
The Queen Boat incident and its aftermath inspired “Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East” (University of California Press), a new book by Brian Whitaker that casts light on a critically underreported subject matter.
The questions raised in the aftermath of the arrest help set the scope of Whitaker’s investigation: How does a nation with no explicit law against same-sex acts manage to arrest men for frequenting a gay establishment? How does a pro-Western government flout even the most basic human rights protections? And why would a secular state cave to Islamist pressures?
Journalism in the Middle East, particularly on a topic as fraught as sexual orientation, presents a host of challenges. Men and women who consider themselves gay, and the handful of organizations that advocate on their behalf, hesitate to speak on the record for fear of retribution, while media coverage of sexuality issues tends to be one-sided, if the issue is addressed at all.
Whitaker painstakingly chronicles, film by film and book by book, the limited and usually slanted representation of homosexuals in Middle Eastern cinema and literature not only to underscore the difficulty of his undertaking, but also to suggest that prejudices and misconceptions thrive in the absence of public discussion. The point is well taken but tiresome; we get the point long before Whitaker is done making it.
More provocative Whitaker’s foray into the muddle of religion and politics. He thoughtfully parses the Qur’an and, short of finding any “universally-agreed ‘Islamic punishment’ for homosexual acts,” cautions against blaming religion for homophobia in the Middle East.
“Treating Islam, rather than social attitudes, as the main obstacle minimizes the hope for reform and gives fuel to those on both sides of the divide who favor a clash-of-civilizations approach,” Whitaker writes. “A different … way of addressing the problem is to pay less attention to the ‘otherness’ of Arab-Islamic culture and more attention to its sameness.”
Enter politics into the realm of sexuality. Central to Whitaker’s argument is what he labels “reverse orientalism,” the process by which the Arab world distances itself from the meddling influence of the United States and Europe, whose vehement attempts to export everything from Coca-Cola to democracy, he claims, only stoke a resistance to what many leaders in the Middle East view as the West’s decadent, individualistic agenda, which includes, of course, the right to go public with one’s attraction to the same sex. As a result of “reverse orientalism,” governments curry favor with radical religious groups in part by cracking down on any semblance of Western excess.
Lest Americans grow smug when considering the status of gays in their own culture, Whitaker reminds readers that the arguments against homosexuality in the Middle East today resemble those that once prevailed, and in some regions continue to rage, in the United States. There is, in fact, a perceptible thread of anti-Americanism in “Unspeakable Love.” According to Whitaker, change must occur organically, not by foreign imposition, however benevolent.
The key point, of course, and a reason to be hopeful, is that change is possible.
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