queer Muslims
New York Post [Page Six] - July 7, 2007
Gay Old Time In Sharia Land
THE ayatollahs may not slap him with a fatwah as they did Salman
Rushdie, but fundamentalist clerics are bound to be enraged at
Michael Luongo over “Gay Travels in the Muslim World” (Harrington
Park Press), his book celebrating homosexuality in the Middle East.
Luongo who compiled chapters by 17 writers covering Morocco,
Mauritania, Oman, Bangladesh, Turkey and Saudi Arabia had the
foreword written by Afdhere Jama, the founder of Huriyah, “the
world’s first magazine for queer Muslims,” who, he claims, number 150
million.
“There is something intoxicatingly beautiful about an Arab man who
paints his eyes with kohl,” Jama states in the book.
Luongo writes about his quest to find some man-on-man action in
Afghanistan. “I was painfully curious what a gay party would be like
in Kabul, but at the same time, I wondered if I were being led into a
trap. I wanted a scoop, but I didn’t want to be a gay Daniel Pearl,”
he writes.
Ushered into a “special room for men,” Luongo said he found they
“were not men who sip cosmos and discuss ‘Queer Eye,’ there was no
doubt about their masculinity.”
He then has fantasies of being “passed around as a party favor at an
Afghan orgy” before spending the night “caressing and holding hands”
with a Muslim man who would now and then say, ‘I wish you were a
girl,’ which I found oddly disconcerting, and made me wonder if all
we were doing was displacement for affections he could not express
otherwise.”
The author adds: “The truth about many young Afghan men is that
although they’ve lived through hardship, treat guns like fashion
accessories, and murdered for their country to free it from the
Taliban, strict Islamic rule means that they have never seen a woman
naked.”
He wonders whether strict Muslim laws restricting interaction between
men and women make gay sex more prevalent there than in the West. “Is
it that they were opportunistic, being with one another if they could
not have a woman?” he wonders.
“My time in Kabul was perhaps the most oddly romantic time I had ever
had with other men from being wooed with flowers to stories of
wartime bravery.”
Luongo told Page Six he’s ready to take the heat. “In August and
September I will have some events for the book - likely fatwah-
inducing, a la Salman Rushdie,” he said.