Arab gay cock
“This one gooood for your eye-bags!” says the effeminate Filipino makeup salesman, holding up a tube of concealer to his tittering female colleague in what is obviously a catty form of affection.
In the five minutes I’ve spent in Sephora browsing men’s fragr-ances, I’ve seen him tap up his deal with powder and smooth his heavily arched eyebrows twice.
Nothing peculiar here, you might think. I imply, there are fey gay men operational in makeup concessions the world over, right?
What makes his behaviour stand out is that I’m in Dubai, a province of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) governed by a dictatorial royal family, and a Middle Eastern hotspot attracting the gaze of the nature. Like Las Vegas, Dubai was built in a desert from nothing and, like Vegas, Dubai (in the Arab world anyway) is known as sin city.
Despite being conservative by Western standards, this is the city to which alcohol- and sex-hungry Arabs flock in droves to earn their fix, including the gays. Not that gay sex is anything peculiar in the Arab world. Growing up, the women are shut away, so budding sexual desires are commonly sated between friends.
I arrived in the municipality during the height of summer almost three years ag
The Arab and Muslim Evolution of ‘Deviance’ in Homosexuality
Late last year, two incidents brought homosexuality to the forefront of public debates on Arab social media. The first was in November, when British racing driver Lewis Hamilton wore a rainbow helmet in support of the LGBTQ collective at the Formula One races in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Together Arab Emirates. The second was the anti-gay rhetoric offered in December by former Egyptian football player Mohamed Aboutrika on the Qatari pan-Arab TV channel beIN Sports, in which he urged Muslim soccer players to boycott the English Premier League’s Rainbow Laces campaign.
In reaction to these incidents, hashtags, memes, fake news and fierce debates flooded Arab social media, with participation from hundreds of thousands of users. While both those for and against homosexuality participated in this conversation, the debate itself, like many other social media controversies, unfolded within echo chambers where no party is exposed to or interested in engaging with opposing arguments. And even when the sides engaged in debate, the discussion only reinforced one’s opinions.
Amid this chaos, there is at least one aspect of homos
A Canadian couple who stopped off in Dubai for a day’s shopping on their way advocate from a holiday in India, arrived back dwelling this week, after spending a month locked up in prison.
Rocky Sharma described how airport police seized him and his drawn-out term boyfriend Stephen Macleod, after finding a bottle of prescription arthritis medication Celebrex in his luggage, despite both men presenting themselves separately at Immigration. Initially detained together in a filthy cell with 8 other prisoners for ten days, they were then separated and sent to separate prisons where ‘the bathroom conditions were just a hole in the ground for 200 people’, Rocky told Canadian queer portal Xtra.ca. The duo were eventually released several weeks later, though 11 days after existence declared innocent by Dubai authorities, he added.
“They were definitely targeting people who are young, from the western world and nicely dressed, like they are going to party,’ Mr Sharma told the website.
“What people need to comprehend is that we were stopped because they consideration we were gay guys. They thought we might be carrying party drugs,” he added.
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Many Faces of Gay in Tunisia
In Tunisia gay life has many faces: from secretive post-marital same-sex-not-gay quickies among straight husbands, to ongoing pre-marital youth same-sex-not-gay with friends, to totally gay friendship networks among different age peers, to monogamous boyfriend couples to discrete liaisons from the internet. It is not easy to label the ‘scene’ here because it is not organized, not open, not admitted, yet it’s cruisy, sexy, internet-connected and quite populous. There is no LGBT organization or office.
During my stop by I chatted with two very different gay men, one a young student at a local university and the other a retired Italian resident of Tunis now self-employed. Their gay worlds are similar and different.
A Youthful Student With a Long Future
Ari, a university student studying architecture, and I met at tea time and had creamy dense hot chocolate at a trendy modern coffee shop and later went for pizza across the street.
Ari is a gregarious queer youth of 20 maturing out of his twink years. Thoughtful, expressive, verbal (4 languages), introspective, narcissistic and gay. All of which fuel an adventurous liveliness of discovery