"Prisoners of Sex" is the odd, provocative title given to Negar Azimi's article in the most recent issue of the New York Times Magazine. Although it touches briefly on events in Morocco, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the piece focuses primarily on the debate over gay rights in Egypt.
A bunch of colorful characters make appearances, including the firebrand parliamentarian Mostafa Backry (who once reportedly closed his office for three days in protest of a Christian becoming a local governor in Egypt). And of course the infamous Queen Boat raid is evoked. In fact, Azimi reports that it remains docked along the Nile with a neon green "Queen Boot" sign outside.
What's perhaps most interesting is the debate among human rights activists over whether or not to stand up for gay rights in "conservative" Egyptian society - and even if the answer is yes, how to do so without seeming like a Western "imperialist" imposition.
Upon release of the report in March 2004, Kenneth Roth, Human Rights
Watch’s executive director, and Scott Long, director of the
organization’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Project,
met with Egypt’s public prosecutor, the assistant to the interior
minister and members of the Foreign Ministry. Their effort seemed to
have had some effect; although occasional arrests continue, the all-out
campaign of arrest and entrapment of men that began with the Queen Boat
incident came to an end. One well-connected lawyer noted that a
high-ranking Ministry of Interior source told him, “It is the end of
the gay cases in Egypt, because of the activities of some human rights
organizations.”
When I spoke to Long about his work on the Queen Boat case and its
aftermath, he reflected on his advocacy methods in a context in which
human rights, and especially gay rights, are increasingly associated
with Western empire-building. “Perhaps we had less publicity for the
report in the United States because we avoided fetishizing beautiful
brown men in Egypt being denied the right to love,” he said. “We wrote
for an Egyptian audience and tried to make this intelligible in terms
of the human rights issues that have been central in Egyptian
campaigns. It may not have made headlines, but it seemed to make
history.” Whether the effort made history or simply interrupted it
remains to be seen. Long himself noted, “The fact that the crackdown
came apparently out of nowhere is a reminder that the repression could
revive anytime...”
“This was framed locally as an attack from the West,” says Bahgat, who eventually collaborated with Human Rights Watch on the case and later opened his own organization, the Egyptian
Initiative for Personal Rights. “It was important to show that working
for the rights of the detained was not a gay agenda, or a Western
agenda, that this was linked to Egypt’s overall human rights record.
Raising the gay banner when most sexual and other human rights are
systematically violated every day is never going to get you far in this
country.”
The article also reveals a little-known fact. Homosexuality per se is not illegal in Egypt:
Many of the police reports on arrests of homosexuals have cited “the
protection of the society’s values” as a motivating factor, adding that
the arrested threatened to harm “the country’s reputation on the
international level.” The country’s image is of the utmost importance
for the officials responsible for these campaigns. Still, homosexual
acts are not against the law in Egypt; most men caught in these
roundups are charged with fujur, or the “habitual practice of
debauchery.” Some countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia or the
United Arab Emirates, expressly criminalize homosexual acts. But in
Egypt, the charges have increasingly involved a creative interpretation
of a law introduced in 1951 to combat prostitution — drafted as a
response to what was viewed as a remnant of Egypt’s colonial past. (The
British introduced the licensing of brothels.)
Read the whole thing. Related comments here and here.
UPDATE: Sad related news from Iraq.
