It’s been quite a while since I’ve written one of my long boring posts, so if you don’t like them, well, I’m sorry.
We had a guest lecturer on campus yesterday who got me thinking (which I am wont to do from time to time) about stuff I haven’t thought about in quite a while. I’m not going to use his name because he made himself a bit infamous for reasons that have nothing to do with the talk he gave, and I don’t want people stumbling across my blog by seeking him out in Google. If his topic sounds interesting, e-mail me and I’ll point you in the direction of his article.
The gist of his talk is something to the following effect: he argues that what he calls a “sexual binary”–namely that one must either identify as hetero- or homosexual–is a western notion that is being imposed on the rest of the world. If this sounds post-colonialist, you’re not wrong (if you don’t know what post-colonialism is, don’t worry about it — I’m only passingly familiar with it as I think the concept that your thoughts have to be limited by a school of thought is kind of stupid).
His specialization is the Arab World, and his particular grief is that the West is imposing this sexual binary on the Arab World when human rights groups, NGOs, etc., identify a certain subset of the populace as gay or lesbian, even when those people may not identify as gay themselves.
For the record, I started having problems with this guy’s talk when he contradicted himself by suggesting that Arabs have learned the concept of being exclusively “gay” or “lesbian” from the West, but then later said that he knows there are Arabs who do identify as gay or lesbian and that’s OK.
Now, he’s not one of these guys suggesting that homosexuality is a western disease and that it’s an unnatural behavior learned from the West — what he’s saying is that in a good chunk of the world, sexuality is more polymorphous than a simple binary. Men who are married to women and have children also have sex with men, for example, and that these societies have constructed space to allow this behavior. What he’s arguing is that the insistence from outside that these people be recognized as “gay” and given rights that they’re not asking for is actually causing more harm than good.
And then he brought up the example of the Queen Boat. The story is recapped as follows: in May 2001, police raided a nightclub in Cairo (the Queen Boat — it was one of the nightclubs that’s on a large boat that goes out for a two or three hour cruise on the Nile that are popular among tourists and Egyptians alike) that was a reputed gay hangout. 52 men were arrested and charged with debauchery (there being no law against gay sex in Egypt), and the trials spanned over months.
Several international gay rights organizations picked up the banner and pressured western embassies to take up the cause of Egypt’s “repression of homosexuality.” The western gay press ran stories about “Egypt’s Stonewall.”
The problem was this: none of the men arrested identified themselves as gay, even under allegations of torture. The gay press attributed this to a long-standing social stigma against homosexuality, but Our Speaker suggested another explanation: none of the men actually considered themselves gay. Many, in fact most of them were married and had children. Instead of being Egypt’s Stonewall, it was a trial that went nowhere, and with the exception of two men who’ve been in jail for years, most of them were free within a couple of months, badly embarrassed at having been accused of “licentious behavior.” Several of them have since emigrated from Egypt (with wives and children).
Our Speaker argued that the international attention did more harm than good–Egypt at the time had no law against homosexual acts. Parliament is now considering them, however, in response to the Queen Boat incident.
I was trying to digest all of this–I think he’s got a point, although I think there are problems with his analysis–when a friend of mine, an Egyptian doctoral candidate in history, raised her hand and made a counterpoint that I’d been waiting for. The Egyptian government was, at the time, facing rising opposition from Islamist parties who were accusing the government of being corrupt and amoral, and were holding themselves to be the protectors of virtue. Shortly thereafter, the Egyptian government sanctions a raid on a well-known gay nightclub that’s been operating for years and charges everyone on board with amoral behavior. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so, and neither do I.
Another example our speaker brought up was the novel/film ‘Omaret Ya’qubian (The Yacoubian Building), which was very popular the last time I was in Cairo in 2006. Among the characters in the novel–which is a sort of Egyptian Peyton Place, following the lives of the inhabitants of an apartment building in downtown Cairo–is the self-identified homosexual character Hatem, who engages in a relationship with a Nubian soldier, Abed Rabbo.
Our Speaker argued that the novel is essentially Islamist in tone, even though the author clearly thinks he’s being very sophisticated. Hatem, who lives alone and is the passive partner in the relationship (read: “bottom”) is identified as شاظ “shadh” (or “shaz,” as the Egyptians would pronounce it) which means deviant or pervert, but is also common street slang for gay. (I started to have problems with his talk around this point, because he was saying that the book was mistranslated into English because shaz used to only mean “deviant” in a much broader sense, even though now anyone who reads the book would read it as “homosexual,” which the author is on record as having said is what he meant).
Abed Rabbo, on the other hand, is married and has a son, and is never identified as a shaz. (Abed Rabbo later murders Hatem … well, it’s complicated). Hence, Our Speaker puts forward the suggestion that the behaviour is only deviant because Hatem has sex exclusively with men, and exclusively in the passive role, for which he is “punished” with death at the end of the novel.
Again, he kind of has a point here, although I kind of think that Our Speaker would do well to review, for example, The Celluloid Closet for examples of early gay and lesbian characters in film, who almost always met a tragic end. One of the explanations of this is that it helped anyone in the audience who was having conflicted issues about feeling sympathetic toward the gay character feel better when he or she “got what they deserved.” Indeed, audiences who watched the film version of The Yacoubian Building were reputed to cheer Hatem’s death, even if they had been sobbing moments earlier when Abed Rabbo’s son took ill and died.
And then this got me thinking about Prop 8. I know, it’s kind of crazy that thinking about the tenuous relationship between Islam and homosexuality in Egypt might have gotten me thinking about Prop 8 and the enormous backlash against the Mormons for funding it. Believe me, I’m all for holding the church accountable for their part–but Californians actually voted for it. I find it interesting (anthropologically speaking) that someone could stand in the election booth and vote for Barack Obama, arguably one of the most liberal Democrats to run for office in years, on the one hand while voting for Prop 8 on the other and see no contradiction.
What, I wonder, was the tipping point? I don’t believe that it’s as simple as “the Mormons poured a bunch of money into the campaign and that’s why it passed” (note to Michael: I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s A reason, I’m saying that I don’t think it’s the ONLY reason.)
I don’t have answers to this, I’m merely posing the question: what made the people of what is, next to Massachusetts, considered the most liberal state in the Union decide not only to ban gay marriage but to retroactively alter the state constitution, thus potentially invalidating 18,000+ marragies already on the books? The LDS campaign may have pushed it over the top (in fact, I’m fairly sure it did), but there was already a solid base to begin.
How could we have made history by electing our first black president and shattering the racial glass ceiling, but reaffirm separate-and-unequal status in several states all in one fell swoop? Are we the sacrificial lamb being offered up? “We’ll elect a black guy, but the immorality has to stop” — is that it? Trust me, I’m kind of used to it. I live in Texas.
But it doesn’t make me happy about any of this. It just makes me wonder what’s really going on here.
If I have any more thoughts, I’ll share. You can, too.
