The myth of the Gay International.

• Author: Scagliotti, John
• Position: Desiring Arabs - Gay Travels in the Muslim World - Book review

Desiring Arabs By Joseph A. Massad. University of Chicago Press. 448 pages. $35.

Gay Travels in the Muslim World Edited by Michael T. Luongo. Harrington Park Press. 200 pages. $19.95.

It is rare that events concerning gays and lesbians in other countries make the front page of mainstream newspapers. So when The New York Times covered the arrests and torture by the Egyptian military of fifty-two gay men in May 2001, the astonishing picture in the "paper of record" of so many gay men covering their faces with white towels as they were herded with cattle prods into a Cairo courthouse was enough to propel many gay and lesbian people in the West to look seriously at the conditions of their own kind in the Middle East for the first time. As Monica Taher of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said, "It was a wake-up call for gay and lesbians, especially in the U.S."

This wasn't the first crackdown on gays in the Middle East (or in Asia, Africa, Latin America, where similar assaults were occurring). It just became the most newsworthy, and put a tiny spotlight on what many of us involved with international gay and lesbian issues had been reporting in our respective media. It finally nudged enough funding sources to support a documentary I was doing at the time called Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World . Freaked by a new breed of determined U.S. Christian fundamentalists filling the federal corridors everywhere in the Age of Bush, PBS, which had broadcast my earlier documentaries on gay life, ultimately couldn't bring itself to air this film. That made a weird kind of sense. It's one thing for the establishment U.S. media to make a fuss over poor victims of an Arab tyrant, and another to embrace the reality that these gay Arab men represented before they were victims: the push-pull between liberation and backlash that has accompanied gay people everywhere--including, ironically, PBS.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The roundup of the Cairo 52--many of them arrested for dancing on a disco party boat on the Nile--came after a brief flourish of gay visibility in Cairo and other big international cities like Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, a time that was quixotically called the "neo-gay '90s." This public emergence of gay identity (as opposed to the practice of same sex, which has been going on all over the world for millennia) roused fundamentalists in those regions and led authorities to move to shut down gay cafes, gay websites, gay theater, gay meeting spots, gay disco boats, and gay people. As Julian Jayaseela, a political activist and AIDS worker in Kuala Lumpur, told me, "There is a price to pay for visibility. It definitely attracts the bullet."

I suppose I should have known that this basic, earthy dialectic of gay life would elude Joseph Massad, an associate professor at Columbia University and the author of Desiring Arabs . I have...