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Gay Travels in the Muslim World by Steve Weinstein
EDGE Editor-In-ChiefMonday Aug 6, 2007Veteran travel writer Michael Luongo, fresh from his experiences as a volunteer emergency services worker at Ground Zero after Sept. 11, undertook a personal journey to the heart of our newly-minted enemies in Afghanistan. There, he apparently had an epiphany about the symbiosis of Western misperceptions of Muslim culture and that culture’s complicated (to put it mildly) relationship to all things subsumed under the distinctly Western rubric of "gay."
The result is this book, a compendium of stories, dialogue, autobiography, analysis, and reportage from the Muslim world. The first thing that must be noted is that the Muslim religion and Muslim geography are every bit as multifaceted as Christianity and Christendom. In the space of barely 200 pages, Luongo has done a singularly admirable job of assembling a cast of characters and spaces that encompasses everything from an Israeli soldier’s affair with a young Arab, to a New Yorker’s ongoing affair with a rural Turkish family man, to sex tourists in Morocco, to an Arab out in America (but closeted to his family).
First off, let me say that I have been to Muslim countries, most recently to Egypt and Tanzania. I probably share some of the prejudices that have infiltrated Western nations, and especially America (and perhaps especially-especially New York City) in the wake of the terrorist attacks. The one thing that you discover when you visit Muslim-majority nations is that the people are every bit as varied as anywhere else.
Consider the tiny island of Britain: The Cornish in the Southeast England speak a different dialect and have different lives and opinions from the Celtic speakers of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland or Londoners. In the same way, cosmopolitan Istanbul is radically different from Iran-influenced Eastern Turkey, or the Kurdistan part of that nation. Similarly, compare Unitarians to Eastern Rite Catholics to Jehovah’s Witnesses; the same disparity applies to followers of Mohammed as to those of Jesus (or Abraham, or Buddha).
This is where Luongo’s book proves most fascinating. The various writers demonstrate how wildly varied gay experiences are in the Muslim world.
The first story is actually more of a report. A Jewish Peace Corps worker in rural Mauritania plainly lays out the way in which men differentiate homosexual sex (the term "gay sex" seems singularly inappropriate here, for reasons that will become clear). Sex between men, in this case, is separate from ropmantic feelings. Another story that (a little too obliquely for my taste) relates the experiences of a man working in Saudi Arabia shows how, in one of the most blatantly homophobic nations in the world, the old Arab dictum of "women for procreation, boys for fun" plays out.
This book is necssary--gay or straight--who wants to understand the world we’re living in now. As it turns out, there is a solid tradition in Muslim culture of man-on-boy sex. Thus, we get a tale of Bedouins (nomadic Arabs) lifting up their robes for a little midnight action at the oasis. It’s alternately funny and horrifying how matter-of-fact and even flatly mechanical these sexual encounters are.
So we see boy exotic dancers, their faces painted. We get sex workers in Morocco and elsewhere plying their trade to jaded Westerners. And we get that married dad in Turkey who conceals his private life from his Western "lover" until the Westerner (who comes off as singularly clueless) does some elementary detective work.
As inevitably happens when people from a wealthy culture encounter people from a desperately poor one, sex becomes a commodity. My least-favorite stories were the last two, in which tourists blandly described being hustled by the locals; it’s a story any traveler just about anywhere in the Middle East or Africa could have told. If there’s a flaw in this collection, it’s that there’s a preponderance of tales of sexual tourism. Color me a prude, but I simply find these people sleazy and desperate, guys who can’t get their freak on at home so they go where their dollars (or pounds or euros) will buy a week’s pleasure from some gay-for-pay native who’s sending the money back home to feed his family.
On the other hand, the two stories by expatriates living in the United States were fascinating bookends to the freedom they each found here. One has chosen to remain in the closet to his family; the other has become (or is becoming: he’s still quite young) an activist.
The best story in the collection, however, is also the most frustrating. It’s the tale of a young Israeli soldier who picks up--or, rather, is picked up--by a scruffy young Arab in his hometown. The story encompasses the pathos of clashing cultures that has been the stuff of romantic tragedy since, at least, Romeo and Juliet (and persists, right up to the recent indie fave The Bubble, an Israeli film that follows a generally similar storyline of an Israeli soldier and his Arab lover). But the author leaves us right at the moment when things get interesting. Without being a spoiler, I’ll only say that I was left hanging as to whether the soldier would obey his conscience and have to face coming out, or slink away. I suspect he did the latter (apparently, this is autobiographical), but it lacked a resolution.
Well, leave ’em always wanting more, as that great philosopher Mama Rose once said. In light of current events, which continue to engulf and implicate us in the affairs of the Muslim world and the inner workings of a complicated religious system (just pick up the paper to read about Sunni vs. Shia in Iraq), this book provides an urgent look into a culture that we ignore at our peril. For gay men, this book is necessary; for anyone--gay and straight--who wants to understand the current geopolitical situation, it will prove insightful.
Publisher: Harrington Park Press. Publication Date: June 13, 2007. Price: $19.95. Format: Paperback (hardcover also available). ISBN-13: 978-1560233404
EDGE Editor-in-Chief Steve Weinstein has been a regular correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, the Advocate, the Village Voice and Out. He has been covering the AIDS crisis since the early ’80s, when he began his career. He is the author of "The Q Guide to Fire Island" (Alyson, 2007).
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