December 05, 2006

NYTimes Magazine on the Debate over Gay Rights in Egypt

"Prisoners of Sex" is the odd, provocative title given to Negar Azimi's article in the most recent issue of the New York Times Magazine. Although it touches briefly on events in Morocco, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the piece focuses primarily on the debate over gay rights in Egypt.

A bunch of colorful characters make appearances, including the firebrand parliamentarian Mostafa Backry (who once reportedly closed his office for three days in protest of a Christian becoming a local governor in Egypt). And of course the infamous Queen Boat raid is evoked. In fact, Azimi reports that it remains docked along the Nile with a neon green "Queen Boot" sign outside.

What's perhaps most interesting is the debate among human rights activists over whether or not to stand up for gay rights in "conservative" Egyptian society - and even if the answer is yes, how to do so without seeming like a Western "imperialist" imposition.

Upon release of the report in March 2004, Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch’s executive director, and Scott Long, director of the organization’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Project, met with Egypt’s public prosecutor, the assistant to the interior minister and members of the Foreign Ministry. Their effort seemed to have had some effect; although occasional arrests continue, the all-out campaign of arrest and entrapment of men that began with the Queen Boat incident came to an end. One well-connected lawyer noted that a high-ranking Ministry of Interior source told him, “It is the end of the gay cases in Egypt, because of the activities of some human rights organizations.”

When I spoke to Long about his work on the Queen Boat case and its aftermath, he reflected on his advocacy methods in a context in which human rights, and especially gay rights, are increasingly associated with Western empire-building. “Perhaps we had less publicity for the report in the United States because we avoided fetishizing beautiful brown men in Egypt being denied the right to love,” he said. “We wrote for an Egyptian audience and tried to make this intelligible in terms of the human rights issues that have been central in Egyptian campaigns. It may not have made headlines, but it seemed to make history.” Whether the effort made history or simply interrupted it remains to be seen. Long himself noted, “The fact that the crackdown came apparently out of nowhere is a reminder that the repression could revive anytime...”

“This was framed locally as an attack from the West,” says Bahgat, who eventually collaborated with Human Rights Watch on the case and later opened his own organization, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “It was important to show that working for the rights of the detained was not a gay agenda, or a Western agenda, that this was linked to Egypt’s overall human rights record. Raising the gay banner when most sexual and other human rights are systematically violated every day is never going to get you far in this country.”

The article also reveals a little-known fact. Homosexuality per se is not illegal in Egypt: