Gay Damascus

18 June 2011

Arabs are more tolerant of homosexuality than the blogs would have you believe

A few years ago, I spent a month in Damascus. I arrived late in the evening but was so eager to see a city I’d long wished to visit — getting a visa had proved nightmarish — that I soon found myself in a little coffee shop round the corner from my budget hotel. I was well aware of Syrians’ reputation for being extraordinarily welcoming and friendly, even by Arab standards; but even I wasn’t quite prepared for the frank opening salvo from the handsome young guy sitting next to me. ‘Are you active or passive?’ he asked me.

It turned out that the coffee shop — packed with men of all ages and types, from English-speaking teenagers to elderly Bedouins — was a pick-up joint. Two other nearby ramshackle coffee shops served the same function, as did the only (packed) local bar. The city’s public parks, moreover, were 24-hour cruising areas, resembling nothing if not Russell Square in its 1980s heyday.

It would be tempting to describe all this as a thriving ‘gay scene’, but it would be foolish to do so. It’s an error often made by Westerners who report on homosexuality in the contemporary Arab world through the rose-tinted prism of their western ideals.

To that list can, alas, now be added a 40-year-old American studying in Britain, Tom MacMaster, who this week was exposed as the hoaxer posing as a Syrian blogger under the name ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’. MacMaster’s antics came to light when his IP address was traced back to the UK. However, for anyone who knows the Damascus scene he was purporting to describe, or has even the vaguest understanding of how homosexuality plays out in the Arab world, there was a much more obvious giveaway. Homosexuals, in fact, enjoy extraordinary freedoms in Damascus, as they do elsewhere in the region, but only so long as they follow a golden rule: don’t define homosexuality in western gay terms.

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James Justice

June 21st, 2011 4:37pm Report this comment

Google "Kingdom in the Closet" for all you need to know about gay sex in Saudi Arabia.

Yam Yam

June 23rd, 2011 9:48am Report this comment

In his superb book "Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century" Leif Jerram describes a similar process at work in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.

As with Arab society, homosexuality has always been present in the West and a blind eye was often turned to it so long as its expression was not too overt or outrageous. It was only in the early twentieth century, when attempts were made to criminalise any manifestation of homosexual behaviour, that a process began that would lead to a politicised backlash in the form of the gay rights movement; a movement which in turn has been vociferous in lauding and promoting a specific gay 'scene' (even though many men who indulge in homosexual practice now, as then, refuse to define themselves in such a narrow and inflexible manner).

Once again, mirroring the Islamic experience of segregating the sexes, attempts in the West at promoting virtue have often fallen victim to the law of unintended consequences. For example, religious reformers in the Victorian era were horrified at the widespread custom of men and women openly relieving themselves in the street and so from the 1880s onwards encouraged the building of public conveniences throughout Britain's towns and cities.

However, what better place has yet been invented for seeking homosexual encounters than a line of urinals where men are permitted to stand next to each other with their tackle on display? Together with a private cubicle behind them in which to explore any newfound friendships?

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