Saudi Arabia, The kingdom that poisons the world.

[GSI]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlhxadPHt4s
Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism and the Spread of Sunni Theofascism.


The Kingdom in the Closet
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/05/the-kingdom-in-the-closet/5774/


Sodomy is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, but gay life flourishes there.
Why it is “easier to be gay than straight” in a society where everyone,
homosexual and otherwise, lives in the closet.

Yasser, a 26-year-old artist, was taking me on an impromptu tour of his
hometown of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on a sweltering September afternoon.
The air conditioner of his dusty Honda battled the heat, prayer beads
dangled from the rearview mirror, and the smell of the cigarette he’d
just smoked wafted toward me as he stopped to show me a barbershop that
his friends frequent. Officially, men in Saudi Arabia aren’t allowed to
wear their hair long or to display jewelry—such vanities are usually
deemed to violate an Islamic instruction that the sexes must not be too
similar in appearance. But Yasser wears a silver necklace, a silver
bracelet, and a sparkly red stud in his left ear, and his hair is
shaggy. Yasser is homosexual, or so we would describe him in the West,
and the barbershop we visited caters to gay men. Business is brisk.

Leaving the barbershop, we drove onto Tahlia Street, a broad avenue
framed by palm trees, then went past a succession of sleek malls and
slowed in front of a glass-and-steel shopping center. Men congregated
outside and in nearby cafés. Whereas most such establishments have a
family section, two of this area’s cafés allow only men; not
surprisingly, they are popular among men who prefer one another’s
company. Yasser gestured to a parking lot across from the shopping
center, explaining that after midnight it would be “full of men picking
up men.” These days, he said, “you see gay people everywhere.”

Yasser turned onto a side street, then braked suddenly. “Oh shit, it’s
a checkpoint,” he said, inclining his head toward some traffic cops in
brown uniforms. “Do you have your ID?” he asked me. He wasn’t worried
about the gay-themed nature of his tour—he didn’t want to be caught
alone with a woman. I rummaged through my purse, realizing that I’d
left my passport in the hotel for safekeeping. Yasser looked behind him
to see if he could reverse the car, but had no choice except to
proceed. To his relief, the cops nodded us through. “God, they freaked
me out,” Yasser said. As he resumed his narration, I recalled something
he had told me earlier. “It’s a lot easier to be gay than straight
here,” he had said. “If you go out with a girl, people will start to
ask her questions. But if I have a date upstairs and my family is
downstairs, they won’t even come up.”
Notorious for its adherence to Wahhabism, a puritanical strain of
Islam, and as the birthplace of most of the 9/11 hijackers, Saudi
Arabia is the only Arab country that claims sharia, or Islamic law, as
its sole legal code. The list of prohibitions is long: It’s
haram—forbidden—to smoke, drink, go to discos, or mix with an unrelated
person of the opposite gender. The rules are enforced by the
mutawwa'in, religious authorities employed by the government’s
Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
The kingdom is dominated by mosques and malls, which the mutawwa'in
patrol in leather sandals and shortened versions of the thawb, the
traditional ankle-length white robe that many Saudis wear. Some
mutawwa'in even bear marks of their devotion on their faces; they bow
to God so adamantly that pressing their foreheads against the ground
leaves a visible dent. The mutawwa'in prod shoppers to say their
devotions when the shops close for prayer, several times daily. If they
catch a boy and a girl on a date, they might haul the couple to the
police station. They make sure that single men steer clear of the
malls, which are family-only zones for the most part, unless they are
with a female relative. Though the power of the mutawwa'in has been
curtailed recently, their presence still inspires fear.
In Saudi Arabia, sodomy is punishable by death. Though that penalty is
seldom applied, just this February a man in the Mecca region was
executed for having sex with a boy, among other crimes. (For this
reason, the names of most people in this story have been changed.) Ask
many Saudis about homosexuality, and they’ll wince with repugnance. “I
disapprove,” Rania, a 32-year-old human-resources manager, told me
firmly. “Women weren’t meant to be with women, and men aren’t supposed
to be with men.”
This legal and public condemnation notwithstanding, the kingdom leaves
considerable space for homosexual behavior. As long as gays and
lesbians maintain a public front of obeisance to Wahhabist norms, they
are left to do what they want in private. Vibrant communities of men
who enjoy sex with other men can be found in cosmopolitan cities like
Jeddah and Riyadh. They meet in schools, in cafés, in the streets, and
on the Internet. “You can be cruised anywhere in Saudi Arabia, any time
of the day,” said Radwan, a 42-year-old gay Saudi American who grew up
in various Western cities and now lives in Jeddah. “They’re quite
shameless about it.” Talal, a Syrian who moved to Riyadh in 2000, calls
the Saudi capital a “gay heaven.”
This is surprising enough. But what seems more startling, at least from
a Western perspective, is that some of the men having sex with other
men don’t consider themselves gay. For many Saudis, the fact that a man
has sex with another man has little to do with “gayness.” The act may
fulfill a desire or a need, but it doesn’t constitute an identity. Nor
does it strip a man of his masculinity, as long as he is in the “top,”
or active, role. This attitude gives Saudi men who engage in homosexual
behavior a degree of freedom. But as a more Westernized notion of
gayness—a notion that stresses orientation over acts—takes hold in the
country, will this delicate balance survive?
‘They will seduce you’
When Yasser hit puberty, he grew attracted to his male cousins. Like
many gay and lesbian teenagers everywhere, he felt isolated. “I used to
have the feeling that I was the queerest in the country,” he recalled.
“But then I went to high school and discovered there are others like
me. Then I find out, it’s a whole society.”
This society thrives just below the surface. During the afternoon,
traffic cops patrol outside girls’ schools as classes end, in part to
keep boys away. But they exert little control over what goes on inside.
A few years ago, a Jeddah- based newspaper ran a story on lesbianism in
high schools, reporting that girls were having sex in the bathrooms.
Yasmin, a 21-year-old student in Riyadh who’d had a brief sexual
relationship with a girlfriend (and was the only Saudi woman who’d had
a lesbian relationship who was willing to speak with me for this
story), told me that one of the department buildings at her college is
known as a lesbian enclave. The building has large bathroom stalls,
which provide privacy, and walls covered with graffiti offering
romantic and religious advice; tips include “she doesn’t really love
you no matter what she tells you” and “before you engage in anything
with [her] remember: God is watching you.” In Saudi Arabia, “It’s
easier to be a lesbian [than a heterosexual]. There’s an overwhelming
number of people who turn to lesbianism,” Yasmin said, adding that the
number of men in the kingdom who turn to gay sex is even greater.
“They’re not really homosexual,” she said. “They’re like cell mates in
prison.”
This analogy came up again and again during my conversations. As
Radwan, the Saudi American, put it, “Some Saudi [men] can’t have sex
with women, so they have sex with guys. When the sexes are so strictly
segregated”—men are allowed little contact with women outside their
families, in order to protect women’s purity—“how do they have a chance
to have sex with a woman and not get into trouble?” Tariq, a
24-year-old in the travel industry, explains that many “tops” are
simply hard up for sex, looking to break their abstinence in whatever
way they can. Francis, a 34-year-old beauty queen from the Philippines
(in 2003 he won a gay beauty pageant held in a private house in Jeddah
by a group of Filipinos), reported that he’s had sex with Saudi men
whose wives were pregnant or menstruating; when those circumstances
changed, most of the men stopped calling. “If they can’t use their
wives,” Francis said, “they have this option with gays.”
Gay courting in the kingdom is often overt—in fact, the preferred mode
is cruising. “When I was new here, I was worried when six or seven cars
would follow me as I walked down the street,” Jamie, a 31-year-old
Filipino florist living in Jeddah, told me. “Especially if you’re
pretty like me, they won’t stop chasing you.” John Bradley, the author
of Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis (2005), says that
most male Western expatriates here, gay or not, have been propositioned
by Saudi men driving by “at any time of the day or night, quite openly
and usually very, very persistently.”
Many gay expatriates say they feel more at home in the kingdom than in
their native lands. Jason, a South African educator who has lived in
Jeddah since 2002, notes that although South Africa allows gay
marriage, “it’s as though there are more gays here.” For Talal, Riyadh
became an escape. When he was 17 and living in Da­mas­cus, his father
walked in on him having sex with a male friend. He hit Talal and
grounded him for two months, letting him out of the house only after he
swore he was no longer attracted to men. Talal’s pale face flushed
crimson as he recalled his shame at disappointing his family. Eager to
escape the weight of their expectations, he took a job in Riyadh. When
he announced that he would be moving, his father responded, “You know
all Saudis like boys, and you are white. Take care.” Talal was pleased
to find a measure of truth in his father’s warning—his fair skin made
him a hit among the locals.
Marcos, a 41-year-old from the Philippines, was arrested in 1996 for
attending a party featuring a drag show. He spent nine months in
prison, where he got 200 lashes, before being deported. Still, he opted
to return; he loves his work in fashion, which pays decently, and the
social opportunities are an added bonus. “Guys romp around and parade
in front of you,” he told me. “They will seduce you. It’s up to you how
many you want, every day.”