Human Rights Campaign

VICKI L. EAKLOR
Professor of History (retired)
Alfred University, Alfred, NY

The largest LGBTQ organization in the United States as of

2017.

The Human Rights Campaign, with a reported 1.5 million members and
supporters and 150 staff in 2017, is the largest LGBTQ civil rights and
political lobbying organization in the United States. Known as the Human
Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF) when founded in 1980, it was the first
lesbian and gay political action committee operating on a national level. Its
original proMects were the financial support of lesbian/gay-friendly
candidates for public office and soliciting sponsors in the US Congress for a
national lesbian/gay rights civil rights bill. (The terms LGBTQ and queer
were not yet in use in the movement.) Over the next four decades, the
organization grew and changed in terms of issues addressed, as well as
staff, members, and activities, but not without struggle and controversy.

Origins
The HRCF was one of several responses, political and cultural, to the
growing backlash against the expansion of civil rights and the increased
visibility of racial and sexual minorities in the mid-twentieth century.
Nonwhite people, women, and gay men and lesbians had made strides
toward equality with straight white men in the postwar era while protests
against US involvement in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s became
more widespread. These conditions helped foster the rise of the New Right,
defined by social and cultural issues and an alliance with the Christian
Right. Desegregation, affirmative action, and second-wave feminism
(especially the never-ratified Equal Rights Amendment [under
consideration for ratification from 1972 to 1982] and the US Supreme Court
decision Roe v. Wade [1973]) all came under attack, as did the lesbian/gay
movement. In the words of Moral MaMority leader Jerry Falwell, “We must
stand against the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist revolution, and the
homosexual revolution” (1980, 19).

The backlash against LGBTQ gains appeared in several forms, from antigay
legislation to violence. In Florida in 1977, for example, conservatives
successfully overturned Dade County's ordinance prohibiting discrimination
based on sexual orientation with the “Save Our Children” campaign.
Similar ordinances were repealed in other cities in the next few years. On
the national level, Congress introduced legislation (which eventually failed)
denying federal funds to any individual or group perceived as supporting
“homosexuality.” The most famous act of antigay violence occurred in 1978
when openly gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk was murdered,
along with George Moscone, the city's mayor. This and the assassin's light
sentence for the murders further sparked lesbian and gay activists to
organize on all levels and address politics more specifically.

Among those activists was Minnesotan Steve Endean, who had served as
board cochair of the National Gay Task Force (now the National LGBTQ
Task Force) and founded the Gay Rights Legislative Committee in his state.
In 1978 he arrived in Washington, DC, to direct the Gay Rights National
Lobby (GRNL) and soon Moined others, including Larry Bye, Jim Foster,
and James Hormel, in forming the HRCF and became its first director
(1980–1983).

The original aims of the HRCF, officially formed as a political action

committee (PAC) in 1980, were to raise funds for supportive candidates and
to sign congressional sponsors for a national gay and lesbian rights bill. To
facilitate these goals it cosponsored the study “Does Support for Gay Rights
Spell Political Suicide?” while establishing the nation's first gay/lesbian
fund-raising network, and in 1980 it also contributed to a congressional
candidate (who won, encouraging candidates that such support might not be
“political suicide”). Two years later the HRCF held a formal dinner at New
York City's Waldorf Astoria at which former US vice president Walter
Mondale spoke. By 1983, however, conflicts in the organization and in the
movement over strategies and images contributed to Endean leaving both
the GRNL (which merged with the HRCF in 1985) and the HRCF. To some
the dinner and Mondale's appearance looked like progress, whereas others
saw elitism in expensive events organized primarily by wealthy white men,
causing some to dub the group the “Champagne Fund.” Added to this was
criticism of both the GRNL and the HRCF for a sluggish response to the
AIDS crisis, adding to the reasons Endean was ousted from both groups'
leadership.

Challenges of the 1980s

Vic Basile, known for his work in the civil rights, labor, and antiwar
movements, succeeded Endean as executive director and served until 1989.
During his tenure the HRCF added activities and personnel and began
outreach to the feminist and African American movements. It absorbed the
GRNL, and Endean returned to the HRCF in 1986 to run the Fairness Fund
(later renamed Speak Out), a mailgram proMect that added grassroots
activity under the newly created Field Division. Also in the late 1980s the
HRC Foundation and the Young Leaders Internship Program were created,
and the original PAC was now but part of several divisions. However, the
HRCF's image as a collection of wealthy white men continued, seemingly
verified by the Insiders Group (later known as the Federal Club), whose
members were male, privileged, and white, and whose main contribution
was fund-raising by hosting black-tie dinners.
Among the central issues lesbian/gay organizations faced in the 1980s were
passage of a national lesbian/gay rights bill and, most prominently,
HIV/AIDS. Hearings were held in San Francisco (1980) and in Washington
(1982); at the latter, the lesbian activist Jean O'Leary felt she had to state
that the rights bill, H.R. 1454, “will not condone homosexuality” (quoted in
Feldblum 2000, 164). There was some progress toward passage: all
Democratic presidential candidates of 1984 endorsed it, and both the House
and Senate reintroduced measures. In 1991 there were 110 cosponsors
(Endean 2006), but the HIV/AIDS crisis came to overshadow these gains,
and the bill was set aside.

The GRNL had lobbied the federal government for AIDS research funding
and education and prevention programs beginning in 1983. Upon the
GRNL's merger with the HRCF in 1985, the AIDS Campaign Trust was
formed, and efforts increased toward securing AIDS-related legislation. The
HRCF played a key role in the late 1980s in the passage of such bills as the
Civil Rights Restoration Act and the 1988 amendments to the Fair Housing
Act, as well as increases in AIDS appropriations. It was also in this decade
that national lesbian/gay rights groups devoted even more energy to
building coalitions with labor, civil rights, feminist, and other lesbian/gay
groups; both the National Gay Task Force and the HRCF Moined the
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, legislation prohibiting
discrimination against people with disabilities included people with
HIV/AIDS, and Coretta Scott King spoke at the HRCF's fifth-annual dinner
event in New York City in 1986, declaring her “solidarity with the gay and
lesbian movement” (quoted in Saunders 2016). In the meantime, as the
historian Marc Stein has written, the HRCF in the 1980s “contributed
millions of dollars to hundreds of candidates who supported gay and lesbian
rights. This did not come close to the amounts raised and used by sexually
conservative political action committees, but it provided an important
counterweight” (2012, 174).
The decade's main issues were addressed by the movement in the National
March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights on 11 October 1987, the
second of its kind. In 1979 the first National March on Washington for
Lesbian and Gay Rights had occurred in October, also to publicize the
movement's maMor concerns (antigay legislation and violence toward
LGBTQ people) and demand action. Concurrently with the 1987 march, the
HRCF held the movement's largest fund-raiser yet. Controversial were the
actual number of marchers (a dispute to be repeated with other rights
marches, including later LGBTQ marches) and the lack of media coverage.
As one result, activists the following year declared 11 October as National
Coming Out Day. The first to organize this was the group called the
National Gay Rights Advocates, who also supplied a panel for The Oprah
Winfrey Show that day. In 1993 the HRCF absorbed National Coming Out
Day and broadened it into the National Coming Out ProMect, soliciting
celebrity spokespersons as one strategy for visibility. As a result of the
expansion of its mission and activity, the HRCF continued to elicit
polarized reactions among activists, from celebration of progress to fears of
domination by one organization and its vision of change; by 1989 the
HRCF was the largest LGBTQ rights organization in the United States,
claiming a membership of 25,000.

New Visions and Old Concerns in the 1990s

The next two executive directors, Tim McFeeley (1989–1995) and
Elizabeth Birch (1995–2004), presided during a time that included high
hopes, bitter disappointments, and controversy among LGBTQ activists.
Under McFeeley, the HRCF continued to build coalitions and focus on
AIDS—for example, participating in National AIDS Lobby Days and
helping persuade Congress to pass such legislation as the Americans with
Disabilities Act (which included protection for people with HIV/AIDS) and
the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act. The
HRCF also officially declared itself pro-choice and worked with others on
issues involving women's health and reproductive rights.
During Bill Clinton's presidential campaign of 1992 he had included
lesbians and gay men, especially in his promise to end the military's policy
against homosexuals serving openly. McFeeley was one of several LGBTQ
organizational leaders to meet with Clinton in 1993, and the HRCF
instituted Operation Lift the Ban, sending over 70,000 messages to
Washington as one of its proMects. The HRCF and the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force worked together on changing the military policy and
other issues, especially in the wake of the movement's third national march,
the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and
Liberation. Yet, the compromise known as “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” that
went into effect in early 1994 did not remedy the situation and contributed
to accusations that the HRCF was ineffectual, resulting in an internal review
that generated a plan of action for 1994.

When Birch took over in 1995, “Fund” was dropped from the name, and the
HRC adopted the “equal sign” logo. Goals included modernizing the group
(going online, hiring professionals, and instituting better marketing
techniques), addressing its elitist image, and adding hate crimes legislation
and Mob discrimination to its agenda along with HIV/AIDS; this last item
was part of a change in strategy from a national lesbian/gay rights bill to
piecemeal protections. In 1994 the Employment Non-Discrimination Act
(ENDA) had been introduced in Congress, aided by the HRC's
Documenting Discrimination proMect, but the bill was defeated in 1996 and
no version had passed as of 2017. There was also some outreach to
transgendered people, and the HRC had added trans issues by the end of
1998. To some this seemed delayed and contributed to ongoing criticism of
the HRC's proMects and focus. Even the support of President Clinton, who
spoke at the HRC's first national dinner and awards ceremony in 1997,
could be viewed as either a victory for the movement or a typical example
of the group's “Washington insider” status.

By 2000 the HRC was embroiled in further controversies, first from its
endorsement of Alfonse D'Amato, a Republican senator from New York,
for reelection—he had voted for ENDA and was against the military
antigay policy but was antichoice—then for proposing a march on
Washington without consulting diverse movement activists.

© JAMAL A. WILSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

US President Bill Clinton Greeted by Human Rights Campaign Executive Director
Elizabeth Birch On-Stage at the 1997 Annual National Dinner. Although some
hailed the appearance of President Clinton at its national dinner in 1997 as a victory for
the Human Rights Campaign, others criticized it as evidence of the group's
“Washington insider” status.

What became the Millennium March on Washington for Equality in 2000

had begun as a grassroots movement called Equality Begins at Home with
the aim of marching on all fifty state capitals, but occurred as the proMect of
the HRC and others and was announced by those perceived as the
movement's most “top-down” representatives: Birch, Troy Perry of the
Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, and the events
promoter Robin Tyler.

Growth and Going Global in the Twenty-First

Century
After 2000 the HRC was deemed effective in responding to the ad
campaigns sponsored by the “ex-gay” movement and in expanding outreach
and programs such as the fight against discrimination in the workplace.
Upon Birch's retirement from the HRC in 2004, Cheryl Jacques became
executive director but served less than a year, naming differences with the
HRC board as the reason. Joe Solmonese (2005–2012) and Chad Griffin
succeeded Jacques, with Griffin still serving as of 2017. The extension of
the HRC's programs and reach is evident in such initiatives as the Religion
and Faith Program, introduced in 2005, and ProMect One America, with its
focus on LGBTQ equality in the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, and
Arkansas), begun in 2014. Workplace equality, health-care issues, and
electing pro-LGBTQ candidates at all political levels remained on the
agenda, as did the HRC's efforts toward legalizing same-sex marriage. In
the latter case, the group's long-standing activism at the state level
contributed to the 2015 US Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v.
Hodges that declared bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. (Plaintiff
Jim Obergefell was a long-standing HRC member.) As part of its campaign
in support of marriage equality, the HRC changed the colors of its logo
from blue and yellow to red and pink, and the image went viral on the
internet, particularly in Facebook profile photos.

According to its website, the “HRC works to improve the lives of LGBTQ
people worldwide by advocating for equal rights and benefits in the
workplace, ensuring families are treated equally under the law, and
increasing public support around the globe” (HRC 2017). The HRC has
indeed expanded beyond the United States, engaging in research, reporting
news internationally, and hosting the Global Innovative Advocacy Summit
since 2016.

SEE ALSO African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights; Defense of

Marriage Act (1996); Hate Crime Law and Policy in the United States;
Human Rights; Human Rights and Activism in Latin America; Human
Rights and Queer Arab Refugees; Human Rights in Asia; Human Rights in
Europe; Military Law and Policy in the United States

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clendinen, Dudley, and Adam Nagourney. Out for Good: The Struggle to
Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1999.

Eaklor, Vicki L. Queer America: A GLBT History of the 20th Century.

Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008.

Endean, Steve. Bringing Lesbian and Gay Rights into the Mainstream:
Twenty Years of Progress. Edited by Vicki L. Eaklor. Binghamton,
NY: Haworth Press, 2006.

Falwell, Jerry. Listen, America! Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980.

Feldblum, Chai R. “The Federal Gay Rights Bill: From Bella to ENDA.” In
Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights, edited by John
D'Emilio, William B. Turner, and Urvashi Vaid, 149–187. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Ghaziani, Amin. The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture

Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008.

HRC (Human Rights Campaign). “Explore.” Accessed 20 September 2017.

https://www.hrc.org/explore
Saunders, Patrick. “Catching Up with … HRC Award Namesake Winston
Johnson.” Georgia Voice, 23 August 2016. https://thegavoice.com/catching-
hrc-award-namesake-winston-Mohnson/

Stein, Marc. Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement. New York:
Routledge, 2012.

Stone, Amy L. Gay Rights at the Ballot Box. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2012.
Human Rights in Asia
GEORGE BAYLON RADICS
Lecturer, Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore

The history and current state of LGBTQ rights in South Asia,

East Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Asia is the largest and most populous continent on Earth. As a result, it

includes a vast diversity of cultures and people with dissimilar religious
beliefs, social organizations, and political histories. Furthermore, the very
concept of “human rights” is highly contested. Asia is often Muxtaposed
against the “West” and characterized as a region that is authoritarian, overly
disciplined, and suffering from a lack of civil liberties. To suggest that all of
Asia treats LGBTQ people and sexuality in this manner, however, would be
a gross misrepresentation. The treatment of sexuality issues and LGBTQ
persons throughout the region differs from community to community and is
tied to deep historical and cultural conceptualizations of gender, interactions
with cultures from inside and outside the region (including the “West”), and
local attempts to recognize and integrate LGBTQ people in a rapidly
changing world. The three subregions of Asia discussed here are South
Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The entry is organized along these
subregions to capture similar influences, traditions, and histories; as such,
human rights is discussed in local terms based on these regional histories.

South Asia
The countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal,
Pakistan, and Sri Lanka constitute the subregion of South Asia. Hindus,
Jains, Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians all make their home in the
region, demonstrating the deep and rich history of faith in South Asia, with
many of these religions originating in the subregion. At the same time, most
nations in the subregion were colonized by the British, Portuguese, Dutch,
or French or experienced external political pressure on account of the
colonization of their neighbors. Although one of the fastest-growing regions
in the world, South Asia is still plagued with gross disparity between urban
and rural areas. Simultaneously, the region has an incredible diversity of
economies, ranging from advanced information- and knowledge-based
services to small-scale production and traditional village farming. These
historical, cultural, and economic forces all play a role in shaping the rights
of LGBTQ people in South Asia. This section looks at the rights of LGBTQ
individuals historically from precolonial to colonial times and in the
postcolonial age, while also discussing LGBTQ activism and prospects for
the future.

Precolonial and Colonial South Asia Over two-thirds of the region

practices the religion of Hinduism. The oldest known set of Hindu
scriptures, the Rigveda, dating from around 1500 to 1200 BCE, makes no
mention of homosexuality. However, ancient religious texts written between
the third and sixth centuries CE do make references to homosexuality. The
Kama Sutra includes an entire chapter on the practice of fellatio between
men. Additionally, close to a third of the region practices Islam, which
reached the region in the seventh century CE. Although Islamic law
explicitly condemns homosexuality, a tradition of homosexual intimacy can
be found in the Mughal era and Islamic mysticism (Sufism). Furthermore,
records indicate that hiMras, or those that may be described today as
transgendered, have a long history in South Asia. Throughout the region's
history, as opposed to viewing sexuality strictly as a matter of procreation,
the ancient literature also discussed sexuality as a source of pleasure. While
it should be noted that South Asian LGBTQ history in its full complexity
cannot be fully discussed here especially because this history includes a
complicated discourse from period to period and from community to
community (see Vanita 2002), it can be argued that how sexuality was
conceptualized in the region changed dramatically with the introduction of
Western colonial power.

Colonial-era legislation idealized the formation of conMugal heterosexual

households on the basis of “love marriage” and biological adulthood. In
1860, in response to a number of local practices that challenged British
values of the time, the colonial government inserted Section 377 into the
Indian Penal Code, a provision that criminalized sodomy and carnal
intercourse against “the order of nature.” Furthermore, in 1871, the
Criminal Tribes Act was passed to scrutinize and regulate the practices of
groups such as hiMras. These types of laws transformed the South Asian
sexual landscape. First, many of these laws were used to blackmail
homosexual political and business rivals. Second, they subMected
nonnormative sexualities and expressions of gender to state surveillance
and control.

Postcolonial South Asia The nationalist movements and subsequent

postcolonial proMects tended to retain and mimic the values of the colonizer
as evidence of a modern and developed nation with self-governing capacity.
As nations in the West began to decriminalize same-sex sexual practices,
South Asian nations sometimes chose to retain and even enhance similar
laws that were inherited through colonization to distinguish themselves as
independent nations no longer forced to follow in the footsteps of their
former colonizers. Political Islam, an ideology that encouraged the re-
Islamization of society through grassroots social and political activism, and
that served to mobilize South Asian Muslims to challenge the authority of
the British, emphasized a stricter interpretation of religious texts.
Heterosexual marriage in the postcolonial context, although historically
important, became the only acceptable form of intimate and sexual
relationship.
Although Section 377 is still in place in most of the former British colonies
of South Asia, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Maldives, and the law
serves as the model for similar laws in Bhutan and Sri Lanka, this does not
mean that alternative sexual practices have been eliminated in South Asia
under threat of law. Personal accounts of sexual activities in maMor cities of
India in the 1970s reveal that, although forced underground, homosexual
encounters could easily be found in public parks and buses (Rangayan
2012). Various sources document the presence of alternative sexualities and
practices in countries such as Pakistan, despite the presence of such
draconian laws (Azhar 2013; Ladly 2012).

Some societies are especially restrictive. Although it has been argued that
Buddhism leads to more open and tolerant ideas of sexuality (Stewart
2010), in Sri Lanka, where nearly 70 percent of the population practices
Theravada Buddhism, heteronormative versions of the family are promoted
in the constitution and homosexual sex is criminalized. In 1999, when gay
organizations protested a newspaper editorial stating that lesbians should be
raped, the Sri Lanka Press Council ruled that lesbianism was “illegal,
immoral, sadistic, salacious, and against Sri Lankan culture, and therefore
deserved to be condemned” (quoted in Tambiah 2004, 84). Furthermore,
even when laws are passed to recognize LGBTQ community members,
such as laws protecting hiMras in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, their
implementation can be problematic. In 2014, after Bangladesh officially
recognized hiMras as a third gender and pointedly hired twelve hiMras for
government Mobs, eleven of them were subsequently fired because they had
penises (Hossain 2017). Thus, official recognition comes with state control,
surveillance, and discrimination.

LGBTQ Activism in South Asia In spite of these challenges, LGBTQ

activism in South Asia is growing. Since the 1970s, a number of LGBTQ
individuals in India began to organize, and by the 1990s a number of
prominent LGBTQ organizations had begun to seek official recognition
from the government. In 2009 one Indian organization successfully
petitioned the Delhi High Court, in Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT
of Delhi, to strike down Section 377, although the ruling was reversed in
2013; in September 2018, India's Supreme Court ruled that same-sex sexual
activity could not be prosecuted under Section 377. In 2017 LGBTQ
organizations in Sri Lanka petitioned the government to strike down
Sections 365 and 365A of the criminal code—the laws criminalizing
LGBTQ acts. Nepal's Sunil Babu Pant—the first openly gay national-level
legislator in Asia—successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to announce
that LGBTQ persons are not mentally ill and deserve equal rights under the
constitution. Nepal today has some of the best protections for LGBTQ
people in the region and in 2017 was described as a “global LGBT rights
beacon” (Knight 2017).

Yet not all nations of South Asia are pushing for the same outward
recognition of rights, and in some cases where rights are afforded, LGBTQ
communities suffer. In 2011 the US embassy sponsored the first gay “pride”
festival in Pakistan. Instead of encouraging more Pakistanis to advocate for
their rights, this event placed many queer organizations “in the line of fire”
and marked them as Western conspirators (Charania 2017). In India and
Bangladesh, adopting the LGBTQ language of the West to become
“respectably queer” or to better “serve” marginalized communities has
intensified economic and social class, caste, and gender differences.

East Asia
The subregion of East Asia includes the countries and territories of
mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North Korea, South
Korea, and Taiwan. Much like South Asia, the region encompasses vast
cultural diversity; simultaneously, however, East Asia has had a deeper
penetration of economic development. East Asia contains three of the four
“Asian Tigers,” or economies that experienced massive growth from the
1960s onward. These three—South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—stand
today as advanced, high-income, and industrialized economies.
Additionally, as of 2018, Japan was the third-largest economy in the world,
and China, though still developing, was the second-largest and one of the
fastest-growing economies in the world. While economic wealth may bring
social change, such change introduces complex interactions between local
practices and globalizing norms. Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism,
Taoism, and Shintoism are but a few of the cultural influences on the
region. Furthermore, economic growth occurred under strong authoritarian
governments, and in response, waves of democratization have transformed
some East Asian nations into robust, liberal democracies. However, even
with sweeping political changes and economic growth—and some
expanded rights for LGBTQ people—much of the region still adheres to
strong heteronormative family values, communitarianism, and filial piety.
Such social norms can lead to cosmopolitan and modern lifestyles, with
alternative sexualities considered shameful and hidden from public. This
section looks at the traditional views on homosexuality, the democratization
period, and East Asian LGBTQ activism in the twenty-first century.

Premodern Views on Homosexuality Historical records across much of

East Asia document awareness of LGBTQ practices. Although
Confucianism has been in existence since the sixth century BCE, and
Buddhism arrived in the region in the third century BCE, both are vague in
their views on sexuality (Stewart 2010). In China, records reveal homo-
erotic behaviors in the imperial courts as early as the second century BCE
(Leupp 1995). Buddhist monks in Japan from the Heian period (794–1185)
were reported to engage in same-sex relations, while gay sex was not
uncommon in premodern Korea, from the Silla dynasty (57 BCE–935 CE) to
the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) (Leupp 1995; Shin 2013). It should be
noted that although many of the records discuss male homoeroticism,
gender inequality led to lesbianism being ignored (Chou 2000; see also
Sang 2003). In Mongolia, however, homosexuality was historically
recognized, accepted as normal, and even praised because of the
significance of LGBTQ shamans in Mongolia prior to the 1700s (Stewart
2010). In China, attitudes appear to change during the late imperial era. The
Manchu dynasty criminalized sodomy in 1740 CE (Sommer 2000).
Furthermore, it has been argued that by the early twentieth century, strong
gender binaries and condemnation of “sexual perversions” had been
introduced to the region by Western colonial powers (Stewart 2010; Hinsch
1990).

Modern Era Throughout much of the subregion, reactions against foreign

influence were profound. Japan rapidly modernized following the MeiMi
Restoration (1868), triggering a militaristic growth that prepared the nation
for World Wars I and II. In the first half of the twentieth century, the
Chinese Communist Party took control after much political infighting
emerged in part as a result of the presence of and competition from foreign
influence. The Korean Peninsula, too, experienced conflict between the
Soviet-backed north and US-backed south. By the early 1950s, the region
was ravaged by war, economically in shambles, and politically weak.
Strong authoritarian leaders emerged in South Korea and Taiwan to
prioritize order and growth over freedom. China entered the Cultural
Revolution period, purging itself of Western “decadence and promiscuity”
such as homosexuality. Japan initiated an ambitious phase of
industrialization and export-led growth. After three decades, Japan had
grown into the third-largest economy in the world.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, much of East Asia had grown
economically robust, with laws playing down tradition and promoting
economic growth and mobility. China removed communist-era laws
criminalizing homosexuality. In Hong Kong and Macau, the British and
Portuguese penal codes were amended (in 1991 and 1996, respectively) to
remove clauses criminalizing gay male sex. In South Korea, since the 2001
passage of the National Human Rights Commission Act, discriminatory
acts on the grounds of sexual orientation have been considered as violating
one's right to equality. Democratization movements in the late 1980s
transformed Taiwan into a liberal and progressive state, leading many to
believe it may be the first in East Asia to allow for gay marriage. Yet these
changes have yet to transform the social status of LGBTQ persons in East
Asia. Although gay marriage was discussed in Taiwan as early as 2003, this
triggered a political backlash with politicians engaging in hate speech
against the LGBTQ community (Yu-Rong and Wang 2010). In Hong Kong,
because of homo-preMudice, many gay and lesbian individuals conceal their
sexuality from friends, employers, and family. Although homosexuality is
not illegal in China, South Korea, or Japan, and LGBTQ rights are
constantly expanding, heteronormative expectations of marriage and
children, along with strong filial piety expectations, force LGBTQ people to
hide their feelings and prioritize social obligations over individual desires.

LGBTQ Activism in the Twenty-First Century Notwithstanding East

Asia's heteronormative rigidity from the early twentieth century onward,
LGBTQ rights have been advancing thanks to a large number of dedicated
individuals willing to contravene strict societal norms. In Japan, lesbians
were the first to organize social groups starting in the 1970s. By the mid-
1980s, as a result of the influence of Western LGBTQ movements, the
LGBTQ community in Japan became more visible, issuing publications,
organizing gay film festivals, and putting on the first lesbian and gay pride
parade, in 1994. In China, Li Yinhe, a scholar and LGBTQ rights activist,
proposed the Chinese Same-Sex Marriage Bill in 2003 and, after it failed,
reintroduced it again in 2005, 2006, and 2008. Activists in Mongolia and
Macau are pushing for greater recognition of the LGBTQ community by
petitioning the government for official registration of LGBTQ
nongovernmental organizations. Finally, although Mongolia and Taiwan
have laws allowing for transgender people to change their sex on official
documents after sexual reassignment surgery, South Korea allows
transgender people to change their sex on such documents without
undergoing surgery. In Hong Kong, the landmark 2013 case W v.
Registrar of Marriages declared that transgender people have the right to
marry as their identified gender rather than their biological sex at birth.

Southeast Asia
This subregion is arguably the most dynamic in Asia, sharing both the
dramatic economic growth of East Asia and the overt colonial past of South
Asia. The subregion includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia,
Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Culturally,
the subregion embodies great diversity, having traded and shared cultures
with the maMor powers of Asia and Europe. Its inhabitants speak over 800
languages and practice almost all of the maMor world religions. The
subregion's legal systems are equally varied, with many nations crafting
different laws to apply to their diverse communities. In this subregion,
LGBTQ rights have been slow to materialize but also have great potential
given the subregion's vibrant diversity and hybridization of cultures from
past to present. This final section reviews the subregion's precolonial and
colonial histories, “Asian values” and globalization, and, finally, LGBTQ
activism in the twenty-first century.

Sexuality in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia Deeply entrenched

and broadly institutionalized traditions of pluralism with respect to gender
and sexuality have existed in Southeast Asia since the early modern era.
When the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, British, and French arrived between
the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, they found such gender norms
confusing and unruly. The British subsequently passed Section 377,
prohibiting sex against the “order of nature” in Brunei, Malaysia, Myanmar,
and Singapore—with Singapore eventually also implementing Section
377A, a code specifically targeting gay males. In colonial Philippines, there
is evidence that the Spanish decreed that sodomites be sentenced to death
by fire. Additionally, the Spanish replaced the babaylans, or transgendered
religious figures, with datus (heads of clan) as village leaders. While the
French and the Dutch had less interventionist policies to deal with sexual
plurality, they nevertheless saw it as a threat to European racial purity and
public health.

Upon the departure of Western colonial powers from the region after World
War II, borders were in flux, internal conflicts along racial and political
lines erupted, and global ideological battles (i.e., capitalism versus
socialism) swept the region. National movements in Indonesia prioritized
family and traditional values as the galvanizing, postcolonial force behind
nation building. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos turned to “high modernity”
through socialism, expunging themselves of traditional and French colonial
laws. The British colonies of Brunei, Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore all
maintained their British laws and, in some cases, emboldened them with
stronger penalties, particularly in the area of sexuality.

“Asian Values” and Globalization Experiencing dramatic economic

growth, and in reaction to Western colonization, Southeast Asian nations
began to push back against the human rights discourse. Political leaders,
such as Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) and Malaysia's Mahathir
Mohamad (1925–), asserted that the Western obsession with individual
rights and “moral decadence” were inappropriate for Asia. Many Southeast
Asian countries therefore emphasized their “traditional cultures” and fought
off Western individualism, of which LGBTQ rights were seen as a
manifestation. In Indonesia, the family in particular was used by the New
Order government as the fundamental building block of society, and by the
1980s and 1990s this heteronormative structure became increasingly
exploited to marginalize LGBTQ identities. Even in Thailand, a state that
has relatively liberal views on sexuality, when a Thai teacher's college
upheld its decision to ban gay teachers, the Thai minister of education
refused to intervene, stating that “under no circumstances … would the
‘rights’ of individuals be permitted to undermine the security of the
collective body” (quoted in Morris 1997, 54).

Yet the tension between globalizing norms, the changing economy, and
political rhetoric led to changes in the way the state treated LGBTQ rights
at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Some Southeast Asian nations
began recruiting the “pink dollar” (purchasing power of the LGBTQ
community), aggressively luring foreign talent from “liberal” Western
nations, and playing down the “Asian values” discourse. Singapore in 2003
allowed LGBTQ people to openly serve in civil service positions and in
2009 had its first “Pink Dot” event to celebrate LGBTQ people. Vietnam in
2012 began debates on same-sex marriage and in 2015 began to allow
ceremonial, though legally invalid, same-sex weddings. In 2010 Myanmar
began its transition to a civilian government, with concomitant legal
reforms and liberalization, as well as a budding LGBTQ rights movement.
Not all countries are progressing smoothly or in the same direction. Brunei
enhanced its colonial-era laws criminalizing sodomy by changing the
penalty from ten years' imprisonment to death by stoning. In Malaysia, the
political opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim (1947–) was prosecuted,
convicted, and imprisoned several times for sodomy in what appeared to be
politically motivated gestures. Finally, in Thailand, reports still surface of
parents killing homosexual children and of gay conversion therapy tactics,
such as raping lesbians or sending gay males to the monastery to become
more “manly.”

LGBTQ Activism in the Twenty-First Century In spite of the difficulties,

LGBTQ activism remains strong in the region. In 2013 Section 377A was
challenged in Singapore's High Court. Although it was ultimately upheld,
the ruling opened the door for future constitutional challenges. In Myanmar,
LGBTQ activists work hard to translate the meaning of “rights” into the
vernacular language after so many years of military rule. Finally, activists in
the Philippines formed Ladlad, the first LGBTQ political party in the
Philippines, and the only existing LGBTQ political party in the world, to
challenge deep-rooted institutional bias in Philippine politics.
Concomitantly, Indonesia and Malaysia have seen an increase in the
policing and public shaming of “effeminate” men. In 2017 Indonesia issued
“socialization orders,” forcibly arresting, detaining, and expelling gays and
lesbians from maMor cities. While Southeast Asia grapples with finding its
own path in the modern world and eschewing the consequences of its
colonial past, political activism is still a balancing act between pushing for
individual rights and avoiding tactics that might antagonize the state or
populations that still embrace the “Asian values” discourse.
As an incredibly diverse region, Asia resists generalizations, particularly
when it comes to the contentious issue of “human rights.” It is clear,
however, that LGBTQ people have made significant strides throughout the
region in making their voices heard and in pushing for greater recognition.
Such strides are not without challenges, however. From political hurdles of
authoritarian or military governments and cultural influences of religion or
“Asian values” to fast-paced yet unequal economic development, LGBTQ
activists have had to overcome a plethora of obstacles in making Asia a safe
place for the members of their communities to live on an equal footing with
non-LGBTQ people. For better or worse, such progress will have to be
made over time and—learning from the past—on homegrown terms and in
response to local circumstances to be successful.

SEE ALSO Activism in Africa South of the Sahara; African Commission on

Human and Peoples' Rights; Human Rights; Human Rights and Activism in
Latin America; Human Rights and Queer Arab Refugees; Human Rights
Campaign; Human Rights in Europe; Marriage, Same-Sex, in Taiwan; Naz
Foundation International; Section 377 and Section 377A; Section 377 in
South Asia; Sunil Babu Pant and Others v. Nepal Government (2007); W v.
Registrar of Marriages (2013)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Azhar, Mobeen. “Gay Pakistan: Where Sex Is Available and Relationships
Are Difficult.” BBC Magazine, 27 August 2013.
https://www.bbc.com/news/23811826

Blackwood, Evelyn. “Regulation of Sexuality in Indonesian Discourse:

Normative Gender, Criminal Law, and Shifting Strategies of Control.”
Culture, Health, and Sexuality 9, no. 3 (2007): 293–307.

Boellstorff, Tom. The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Charania, Moon. “Outing the Pakistani Queer: Pride, Paranoia, and Politics
in US Visual Culture.” Sexualities 20, nos. 1–2 (2017): 41–64.

ChatterMee, Indrani. “When ‘Sexuality’ Floated Free of Histories in South

Asia.” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4 (2012): 945–962.

Chiang, Howard, and Yin Wang, eds. Perverse Taiwan. London: Routledge,
2017.

Chou, Wah-shan. Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese

Societies. New York: Haworth Press, 2000.

Chua, Lynette J., and David Gilbert. “Sexual Orientation and Gender
Identity Minorities in Transition: LGBT Rights and Activism in Myanmar.”
Human Rights Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2015): 1–28.

Garcia, J. Neil C. Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to

MSM. 2nd ed. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2008.

Hinsch, Bret. Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition
in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Hossain, Adnan. “The Paradox of Recognition: HiMra, Third Gender, and

Sexual Rights in Bangladesh.” Culture, Health, and Sexuality 19, no. 12
(2017): 1418–1431.

Knight, Kyle. “How Did Nepal Become a Global LGBT Rights Beacon?”
Human Rights Watch. 11 August 2017.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/08/11/how-did-nepal-become-global-
lgbt- rights-beacon

Ladly, Meghan Davidson. “Gay Pakistanis, Still in Shadows, Seek

Acceptance.” New York Times, 3 November 2012.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/world/asia/gays-in-pakistan-move-
cautiously-to-gain-acceptance.html
Leupp, Gary P. Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in
Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

McLelland, Mark, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker, eds. Queer

Voices from Japan: First Person Narratives from Japan's Sexual
Minorities. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.

Morris, Rosalind C. “Educating Desire: Thailand, Transnationalism, and

Transgression.” Social Text, no. 52–53 (1997): 53–79.

Peletz, Michael G. Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics in Modern Asia.

2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2017.

Radics, George Baylon. “Decolonizing Singapore's Sex Laws: Tracing

Section 377A of Singapore's Penal Code.” Columbia Human Rights Law
Review 45, no. 1 (2013): 57–99.

Sang, Tze-lan D. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in

Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Shin, Jeeyoung. “Male Homosexuality in The King and the Clown: Hybrid
Construction and Contested Meanings.” Journal of Korean Studies 18, no. 1
(2013): 89–114.

Simon, Rita J., and Alison Brooks. Gay and Lesbian Communities the
World Over. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.

Sommer, Matthew H. Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Stewart, Chuck, ed. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of LGBT Issues

Worldwide. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010.

Tambiah, Yasmin. “Sexuality and Women's Rights in Armed Conflict in Sri

Lanka.” Reproductive Health Matters 12, no. 23 (2004): 78–87.
Vanita, Ruth, ed. Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian
Culture and Society. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Yu-Rong, Chen, and Wang Ping. “Obstacles to LGBT Human Rights

Development in Taiwan.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 18, no. 2
(2010): 399–407.

FILMOGRAPHY

Rangayan, Sridhar, dir. ProMect Bolo: A Collection of Oral Histories of

Indian LGBT Persons. Mumbai: Solaris Pictures, 2012. DVD.
Human Rights in Europe
GERALDINE VAN BUEREN
Professor of International Human Rights Law, Queen Mary University of
London; Barrister (Middle Temple); Queen's Counsel (Honoris Causa)
Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford

Important cases decided by the European Court of Human

Rights and the European Court of Justice related to
LGBTQ issues.

“Europe” is best understood in terms of political and legal organization as

an inner and a larger outer circle of countries. All member countries of the
inner circle are also members of the outer circle. The inner circle (twenty-
eight countries as of 2017) is the European Union (EU). These countries are
bound by the provisions of the successive treaties that make up the
constitution of the EU. Although primarily concerned with economic issues,
the EU has increasingly become concerned with human rights, such as the
right to equality and privacy. The EU “legislates” through the creation of
Regulations, which are directly enforceable in member states, and
Directives, which member states must legislate to implement. The supreme
court of the European Union is the Court of Justice, which is part of the
entity known as the Court of Justice of the European Union. The Court of
Justice, which sits in Luxembourg, is often referred to as the European
Court of Justice.

The outer circle is the Council of Europe, which includes forty-seven

countries as member states. The Council of Europe “legislates” by drafting
treaties that member states may decide to become bound by. The most
important of these treaties is the European Convention on Human Rights,
which is legally binding on all member states of the Council of Europe.
This Convention is primarily concerned with human rights, such as freedom
of speech, privacy, and nondiscrimination. The supreme court of the
Council of Europe is the European Court of Human Rights. It sits in
Strasbourg, France.

THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

The European Parliament is the legislative body of the European

Union. It should not be confused with the Parliamentary Assembly
(formerly known as the Consultative Assembly) of the Council of
Europe, although both bodies meet in Strasbourg, France. The
European Parliament's role regarding human rights is limited by the
fact that it does not initiate legislation (which is done by the
Commission of the European Union), and the legislation that it does
participate in is limited to matters within the competence of the
European Union, which do not include criminal law. The Parliament
adopted a Holocaust resolution in 2005 that condemned the murder of
homosexuals in Auschwitz-Birkenau and warned of the danger of
victimizing people for their sexual orientation. Within the Parliament
the Intergroup on LGBTI Rights is an informal forum for over 150
members of the European Parliament. It has five priorities for its work:
freedom of movement for LGBT people, monitoring the European
Commission, combating discrimination in the European Union,
securing transgender and intersex rights, and monitoring human rights
in the work of the European Union.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has no

legislative function, although it is very active in all areas of human
rights and elects the Mudges of the European Court of Human Rights.
On 16 May 2017, on the eve of the International Day against
Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, Jonas Gunnarsson, PACE's
general rapporteur on the rights of LGBTI people, issued a statement
 in support of the LGBTI community: “Recent allegations of wide-scale
abductions and torture as well as extraMudicial killings of LGBTI
people in Chechnya highlight more than ever the urgent need to protect
victims of homophobic and transphobic violence and end the impunity
of perpetrators.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gunnarsson, Jonas. “Homophobic and Transphobic Violence:

Protecting Victims, Ending Impunity.” Parliamentary Assembly /
Assemblée Parlementaire, 16 May 2017.
http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/News/News-View-EN.asp?
newsid=6645&lang=2&cat=135

Geraldine Van Bueren

Professor of International Human Rights
Law, Queen Mary University of London; Barrister
(Middle Temple); Queen's Counsel (Honoris
Causa) Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford

Formation of the European Union and the

Council of Europe
The reason for the existence of these two supreme courts in Europe is as
much history as logic. After World War II (1939–1945) there was a growing
consensus among nations that something should be done to prevent another
war in Europe and to prevent abuses of human rights such as those under
the Nazis. Initially, this took the form of a movement for European unity,
formally discussed at the Congress of Europe in The Hague in the
Netherlands in 1948. The movement soon divided.
One group of states was primarily concerned with preventing another
European war by establishing international control of the primary means of
industrial production through the creation of the European Coal and Steel
Community in 1951. This was followed by the establishment, both in 1958,
of the European Atomic Energy Community and the European Economic
Community, the latter of which evolved into the European Union. The
primary aim of the European Union is the facilitation of the free movement
of goods, capital, services, and labor between member states.

The maMor human rights component of EU law for many years was the
prohibition of sexual discrimination in employment. This did not initially
include discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. That was
added, along with an expansive catalog of rights, in the Charter of
Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which came into force in 2009
through the Treaty of Lisbon. Most EU legislation and case law regarding
LGBTQ rights have been concerned with employment and related subMects,
such as pensions.

The other group of states, including all those in the first group, was
concerned with protecting human rights and democratic values. It began by
creating the Council of Europe, the title given to the group of states that
agreed in 1949 to abide by the Statute of the Council of Europe. This
committed signatory states to guarantee democracy and fundamental human
rights. The Council of Europe then began to draft treaties, the first of which
was the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR; officially called
the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental
Freedoms). This treaty established machinery for the implementation of
rights, including the European Court of Human Rights. At present,
individuals who feel that a state has violated their rights under the
Convention can complain to the European Court of Human Rights, and
states are bound to follow the rulings of the court.
The two provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights most
relevant to LGBTQ rights are the right to privacy (in Article 8) and the right
not to be discriminated against (in Article 14). The right to privacy has been
significant in striking down laws penalizing same-sex acts and recognizing
transsexual identity. The nondiscrimination right in Article 14 does not
expressly include sexual orientation as a prohibited ground, but it has been
adopted by interpretation. The right to marry and found a family (in Article
12) is relevant to LGBTQ rights, but the European Court of Human Rights
has not yet ruled that this includes a right to same-sex marriage.

LGBTQ Rights in Europe before the ECHR

and EU
Prior to the nineteenth century, homosexual acts were crimes subMect to the
death penalty in most European states. France was the first western
European country to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting
adults when, in 1791, the revolutionary government adopted a new penal
code that no longer criminalized sodomy.

During the nineteenth century, the persecution of LGBTQ individuals

changed from a moralistic and punitive model to a medical model.
Deviation from the sexual norm was perceived as an illness rather than evil.
There was a great deal of speculation about whether this “illness” was the
result of nature or nurture. The debate was far from theoretical, because the
etiological theory chosen indicated the societal response. If it was a
condition from birth, then the response would be medical treatment, which
could be through drugs or surgery. If it was the result of environmental
conditioning, then it could be “cured” by various changes in environment.

In Germany in 1897 the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935)

cofounded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-
Humanitarian Committee) to campaign against Paragraph 175 of the penal
code, which made sex between men illegal. This was the first public gay
rights organization in Germany. In 1919 he also cofounded the Institut für
Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), a private sexology
research institute. The first gay demonstration, with about 400 people, took
place in Nollendorfplatz in 1922 in Berlin.

In post–World War II Europe, national laws regarding homosexuality were

often changed as a result of internal campaigning and reform. But many
laws regarding LGBTQ rights resulted from rulings by the European Court
of Human Rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. Dating
from 1950, it is the best-known treaty from the Council of Europe, the
larger and older of European institutions, not to be confused with the
smaller and younger European Union. Both the Council of Europe and the
EU have been active in formulating LGBTQ rights.

Although the two courts are often confused, sometimes even by lawyers,
the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the European Court
of Justice in Luxembourg are very different. The European Court of Human
Rights was created by the European Convention on Human Rights, which
was promulgated by the Council of Europe, the older, larger, and legally
less directly controlling European institution in comparison with the EU.
The European Court of Human Rights considers complaints from those who
believe that their Convention rights have been violated, after exhausting all
national legal appeals. The European Court of Justice is the supreme court
of the EU. Its usual procedure is to consider requests for advice on EU law
from national courts at all levels and to advise the national court on how to
apply EU law. This advice, on subMects such as the inclusion of transsexuals
under EU sex discrimination law, must be followed by the court that
requested the advice and is highly persuasive on courts in other EU
countries. It is the equivalent of rulings by the US Supreme Court.

European Court of Human Rights LGBTQ

Cases
Cases Involving Criminal Law and Humane Treatment The LGBTQ
case law under the European Convention on Human Rights is mostly about
the Article 8 right to private and family life, the Article 12 right to marry,
and the Article 14 right not to be discriminated against, while some cases
involve the Article 3 right not to be subMect to inhuman or degrading
treatment and the rights to freedom of speech and assembly in Articles 10
and 11. In 1981 in the landmark case of Dudgeon v. United Kingdom the
European Court of Human Rights held that Article 8 was violated by a
Northern Ireland law making male homosexual acts crimes. The applicant
had not been convicted, but as a homosexual he was a victim by the very
existence of the law. In 1988 in Norris v. Ireland the court also held that
there had been a violation of Article 8 of the Convention by the law in the
Republic of Ireland. In the 1993 case of Modinos v. Cyprus the court also
held that the law in Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus violated Article 8.
The court began by ruling that laws penalizing homosexuals violated the
right to privacy and then began to find that they also violated the right not
to be discriminated against, even though sexual orientation is not one of the
specifically prohibited grounds for discrimination in Article 14.

THE HOLOCAUST AND LGBT VICTIMS

While gays and lesbians had been socially marginalized well before
Adolf Hitler came to power as leader of the Nazis in Germany in 1933,
persecution of them intensified in the following years. Under the
Nazis, organizations such as Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für
Sexualwissenschaft were banned, and in 1933 all the books in the
institute's library were publicly burned. The Reichszentrale zur
Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung (Reich Central
Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion) was created in
1936, and large numbers of homosexuals began to be arrested. In July
1940 the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler declared that all men
convicted for homosexual acts and known to have had more than one
partner should be sent directly to a concentration camp, although the
Gestapo had been rounding up men since the late 1930s. In November
1942 an SS (Schutzstaffel [Protection squadron]) decree gave
concentration camp commandants the power to order the castration of
homosexual prisoners, although castrations had been carried out
against sexual offenders, including homosexuals, as early as 1935 on
the basis of the Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals and Sex
Offenders.

In concentration camps homosexual men were identified by a pink

triangle, while some wore a green triangle as ordinary criminals.
Lesbians were not persecuted formally, although some wore a black
triangle as asocials for failure to conform to gender norms. Some were
subMected to medical experiments. Between 1933 and 1945 about
100,000 men were arrested, with as many as 50,000 serving time in
Mails and prisons, and 5,000 to 15,000 were sent to concentration
camps. In the camps only about 4,000 survived. At the 1945
Nuremberg war crimes trials no mention was made of crimes against
homosexuals. The Federal Law for the Compensation of the Victims of
National Socialist Persecution of 1956 declared that men held in
concentration camps as homosexuals were not qualified to receive
compensation. There was little recognition of LGBT victims of the
Holocaust until the 1970s, and it was only in 2002 that the government
of Germany issued a formal apology for the Nazi persecution of
homosexuals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grau, Günter, ed. Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in

Germany, 1933–45. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Chicago: Fitzroy
Dearborn, 1995.

Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against

Homosexuals. New York: Holt, 1986.
 Geraldine Van Bueren
Professor of International Human Rights Law, Queen Mary
University of London; Barrister (Middle Temple); Queen's
Counsel (Honoris Causa)
Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford

In the United Kingdom the Sexual Offences Act in 1967 removed criminal
penalties for homosexual acts in private by males over the age of twenty-
one. In 1994 the age of consent for male homosexual acts was lowered to
eighteeen, while the age of consent for heterosexual acts was sixteen. The
case Sutherland v. United Kingdom was filed in 1994, arguing that the
difference in the age of consent was discrimination in violation of Article
14. The British government agreed to lower the age of consent for male
homosexual acts to sixteen. This was done in 2001, and a friendly
settlement between plaintiff and the United Kingdom was approved by the
court.

The European Court of Human Rights has decided several cases involving
the treatment of LGBTQ people that amounted to violations of the right to
life and the prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment (Articles 2 and
3). Identoba v. Georgia (2015) centered on a demonstration held in May
2012 on the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia, and
Biphobia that was violently disrupted by counterdemonstrators. The court
ruled that the Georgian government's failure to protect against violent
attacks and effectively investigate them violated Articles 3 (torture) and 14
(discrimination). In 2012 the court found in X. v. Turkey that the solitary
confinement for over eight months of a homosexual prisoner had not been
for his protection but because of his sexual orientation, violating Articles 3
(torture) and 14 (discrimination). In the 2016 case of O.M. v. Hungary the
court ruled that detaining a gay Iranian man who applied for asylum for two
months violated his Article 5 right to liberty. The court has come close to
deciding that the Convention would be violated if ill-treatment was likely to
result from the return of homosexuals to their country of origin. The court
was still deliberating M.E. v. Sweden in 2015 when the Swedish Migration
Agency found that if a homosexual was deported to Libya he would be at
risk of persecution.

Cases Involving LGBTQ Gender Identity Rights At first the European

Court of Human Rights reMected claims by transsexuals, but it gradually has
come around to the view that a refusal to recognize gender identity violates
the European Convention on Human Rights. The court has modified its
interpretation regarding gender identity in a series of cases from the Rees
case to the Christine Goodwin case. In Rees v. United Kingdom (1986), the
court found no breach of Article 8 (privacy) when a female-to-male
transsexual was refused legal recognition of his condition. The court also
found no breach of Article 12 (right to marry) because traditional marriage
was defined as being between persons of different biological sexes. In
Cossey v. United Kingdom (1990) the court repeated its ruling in Rees.

But in B. v. France (1992) the court found a breach of Article 8 (privacy) in

the refusal of French authorities to amend the civil-status register to
recognize a male-tofemale transsexual, distinguishing from Rees and
Cossey by differences between the British and the French civil status
systems. In the United Kingdom there was less expectation that records
such as birth certificates would be updated, but the French system allowed
for records to be updated throughout a person's life, establishing an
expectation that the civil-status register would be updated for everyone,
including transsexuals.

In Sheffield and Horsham v. United Kingdom (1998) the court was not
persuaded that it should depart from its Rees and Cossey Mudgments. It said
that “transsexualism raises complex scientific, legal, moral, and social
issues, in respect of which there is no generally shared approach among the
Contracting States.” The court held that there had been no violations of
Articles 8 (privacy), 12 (right to marry), or 14 (discrimination) but
reaffirmed that the area needs to be kept under permanent review by the
Contracting States in the context of increased social acceptance of the
phenomenon and increased recognition of the problems that postoperative
transsexuals encounter.

But in Christine Goodwin v. United Kingdom (2002) the stance of the

European Court of Human Rights changed from previous rulings. The court
held that there was a violation of Article 8 (privacy) by the lack of legal
recognition of Goodwin's changed gender in terms of employment and
social security, owing to a clear and continuing international trend toward
increased social acceptance of transsexuals and toward legal recognition of
the new sexual identity of postoperative transsexuals. The court also found
a violation of Article 12 (right to marry), saying that it was for the state to
determine the conditions and formalities of transsexual marriages but that it
“finds no Mustification for barring the transsexual from enMoying the right to
marry under any circumstances.” While the state could regulate the
formalities of marriage, it could not impose a complete ban on marriage by
transsexuals.

Following Christine Goodwin, the United Kingdom introduced a system

whereby transsexuals could apply for a gender recognition certificate. Two
later cases concerned transsexuals who were married before the sex
reassignment surgery and who wanted to make use of this gender
recognition procedure. In Parry v. United Kingdom (2006) and R. and F. v.
United Kingdom (2006) the applicants were married and had children,
respectively. In each case, one of them underwent gender reassignment
surgery and remained with his or her spouse as a married couple. Following
the enactment of the Gender Recognition Act of 2004, which was passed to
comply with the 2002 ruling in Goodwin, the applicants, who had
undergone gender reassignment surgery, made an application for the issue
of a gender recognition certificate, which could not be obtained unless they
terminated their marriage. The applicants complained in particular under
Articles 8 (privacy) and 12 (right to marry) that they had been unable to
obtain legal recognition of their acquired gender without terminating their
marriage.

The court declared the applications inadmissible. The applicants were

requested to annul their marriage because same-sex marriages were not
permitted under English law. The United Kingdom had given legal
recognition to gender reassignment, and the applicants could continue their
relationship through a civil partnership, which carried almost all the same
legal rights and obligations. The court observed that when the new system
was introduced following the Christine Goodwin Mudgment, the legislature
was aware that there were a small number of transsexuals in existing
marriages but deliberately made no provision for those marriages to
continue in the event that one partner made use of the gender recognition
procedure. The court found that it could not be required to make allowances
for that small number of marriages. This is an example of the European
Court of Human Rights' reluctance to interfere with what it regards as the
details of national laws on marriage.

In Grant v. United Kingdom (2006) the applicant, a sixty-eight-year-old

postoperative male-to-female transsexual, successfully complained about
the lack of legal recognition of her change of gender and the refusal to pay
her a retirement pension at the age applicable to other women (sixty). The
court held that there had been a violation of Article 8 (privacy). She had
been a victim of the lack of legal recognition from the moment after the
Christine Goodwin Mudgment when the authorities had refused to give effect
to her claim, namely from 5 September 2002, until the Gender Recognition
Act of 2004 entered into force. This lack of recognition had breached her
right to respect for her private life. The refusal of health insurers to pay for
the sex-change operation for a sixty-seven-year-old person because she had
not complied with a two-year waiting period violated Article 8 (privacy) in
Schlumpf v. Switzerland (2009).
In Hämäläinen v. Finland (2014) the court held that it did not violate
Article 8 (privacy) to require the conversion of a marriage into a registered
partnership as a precondition to legal recognition of an acquired gender
because it would provide legal protection for same-sex couples that was
almost identical to that of marriage. The applicant was born a male, married
a woman and had a child with her, and then underwent male-to-female
gender reassignment surgery. She could have her identity changed to female
in her official documents only if her wife consented to turn the marriage
into a civil partnership or if they divorced. The court also found that there
had been no violation of Article 14 (discrimination).

Cases Involving Same-Sex Marriage and Civil Union Rights Although

the European Court of Human Rights had yet to recognize a right to same-
sex marriage as of 2017, many European countries had already done so.
The first country was the Netherlands (2001). By the end of 2017, same-sex
marriages were legal nationally in fifteen European countries: the
Netherlands, Belgium (2003), Spain (2005), Norway (2009), Sweden
(2009), Iceland (2010), Portugal (2010), Denmark (2012), France (2013),
the United Kingdom (2014), Luxembourg (2015), Ireland (2015), Finland
(2017), Germany (2017), and Malta (2017). In addition, same-sex marriages
were set to become legal in Austria at the beginning of 2019. The European
Court of Human Rights sometimes seems to wait for an emerging
consensus among Council of Europe states before changing its rulings.
 © FREDERICK FLORIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Horst Michael Schalk (right) with His Lawyer at the European Court of Human
Rights in Strasbourg, France, during a Hearing for Schalk and Kopf v. Austria,
2010. Schalk and his partner petitioned the Court of Human Rights for the right to
marry in Austria. The court ruled against them, stating that the national authorities were
best placed to assess and respond to the needs of society given the deep-rooted social
and cultural connotations inherent in the institution of marriage, which differ greatly
from one society to another.

In the 2010 case of Schalk and Kopf v. Austria the court ruled that the
European Convention on Human Rights did not require a state to grant a
same-sex couple access to marriage. The applicants were a same-sex couple
living in a stable partnership, and the refusal of the Austrian authorities to
grant them permission to marry was upheld by the courts. The European
Court of Human Rights found no violations of Articles 12 (right to marry)
or 14 (discrimination) and said that national authorities were best placed to
assess and respond to the needs of society in this field, given that marriage
had deep-rooted social and cultural connotations differing greatly from one
society to another. In 2016 the court repeated that ruling in Chapin and
Charpentier v. France but noted that France had granted same-sex couples
access to marriage in 2013, and the applicants were therefore free to marry.

Although the court had yet to decide that there is an LGBTQ right to marry
as of 2017, it had decided several cases involving LGBTQ people and civil
unions. In Vallianatos v. Greece (2013) the court held that it was a
violation of Articles 14 (discrimination) and 8 (privacy) for the Greek law
of 2008 to provide for civil unions only for different-sex couples,
automatically excluding same-sex couples. The court noted that of the
nineteen state parties to the Convention that authorized some form of
registered
partnership other than marriage, Lithuania and Greece were the only ones to
reserve it exclusively to different-sex couples.

In Oliari v. Italy (2015) the court held it was a violation of Article 8

(privacy) that under Italian law same-sex couples had no option to get
married or enter into any other type of civil union. The court noted that
twenty-four of the forty-seven Council of Europe member states gave some
legal recognition of same-sex couples, that the Italian Constitutional Court
had repeatedly called for recognition, and that, according to surveys, a
maMority of the Italian population supported legal recognition of
homosexual couples. In Salgueiro da Silva Mouta v. Portugal (1999) the
European Court of Human Rights held that it was a violation of Article 14
(discrimination) and Article 8 (privacy) for the Portuguese courts to prevent
a homosexual man living with another man from visiting his daughter, in
breach of an agreement reached at the time of his divorce. The Portuguese
courts' decision—on a finding that “the child should live in a traditional
Portuguese family,” which forced him to hide his homosexuality when
seeing his daughter—was based on considerations relating to sexual
orientation not acceptable under the Convention.
The court has been consistent in its rulings on residence rights and has
decided two cases upholding the right of same-sex alien partners to
residence permits. The 2016 case PaMić v. Croatia involved a national of
Bosnia and Herzegovina who was in a stable same-sex relationship with a
woman living in Croatia and was refused a residence permit in Croatia. The
Croatian Aliens Act reserved the possibility of applying for a residence
permit for family reunification to different-sex couples. The court held that
there had been a violation of Article 14 (discrimination) taken together with
Article 8 (privacy). It found that the applicant had been affected by a
difference in treatment between different-sex couples and same-sex couples.
In Taddeucci and McCall v. Italy (2016) the court held that Italy's
immigration law violated Articles 14 (discrimination) and 8 (privacy) by
refusing a family member's residence permit to unmarried partners. The gay
couple, one Italian and the other from New Zealand, could not live together
in Italy because the Italian authorities refused to issue the second applicant
with a residence permit on family grounds. The court found that the gay
couple could not be understood as comparable to an unmarried heterosexual
couple because they could not marry or, at that time, obtain any other form
of legal recognition. The court ruled that treating homosexual couples in the
same way as unmarried heterosexual couples breached the right not to be
subMect to discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Cases Involving LGBTQ Social Rights The European Court of Human

Rights thus has evolved in its case law to recognize transsexual identity but
has not yet recognized a right to same-sex marriage. In same-sex
relationships the court has given recognition to residence rights and is
beginning to give some recognition to social rights, such as pensions.
Beyond gender identity, marriage, and residency, there have been several
cases involving LGBTQ people and various social rights. In Mata Estevez v.
Spain (2001) the court effectively upheld discrimination. The applicant
complained about the difference in treatment for a survivor's pension
between de facto homosexual partners and married couples. The court
reMected the application as manifestly ill-founded, finding that Spanish
legislation relating to eligibility for survivors' allowances pursued a
legitimate aim (the protection of the family based on the bonds of marriage)
and that the difference in treatment could be considered to fall within the
state's margin of appreciation. But in P. B. and J. S. v. Austria (2010), the
court found a violation in the refusal to extend sickness insurance coverage
to the homosexual partner of an insured person. Before a legislative
amendment in July 2007, Austrian law provided that only a close relative of
the insured person or a cohabitee of the opposite sex qualified as
dependents. The court held that there had been a violation of Article 14
(discrimination) in conMunction with Article 8 (privacy). An amendment
making the law neutral regarding the sexual orientation of the cohabitee put
an end to the violation.

In Manenc v. France (2010) the court approved the refusal of a reversionary

pension to the survivor of a civil partnership between two people of the
same sex on the ground that the requirement of a lawful marriage had not
been met. The court found that the French legislation on survivors' benefits
pursued a legitimate aim (the protection of the family based on the bonds of
marriage) and that limiting the legislation to married couples, to the
exclusion of partners in a civil partnership regardless of their sexual
orientation, fell within the broad margin of appreciation accorded to the
states by the European Convention on Human Rights. The court ruled the
application inadmissible.

In Aldeguer Tomás v. Spain (2016) the applicant was denied a survivor's

pension following the death of his partner, with whom he had lived in a de
facto marital relationship. The applicant had been unable to marry his
partner under the law in force during the latter's lifetime. Three years after
his partner's death, the law legalizing same-sex marriage in Spain entered
into force. The court held that there had been no violation of Article 14
(discrimination) in conMunction with Article 8 (privacy) and Article 1
(property) of Protocol No. 1 to the Convention, finding that there had been
no discrimination in the applicant's case. In particular, his situation
following the entry into force of the law legalizing same-sex marriage in
Spain in 2005 was not the same as that of a surviving partner of a
heterosexual cohabiting couple, who had been unable to marry before the
law legalizing divorce entered into force in 1981 and who qualified for a
survivor's pension by virtue of a provision of that law. Moreover, states had,
at the relevant time, a margin of appreciation regarding the timing of the
introduction of legislative changes in the field of legal recognition of same-
sex couples and the exact status conferred on them, an area that was
regarded as one of evolving rights with no established consensus.

The court held that there had been a violation of Articles 14

(discrimination) and 8 (privacy) in Karner v. Austria (2003) by the Austrian
Supreme Court's decision not to recognize the right of the applicant to
succeed to a tenancy after the death of his companion, which was
discrimination on the ground of his sexual orientation. In Kozak v. Poland
(2010), following the death of his homosexual partner, the applicant
claimed to be entitled to succeed to the tenancy of a council flat that was in
his partner's name. In dismissing his claim, the Polish courts found that the
applicant had moved out of the flat and stopped paying rent before his
partner's death and that, in any event, a de facto marital relationship, which
was a prerequisite for succession to the tenancy of a council flat, could exist
only between persons of the opposite sex. The European Court of Human
Rights held that there had been a violation of Article 14 (discrimination) in
conMunction with Article 8 (privacy). Given the state's narrow margin of
appreciation in cases of difference in treatment on the basis of sexual
orientation, a blanket exclusion of persons living in a homosexual
relationship from succession to a tenancy could not be considered
acceptable. These cases show that combining property rights with rights to
privacy and nondiscrimination appeared to be persuasive to the court.

Cases Involving Adoption Although as of 2017 the court had not yet
recognized a right to same-sex marriage, it did come close to recognizing a
right to adopt in several cases involving LGBTQ people wanting to adopt.
In Fretté v. France (2002), a homosexual man complained that the decision
dismissing his request for authorization to adopt a child amounted to
arbitrary interference with his private and family life because it was based
exclusively on unfavorable preMudice about his sexual orientation. The court
held that there had been no violation of Article 14 (discrimination) in
conMunction with Article 8 (privacy). It found that the national authorities
had been legitimately and reasonably entitled to consider that the right to be
able to adopt, on which the applicant had relied, was limited by the interests
of children eligible for adoption, notwithstanding the applicant's legitimate
aspirations and without calling his personal choices into question. But in E.
B. v. France (2008), the court found a violation of Articles 14
(discrimination) and 8 (privacy) in the refusal to approve for adoption on
the ground of the applicant's lifestyle as a lesbian living with another
woman. The court observed that the applicant's homosexuality had been a
determining factor in refusing her request, whereas French law allowed
single persons to adopt a child, thereby opening up the possibility of
adoption by a single homosexual.

In Gas and Dubois v. France (2012) the applicants were two cohabiting
women. The court found no violations of Articles 14 (discrimination) or 8
(privacy) in the refusal of the first applicant's application for a simple
adoption order with respect to the second applicant's child. It saw no
evidence of a difference in treatment based on the applicants' sexual
orientation, as different-sex couples who had entered into a civil partnership
were likewise prohibited from obtaining a simple adoption order. In reply to
the argument that different-sex couples in a civil partnership could
circumvent the prohibition by marrying, the court reiterated its ruling in
Schalk and Kopf v. Austria (2010) that there is no right to marriage for
same-sex couples.

But in X v. Austria (2013), the court held that there had been a violation of
Articles 14 (discrimination) and 8 (privacy) when the Austrian courts
refused to grant one of the partners (two women in a stable homosexual
relationship) the right to adopt the son of the other partner without severing
the mother's legal ties with the child (second-parent adoption). The case
was distinguished from Gas and Dubois v. France, in which the court had
found that there was no difference in treatment based on sexual orientation
between an unmarried different-sex couple and a same-sex couple, because,
under French law, second-parent adoption was not open to any unmarried
couple, be they homosexual or heterosexual.

In J. M. v. United Kingdom (2010), the court found a violation of Article 14

(discrimination) and Article 1 (protection of property) of Protocol No. 1 in
the rules on child maintenance including in the UK Civil Partnership Act,
which discriminated against those in same-sex relationships. The applicant
was a divorced mother who lived with another woman in a long-term
relationship. Because her two children lived mainly with their father, the
mother was required to pay 47 pounds per week, whereas if she had formed
a new relationship with a man the amount would have been 14 pounds.

Cases Involving Military Service and Free Speech Rights The European
Court of Human Rights' case law is clear that sexual orientation cannot be a
bar to military service, as decided in Lustig-Prean and Beckett v. United
Kingdom (1999), Smith and Grady v. United Kingdom (1999), Perkins and
R. v. United Kingdom (2003), and Beck, Copp and Bazeley v. United
Kingdom (2003). The applicants were all British armed forces personnel,
discharged from the forces on the basis of their homosexuality. In all these
cases, the court held that there had been a violation of Article 8 (privacy). It
found that the measures taken against the applicants had constituted
especially grave interferences with their private lives and had not been
Mustified by “convincing and weighty reasons” (Smith and Grady 1999).

In Kaos GL v. Turkey (2016), the court found a breach of Article 10

(speech) in the seizure of all copies of a magazine published by an LGBTQ
association, and in Bayev v. Russia (2017) that Articles 10 (speech) and 14
(discrimination) were violated by legislation banning the promotion of
homosexuality. The court, in Bączkowski v. Poland (2007), found violations
of Articles 11 (assembly) and 14 (discrimination) in the local refusal of
permission to organize a march in Warsaw in 2005 about discrimination
against minorities, women, and people with disabilities. In Alekseyev v.
Russia (2010), the court found a violation of Articles 11 (assembly) and 14
(discrimination) in the banning of several LGBTQ marches, and in
Lashmankin v. Russia (2017) Article 11 (assembly) was violated when
authorities placed severe limitations on plans for gay pride public events. In
Genderdoc-M v. Moldova (2012), the court held that there had been a
violation of Articles 11 (assembly) and 14 (discrimination) in the banning
of a planned LGBTQ demonstration in May 2005.

European Union LGBTQ Law

Although the institutions of the European Union have often said that the
protection of human rights is an important part of EU law, before 2009 the
main aspect of human rights that was the subMect of enforcement was
equality of treatment of the sexes in employment. Only when the Charter of
Fundamental Rights went into effect in 2009 through Treaty of Lisbon were
many other rights made enforceable. These rights included socioeconomic
rights and the right not to be discriminated against on the grounds of sexual
orientation. But the rights were directly binding only on the institutions of
the EU. They were to be binding on national governments only when they
were acting to implement EU law. The United Kingdom and Poland
required a protocol to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights that attempted
to limit the application of those rights. This was inspired partly by fears that
the ratification of the Charter could force Poland to allow civil marriage to
same-sex couples. The two countries refused to accept the Charter as part of
the Treaty of Lisbon without the protocol.

The earlier Treaty of Amsterdam, which came into effect in 1999 after
being signed in 1997, required the EU to respect fundamental rights, and for
the first time there was an explicit reference to sexual orientation.
According to that treaty, action could be taken to “combat discrimination
based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or
sexual orientation” (Treaty of Amsterdam 1997, 26). This was done through
the Employment Equality Directive (2000), which requires member states
to combat direct and indirect discrimination in employment on all the
prohibited grounds. A Directive requires EU member states to adopt
implementing legislation, unlike an EU Regulation, which has direct effect
in national laws.

European Court of Justice Transgender

Cases
Despite the absence of any reference to transgender rights in EU treaties
and legislation, in three cases decided by the European Court of Justice
(ECJ) the court enhanced the rights of transsexual citizens. In the 1996 case
of P. v. S. and Cornwall County Council, a transsexual had been dismissed.
The ECJ ruled that discriminatory treatment of a person who has undergone
a sex-change operation was discrimination on the ground of belonging to a
particular sex under the Directive on equal treatment for men and women.

In the 2004 case of K. B. v. National Health Service Pensions Agency, K. B.

claimed that her transsexual femaleto-male partner would not be entitled to
a survivor's payment because they were not married. They could not marry
because her husband was registered as a woman, and it was not then
possible to change a person's sex in the British registry of birth after a
person had undergone gender reassignment surgery. The ECJ ruled that EU
law on equal pay for women and men also covered discrimination against
transsexuals.

In the Richards v. Secretary of State for Work and Pensions case (2006), a
British pension fund had refused to grant a male-to-female transsexual an
old-age pension before her sixty-fifth birthday because she was legally still
a man. The ECJ ruled that it was impermissible discrimination against a
male-to-female transsexual who would have been entitled to a pension if
she could have registered as a woman in the national civil registry. All three
of these landmark rulings concerned the United Kingdom, but they applied
to all EU member states.

ECJ Cases Involving Lesbian and Gay Rights

Curiously, the ECJ has been less assertive in protecting lesbian and gay
rights than the rights of transsexuals. In the 1998 case of Grant v. South-
West Trains Ltd., Lisa Grant argued that her male predecessor had received
a yearly travel allowance for his female partner (an unmarried cohabitee),
whereas her female partner had been refused a travel allowance. She argued
that if her partner had been a man, she would have received the allowance.
The ECJ refused to interpret sex discrimination to include discrimination
based on sexual orientation. Instead of comparing the unmarried cohabiting
Grant with her unmarried cohabiting predecessor, the ECJ compared her
situation to that of a male-male couple and applied an “equal misery
argument”: both couples would have been treated equally badly.

One explanation for this ruling was its potential financial repercussions.
Transsexuals are a small minority compared to the EU gay and lesbian
population of some 35 million that could have benefited from a favorable
ruling in Grant. The ECJ said that there was no consensus among member
states as to whether same-sex relationships were equivalent to relationships
between persons of different sexes. It also observed that the European
Convention on Human Rights did not then protect same-sex relationships.
There was speculation that Grant might have been decided differently under
the Treaty of Amsterdam, which came into effect in 1999 with a specific
reference to sexual orientation. But in the 2001 case of D. and Kingdom of
Sweden v. Council, the ECJ confirmed its ruling in Grant and refused to
treat the registered partnership of a Swedish EU official with his male
partner as equivalent to a marriage.
The status of same-sex relationships was finally recognized by the ECJ in
2008, in the case of Maruko v. Versorgungsanstalt der deutschen Bühnen.
Tadao Maruko's claim to a widower's pension was refused by the pension
fund of German theaters because he and his partner had not been married.
German law did not allow gay and lesbian couples to marry, but Maruko
and his partner had entered into a registered partnership in 2000, as soon as
German law made it possible. The question was whether it would be
unlawful discrimination for samesex couples to be denied rights reserved
for married couples when the law did not allow them to marry, and the ECJ
ruled that it was for the national court to decide whether a surviving partner
was truly comparable to a surviving spouse. The Munich court that had
referred Maruko to the ECJ ruled in favor of Maruko, saying that under
evolving German legislation surviving spouses and registered partners were
comparable with regard to survivors' pensions.

Comparison and Prospects

Paradoxically, the European Court of Justice, which is primarily concerned
with economic law, recognized transsexual rights in the UK Cornwall case
in 1996, whereas the European Court of Human Rights, the premier
European human rights court, refused to recognize transsexual rights in the
United Kingdom until the 2002 case of Christine Goodwin. The specific
inclusion of sexual orientation as a prohibited ground of discrimination
along with many other rights in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights
means that the ECJ may become even more important for LGBTQ rights in
Europe in the future.

The future is likely to bring increasing recognition of LGBTQ rights in both

the Council of Europe and the European Union. Although the European
Court of Human Rights may recognize a right to same-sex marriage, other
cases may be affected by the relatively recent membership in the Council of
Europe of eastern European countries with less tolerance of LGBTQ rights,
combined with the tendency of the European Court of Human Rights to rely
on a consensus of member states. In the European Union the “statutory”
recognition of LGBTQ rights in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights,
combined with the smaller membership of largely western European states
that recognize LGBTQ rights in national law, may influence rulings by the
Court of Justice of the European Union and lead to increased recognition of
LGBTQ rights.

SEE ALSO Adoption and Surrogacy in Europe; African Commission on

Human and Peoples' Rights; Human Rights; Human Rights and Activism in
Latin America; Human Rights and Queer Arab Refugees; Human Rights
Campaign; Human Rights in Asia; Marriage, Universal, in Europe; Von
Mahlsdorf, Charlotte (1928–2002)

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20, no. 4 (1998): 455–479.

Bell, Mark. “Shifting Conceptions of Sexual Discrimination at the Court of

Justice: from P v. S to Grant v. SWT.” European Law Journal 5, no. 1
(1999): 63–81.

Boele-Woelki, Katharina. “The Legal Recognition of Same-Sex

Relationships within the European Union.” Tulane Law Review 82, no. 5
(2008): 1949–1981.

Council of Europe. “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.” Accessed on

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Denys, Christine. “Homosexuality: A Non-issue in Community Law?”

European Law Review 24, no. 4 (1999): 419–425.
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Kollman, Kelly. “European Institutions, Transnational Networks, and

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van der Vleuten, Anna. The Price of Gender Equality: Member States and
Governance in the European Union. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.

Weiss, Adam. “Federalism and the Gay Family: Free Movement of Same-
Sex Couples in the United States and the European Union.” Columbia
Journal of Law and Social Problems 41, no. 1 (2007): 81–124.

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Discrimination: The Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights and
the Court of Justice of the European Union.” International Lesbian, Gay,
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europe.org/sites/default/files/Attachments/case_law_document_rw_2017-
08-01.pdf
I Luv U But (2012–2014; Fadia Abboud)
NICOLE FARES
Independent scholar
Alpharetta, GA

Australian web TV series showing how culture, family, and

honor affect gays and lesbians in religious families in the Arab
diaspora.

The fifteen-year-long Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) displaced an

estimated 900,000 people (Murphy 2006). Today, it is estimated that 6
million Lebanese people live in diaspora, most of whom maintain an active
relationship with their native country (Labaki 2006). The filmmaker Fadia
Abboud shows the strong ties between diasporic communities and their
Lebanese identities, as the dialogue in her web series I Luv U But (2012–
2014) alternates between English and the Lebanese dialect. The series
focuses on the experiences of Lebanese Australian LGBT individuals as
they attempt to meet the demands and expectations of both their families
and their proud, liberal community.

Abboud is one of the founders of Club Arak, a queer Arab dance party
featured in episode 9 of season 1, and also the codirector of the Arab Film
Festival Australia. She has written and directed a number of films,
including I Remember 1948, a documentary screened on SBS (a public TV
network in Australia) in 2008, and two short dramas: In the Ladies Lounge
(2007), which won awards at the Queer Screen film festival, and Big
Trouble, Little Fish (2010), screened at Flickerfest. I Luv U But provides a
comic portrayal of the many gay and lesbian Arabs living in the closet in
both the West and the Middle East, as proof that the Western pride
discourse is not applicable to everyone, even those living in the West.
Whereas other writers and directors, such as Abboud's counterpart Alissar
Gazal, who produced and directed the documentary Lesbanese (2008),
focus on the Western “coming-out” narrative as adopted and altered in
Lebanese and Arab LGBT communities, Abboud relocates the discussion
within the failures of the pride narrative in Western countries to incorporate
Arab culture in its discourse and ideology. Through her web series on
Lebanese Australian gay and lesbian lifestyles, she challenges the notion of
coming out as a necessary and desirable rite of passage for gay men and
lesbians, arguing that not all people would choose to “Must give up family
for the individual pursuit of happiness” (Abboud, quoted in Taylor 2014).

Set in the heart of the vibrant and multicultural community of Sydney,

Australia, I Luv U But depicts the lives of queer Lebanese Australian
husband and wife Mouna and Sam, who married for convenience. The
series consists of two seasons and a total of nineteen short episodes that
average about ten minutes each. Both characters are gay and not “out” to
their parents and extended conservative families. The series aims to expose
this lifestyle in a nonMudgmental way—to say that it is okay and that there is
no right or wrong choice of LGBT lifestyle. Abboud was successful in
casting a friendly and likable cast, with Alissar Gazal as Mouna's mother,
who is unaware of her daughter's secret; Abbey Aziz as the lesbian wife,
Mouna; George El Hindi as the gay husband, Sam; and Rose Souaid as
Sam's mother. The first episode begins with Mouna in a wedding dress and
Sam in a tuxedo, addressing the viewer in an effort to explain their having
to resort to deceiving their families. The series progresses and unfolds, as
Sam is seen in episode 3 scrambling to get his date out of his house when
his mother-in-law pays him an unexpected visit. The series does a great Mob
portraying the old conservative and patriarchal traditions these Lebanese
Australian families uphold when, for instance, in that same episode,
Mouna's mother tells her to “give [her] husband a taste [of the food] before
[she] take[s] a bite of it,” or when, in episode 6 of season 1, Sam's mother
asks him: “Why did you marry such an old wife? She's 35!”
 © LISA MAREE WILLIAMS/GETTY IMAGES
I Lui U But Director Fadia Abboud. Abboud, shown here at the Sydney Film
Festival in 2007, used her miniseries to challenge the Western notion that “coming out”
is a necessary rite of passage for gay men and lesbians in her portrayal of Arab
characters who stay in the closet to avoid alienating their conservative families.

For the Arab communities residing in the West, preserving traditional

cultural values is crucial because they form a minority within a dominant
culture with differing values that are constantly changing and influencing
their Eastern culture, which seems on the verge of submersion within its
dominant host culture. The children of Arab parents feel the pressure to
assimilate and find it easier to set aside their Arabic language and Middle
Eastern traditions. It becomes more crucial for Arab parents to minimize the
Western influence on their families, and they therefore ultimately grow
more conservative and religious as a result. Immigrant parents will uphold a
romanticized version of traditional values and customs, despite these values
and traditions having gone through substantial change since they left their
home country (Foner and Dreby 2011). They expect a level of obedience
and respect from their children that second-generation immigrants would
naturally consider authoritarian and domineering. Parents' concerns about
the corrupting influence of their mainstream Western culture are also related
to sexual relations as a second source of conflict. Parents worry about their
children's sexuality and dating choices, but that concern is particularly more
acute with daughters than with sons (Foner and Dreby 2011). This leads
minority Middle Eastern communities, such as the Lebanese community in
Australia, to isolation, which can be devastating for queer Lebanese
Australians. In the series, we experience how the couple handles these
challenges in their daily lives while being married yet maintaining separate
personal lives—Mouna with her partner, Sash, and Sam with his many
sexual exploits.

Portrayal of Marriage
In I Luv U But, queer identity is transformed within the terms of Arab,
religious, social, and cultural contexts. The couple finds themselves forced
to reconcile many aspects of their identities: the cultural, the religious, and
the sexual. For them, as it is for many Arab queer individuals in Western
countries, the loss of group belonging is not a sacrifice they want to make
for the right to be “out.” This is articulated in episode 4 of season 1, when
Mouna tells her partner, who pressures her to come out, “There's no way I
can do what you did to your parents.” Arab families in diaspora, especially
mothers, create strong emotional ties that bond members together. Children
in immigrant families therefore have a sense of pride in their country of
origin and appreciate their parents' sacrifices and struggles to make a better
life for themselves and their children (D'Alisera 2009). And despite the
young members of the community resenting their parents' constraints and
obligations, they also feel a strong sense of loyalty, affection, and duty to
their parents (Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, and Todorova 2008). They
recognize the importance of family and the need to provide, financially or
otherwise, for their family members (D'Alisera 2009). Gay marriages of
convenience have, thus, become the reality for many in the LGBT
community as they hail from traditional ethnic and religious environments.

Capitulating to the expectations of their Lebanese heritage, children of

immigrant Arab parents enter a heterosexual marriage, at least as far as their
families are concerned. It is not that same-sex acts cannot occur, it is that
everyone must keep up appearances that conform to the important
principles and values of Arab society: “So long as everyone can pretend
that [homosexuality] doesn't happen, there is no need to do anything [to]
stop it” (Whitaker 2006, 10). This manner of keeping up appearances
increasingly leads to a widening gap between the demands of society and
the daily life the individual leads, as well as between upholding tradition
and appearances for the sake of culture and history and the things
individuals do in private away from the scrutiny of society (Whitaker
2006). This “double life” almost always involves marriage, because, as
already noted, family and progeny are of the utmost importance in Arab
society.

Mouna's Lebanese Australian partner goes on to talk about how coming out
was not an easy experience for her, how it led to her parents ostracizing her,
but how she continues to believe that that was a price she had to pay to be
free. To which Mouna then responds, “You're out but you're not free.” I
Luv U But evinces a pronounced hope for a future in which the price of gay
rights and social freedom is not family ties or religion.

Performing Sexual Identity

This web series also serves as a commentary on the intersection of
patriarchy, traditional conservative gender dynamics, and homosexuality, as
well as on gendered behavior commonly associated with femininity and
masculinity. An important factor in the definition of masculinity is the
question of activity and passivity, as it has been established by many
scholars of literature and cinema (al-Samman 2008; Dialmy 2009a, 2009b;
Georgis 2013).

The Lebanese French author Amin Maalouf argues in his 2001 book In the
Name of Identity that people identify with certain aspects of their identity
when they are under threat of erasure. For many in Middle Eastern
communities, homosexuality is a Western threat to their traditional values
and national and religious identities. Children in the Arab world do not
generally leave their parents' home until marriage; and once married, they
are expected to care for their elderly parents, who eventually reside with
one of their children. In order to maintain this structure, familial bonds that
rely on heteronormativity must remain intact. Any violation of conventional
values, such as divorce, sex scandals, bearing a child out of wedlock, or any
violations that are public in nature, are considered threats to the social
fabric of these communities. And these threats are articulated in terms of
the once-colonizer (current colonizer?) Western Other.

The topic of homosexuality in modern literature and cinema seems to be

dominantly framed within the context of the colonial Other, which in turn
re-creates the traditional power dichotomy of the active colonizer and the
passive Arab partner (al-Samman 2008). The male, by default, is assigned
the active role in Arab society in contrast to the female, who is reduced to
passivity. Male activity is often accompanied by the insatiable desire to
dominate, which carries a patriarchal operation that emphasizes the male as
active (Ncube 2014). And to be an active agent in a postmodern Arab
society, or in keeping with the patriarchal Arab mentality, is to simply
mechanically reproduce heteropatriarchal norms that define masculinity as
domination. In I Luv U But, Sam inadvertently reproduces these norms, as
he differentiates between passive and active masculinities in his personal
relationship, shown in this exchange with his lover: “Are you a bottom?” /
“Yeah” / “Good, because I'm a top” (season 1, episode 5). His behavior
changes, however, when addressing the female characters in the miniseries,
as the women take on more dominant roles.

As homosexuality in the Middle East is viewed as the failure of the Arab

man to resist colonial influences, gay Arabs in the West seem to
compensate for that view by attempting to show that indeed it is possible to
be a homosexual and a real Arab man. I Luv U But questions the dominant
belief that hindered behaviors are innate, depicting the ways in which an
individual's performance of an acquired gendered and sexualized behavior
is imposed on them by normative heterosexuality. Judith Butler (1993)
questions this distinction by establishing that “gender acts” influence
individuals in physical and corporeal ways and that their recognition of
corporeal sexual difference is affected and altered by social conventions.
Sex, then, stops being “a bodily given on which the construct of gender is
artificially imposed” and is instead “a cultural norm which governs the
materialization of bodies” (Butler 1993, 2–3). Butler adopts the postmodern
technique of viewing reality as determined by language, which ultimately
renders it impossible to envision or articulate sex without imposing
linguistic norms: “there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the
same time a further formation of that body” (10). Thus, many Arabs who
engage in same-sex practices do not identify as ” “lesbian,” or “bisexual”;
they have formulated their “gay, sense of self through various culturally
specific encounters and remain unconnected to the word gay. Even among
those who may feel at home in their gay identity, the notion of publicly
coming out rings hollow in a culture where who you share your bed with is
a private matter.

The Lebanese Mother

In most works of literature written by Arab women that tackle the period of
postcolonial wars, mothers and motherhoods have acquired centrality
(Cooke 1994–1995). The nurturing persona, who in the literature of the
colonial period seems bent on molding her daughter into her own resistant
shape, has multiplied so as to be able to play numerous roles. These
mothers are both aggressive and pacific, patriotic and nationalist, desiring
and destructive, martyr and prisoner. They may be all of these at once or at
different times. Motherhood, or the act of mothering, becomes a
multifaceted tactic of resistance, and the literature to which it belongs
becomes an act of resistance in and of itself (Cooke 1994–1995). As such,
Arab motherhood is constantly reconstructed to suit its challenges. In I Luv
U But, mothers embody the motherland. Sam's mother represents a more
modern Lebanon with her talk of seeking independence and living life to
the fullest (season 2, episode 3) and of reconnecting to her womanhood and
embracing her sexuality (season 1, episode 6). Mouna's mother is constantly
cooking Lebanese dishes for her daughter and son-in-law, as if to preserve
her and her homeland's memory in an inward culinary landscape, providing
the framework of reference needed by her daughter. The maternal culinary
heritage represents “the cultural agency of resistance and endurance … [as]
the mother teaches her daughter the importance of certain ‘memory foods’
that inscribe an entire ethos of harmonious living as her best defence
against cultural erasure” (Mehta 2009, 213).

Immigrant families, therefore, are crucial to the development of children's

personal identities and ideologies, as they provide them with ideas of nation
—making father and mother figures central in most Arab immigrant works
of literature (Mehta 2009). The absence of fathers from I Luv UBut,
however, is an indicator not of the lack of importance of fathers in the
Lebanese familial structures but of the more masculine roles Lebanese
mothers took on in the family following the Lebanese Civil War, when
mothers had to replace the physical and emotional absence of the fathers
and sons who left to fight or died in the war (Cooke 1994–1995). Mouna's
mother represents that Lebanese mother who had to raise her child alone.
Middle Eastern and Arab queer cinema is growing in relevance and
importance under current economic and political conditions, such as those
that followed the Lebanese Civil War, as it redefines the link between the
public field of radical politics and the private realm of sexuality and desire.
These works demonstrate how both female and queer sexualities often serve
as figures of sacrifice and marginalization and repression within the
nationalist struggle and the subsequent formation of national states (Aaron
2004). The place of queer sexuality, in light of the predicament of
postcolonial nationalism, is thus a social and political position.

International Gay Arab Representations

The first season of I Luv U But found a following not Must in Australia but in
Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Lebanon; it was nominated for
Most Engaging YouTube Channel in Lebanon's Social Media Awards in
2013. “There hasn't been a queer Arab story that isn't about poor us,”
Abboud says. “This is almost a celebration and a comedy that says it's OK
not to come out. And it was really well-received for that reason” (quoted in
Taylor 2014). I Luv U But filled an important gap in gay Arab
representation. It was a breakthrough in terms of positioning racial
minorities within the global/Western queer life and discourse. It also
touched on the difficulties queer Arabs face integrating into mainstream
Western society. It made these insinuations frequently, but in passing, Must
as these incidents take place in real life; examples include when Sam tells
his cousin to shave because Western men do not find body hair attractive
(season 1, episode 7), or when Sam employs the Orientalist image of Arabs
as terrorists to scare his bedmates into leaving: “My mother Must got back
from a military camp with Hezbollah and she's outside right now. Get out!”
(season 2, episode 1). Such topics are essential to address considering not
only how undeniably close the mainstream LGBTQ movement in the West
has aligned itself with capitalism and the military, but also the growing anti-
Arab and Islamophobic sentiments of the second decade of the twenty-first
century. In today's dominant global queer ideology, the only acceptable
visible queer Arab is the victim who exchanges his Arabness and native
culture for the more tolerant Western nation.
I Luv U But ended with an episode titled “I Luv U,” in which Mouna and
Sam attend a pool party given by Ali Baba, where Mouna reminisces on the
good times she had with her ex-girlfriend Sash, who has continuously
expressed difficulty in being in a relationship with a closeted lesbian,
especially considering that she herself is a Lebanese Australian and has
chosen to come out to her family. Ali Baba reconciles Sash with Mouna by
enlightening the latter about the complexities of the queer Arab identity.
What she says encapsulates the message of the web series: “Being gay is
complicated. Being Arab and gay is even worse. Coming out isn't the be all
end all kind of thing. It's actually OK not to be out. What really matters is
what's here [pointing at her heart]. Everything else is pure decoration.”

SEE ALSO Coming-Out/Coming-In Discourses in the Middle

East; Diasporas, Queer

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aaron, Michele, ed. New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New
York: Routledge, 1993.

Cooke, Miriam. “Arab Women Arab Wars.” Cultural Critique, no. 29

(Winter 1994–1995): 5–29.

D'Alisera, Joann. “Images of a Wounded Homeland: Sierra Leonean

Children and the New Heart of Darkness.” In Across Generations:
Immigrant Families in America, edited by Nancy Foner, 114–134. New
York: New York University Press, 2009.

Dialmy, Abdessamad. “Sexual Behaviors and Practices in Morocco.”

Abdessamad Dialmy (blog), 28 June 2009a. http://dialmy.over-
blog.com/article-33193913.html
Dialmy, Abdessamad. Vers une nouvelle masculinité au Maroc [Toward
a new masculinity in Morocco]. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA, 2009b.

Foner, Nancy, and Joanna Dreby. “Relations between the Generations in

Immigrant Families.” Annual Review of Sociology 37 (2011): 545–564.

Georgis, Dina. “Thinking Past Pride: Queer Arab Shame in Bareed

Mista3Mil.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013):
233–251.

I Luv U But. Created by Fadia Abboud. 2012–2014. Web series.

http://iluvubut.tv

Labaki, Boutros. “The Role of Transnational Communities in Fostering

Development in Countries of Origin: The Case of Lebanon.” United
Nations, Expert Group Meeting on International Migration and
Development in the Arab Region, Beirut, 15–17 May 2006.
http://www.un.org/esa/population/meetings/EGM_Ittmig_Arab/Paper13_La
baki.pdf

Maalouf, Amin. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong.
Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Arcade, 2012.

Mehta, Brinda J. “The Semiosis of Food in Diana Abu Jaber's Crescent.” In

Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab
Literature, edited by Layla Al Maleh, 203–235. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009.

Murphy, Kara. “The Lebanese Crisis and its Impact on Immigrants and
Refugees.” Migration Policy, 1 September 2006.
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/lebanese-crisis-and-its-impact-
immigrants-and-refugees

Ncube, Gibson. “Arab-Muslim Masculinity on Trial: Gay Muslim Writers

Broaching Homosexuality.” Gender Forum, no. 47 (2014): 50–63.
http://genderforum.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/02/2014_Gender_Masculinity_Complete.pdf

Samman, Hanadi al-. “Out of the Closet: Representation of Homosexuals

and Lesbians in Modern Arabic Literature.” Journal of Arabic Literature
39, no. 2 (2008): 270–310.

Suárez-Orozco, Carola, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, and Irina Todorova.

Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008.

Taylor, Andrew. “I Luv U But: Faking It for Family.” Sydney Morning

Herald, 10 May 2014. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/i-luv-u-but-
faking-it-for-family-20140507-37wrg.html

Whitaker, Brian. Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle
East. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Imarat Yaʿkubian (2002; Alaa al-Aswany)
NATHANIEL GREENBERG
Assistant Professor of Arabic
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA

Egyptian novel that features a gay character.

Alaa al-Aswany's 2002 novel Imarat Yaʿkubian (The Yacoubian Building

[2004]) appeared at a transformative time in Egyptian history. Published
Must months before the announcement of the American led-invasion of Iraq,
the book began circulating as internal pressure began to rise in response to
the government's apparent complicity or, at best, silence on the pending
war. It was the second time in the then twenty-year tenure of President
Hosni Mubarak that Egyptians had been asked to cooperate in a US-led
attack on a fellow Arab nation. The first Gulf War (1990–1991) brought
scores of protests and a subsequent crackdown that would reignite a fierce
opposition campaign led in large part by the country's largest outlawed
organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.

At the core of the government's ostensible complicity with the Americans

was an overwhelming sense of hypocrisy. As Saad Ibrahim, a well-known
academic and former chairman of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development
Studies in Cairo, wrote in a review of al-Aswany's novel:

Egyptians bemoan their lack of freedom, yearn for an open

society, fear Islamic militancy, and resent US hegemony.
Yet official Egypt proclaims itself to be the guardian of the
true Islam, a strategic ally of the United States, and a
beacon of
 democracy. Few, if any Egyptians, believe these official
proclamations, and worse, the hypocrisy is a crushing weight
on their hope for progress.

(COMBAHEE [1977] 2009, 3)

Ibrahim described reading al-Aswany's novel (along with his prison guards)
while incarcerated in Egypt's notorious Tora Farm prison. He wonders how
the novelist, who captured so elegantly the same hypocrisies he observed,
could remain unprosecuted while he stewed in Mail. The situation reflected
yet another of the many complex inconsistences that characterized the
regime's brutal, if brittle, grip on power.

Characters, Setting, and Plot

The novel is set around the time of the first Gulf War. Told in the bygone
style of mid-twentieth-century realism, the novel depicts the interconnected
lives of a dozen characters in a real-life decaying apartment building, called
the Yaʿkubian, built at the dawn of the twentieth century in Cairo's historic
downtown. The characters include: Zaki Bey el Dessouki, the now elderly
Paris-educated son of a pasha (Turkish officer of high rank); Hagg Azzam,
a ruthless and corrupt businessman with political ambitions; Busayna el
Said, a young woman who must endure her employer's sexual harassment in
order to help provide for her younger siblings; her fiancé, Taha el Shazli,
the son of the building's doorman who hopes to advance in society by
becoming a policeman; and Hatim Rasheed, the wealthy half-French, half-
Egyptian editor of a French newspaper, who is gay. Al-Aswany's inclusion
of a gay character is notable for breaking the taboo on homosexuality in
Egyptian literature.

Al-Aswany's characters endure a methodical string of coincidences,

common enemies, and shared miseries. More importantly still, the
characters of Imarat Yaʿkubian continually trade places. They drift from
positions of power to positions of powerlessness, from love to hate, from
virtuousness to depravity. They lose and rediscover a sense of autonomy, of
citizenship in the face of oppression, and of alienation in the face of
fraternity. Each in his or her own way is victimized by the corruption in
Egyptian society and government that traps them in their circumstances
with no hope for advancement.

The novel opens with Zaki Bey el Dessouki, who owns office space in the
Yaʿkubian, finally achieving his goal of seducing a local barmaid, only to
discover after the encounter that she has drugged and robbed him. Zaki is a
former engineer whose life now revolves around doing little besides
seducing women; he represents the former ruling class in Egypt, which was
cultured, secular, and cosmopolitan. His upper-class counterpart, Azzam, on
the other hand, clawed his way from poverty to riches, and now uses his
business dealings to hide his hashish empire. He uses the pretense of Islam
to cover his immoral behavior. Busayna, who lives in the makeshift
apartments on the building's crowded rooftop, is frustrated with Taha el
Shazli's inability to financially provide for her; this ends up causing her to
fall in love with Zaki “Pasha” instead. This turn of events is a blow to Taha,
who is both honest and intelligent but is unable to advance in society
because of his poverty and lack of social connections.
 © AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Copies of Alaa al-Aswany's Novel Imarat Yaʿkubian in a Cairo Bookstore. This
novel about the interconnected lives of a dozen characters in a real-life decaying
apartment building in Cairo included a gay character, breaking the taboo on
homosexuality in Egyptian literature.

When Taha arrives to sit for his entrance exam to the police academy, the
presiding officer asks about his father's profession. Taha explains that his
father is a “civil servant.” The officer corrects him, saying that his father is
really a “property guard.” Both humiliated and outraged by the demand that
he pay a bribe to enter the academy, Taha gives up his dream of becoming a
police officer and enrolls as a student at Cairo University. There, he is
drawn to the comradery of a group of devout Muslim students, and his
disillusionment causes him to become radicalized. He then falls in with the
clandestine cell of an organization based loosely on the outlawed al-Jamaʿa
al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group).
The course of Taha's traMectory is a familiar motif in Egyptian literature.
(The Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz depicts a similar character's
evolution in the third installment of his famous Cairo Trilogy [1956–1957].)
It also serves as the novel's clearest iteration of social critique. Both
Busayna and Taha are funneled to their respective paths—Busayna into
moral compromise and Taha into increased religiosity—by the economic
inequality of Egyptian society

This economic inequality is also evident in the relationship between the gay
character, Hatim Rasheed, and his impoverished, married lover Abduh. As
the editor of a newspaper, Hatim is wealthy and cultured. Abduh, on the
other hand, is a migrant from the South, a low-level security officer posted
to an unfamiliar neighborhood in Cairo, as was commonplace at the time.
Their relationship is asymmetrical, violent, and doomed. Hatim initially
seduces Abduh by getting him drunk on wine and showing him
pornographic movies. Over time Abduh becomes financially dependent on
Hatim. He relocates his family from the South but spends his evenings
drinking and fornicating with Hatim. Abduh becomes so impaired by his
pseudo-enslavement to Hatim that he is no longer able to have sex with his
wife without sodomizing her. The collapse of this holistic peasant marriage
is maximized by an episode of unspeakable tragedy. Home alone, Abduh's
wife is forced to call on Hatim to pay for their infant son's hospitalization
when the baby falls severely ill. Hatim responds, but the effort is too late,
and the child dies. Abduh interprets the event as God's Mudgment on him for
his relationship with Hatim and breaks off his affair with him.

An Allegory of Social and Spiritual Decay

To frame the parameters of this demonization narrative, al-Aswany situates
the gay affair within a neatly coded allegory of social and spiritual decay. In
textual terms, the most blatant technique for doing this is the author's
calibrated use of narrative sequencing. A lengthy passage detailing Abduh's
full transformation from national serviceman to gay lover is preceded by the
graphic climax of Taha's interrogation and torture by secret state-security
officers that includes his rape: “two thick hands reached down, grabbed his
buttocks, and pulled them apart. He felt a solid obMect being stuck into his
rear…. He screamed at the top of his voice” (al-Aswany 2004, 153).

Al-Aswany's fame has derived in large part from his willingness to depict
taboo subMects; his genius, however, can be found in the easy symmetry of
his prose and his fluid capacity for defusing controversy through the
rhetorical reinforcement of the status quo. The gay couple in Imarat
Yaʿkubian accomplishes this masterfully. Cast against the frieze of the
novel's aesthetic infrastructure— the fin de siècle settings, the glasses of
whisky, and the music of Edith Piaf—Hatim is at once a creature and a by-
product of Cairo's bygone elegance. The editor of a French newspaper, he is
a renowned public intellectual by day and a closeted homosexual
“hobbyist” by night. This arrangement is less a matter of pragmatism, as
one might intuit (everyone “knows” that he is a homosexual because
“homosexuality is impossible to hide” [al-Aswany 2004, 177]), and more
an expression of his psychology.

Al-Aswany psychologizes Hatim more than any of his other characters. The
diagnosis—crass, racist, and uncreative—is that Hatim is gay because he
was abused by his Nubian doorman as a child. His father, Francophile and
worldly, never loved him but rather, he thinks, “treated me as though I were
a rare art obMect or painting” (al-Aswany 2004, 181). His mother (whom he
despises) was equally neglectful. Notably, however, she was French: “a
barmaid at a small bar in the Latin Quarter” who, after moving to Egypt
with her husband (“a bigger social leap than [she'd] ever dreamed of”),
adopted the airs of indignant superiority over her Egyptian peers (181). So
while Hatim, like Zaki, speaks French, he is not a Francophile. He did not
acquire his Mediterranean sophistication like Zaki. Rather, Hatim, a
creature of miscegenation, is a sort of traitorous impostor, a poisoned pill
who poisons all those whom he touches. His violent murder at the hands of
Abduh logically elicits little empathy from the narrator. Indeed, his
penultimate words, “you'd strike your master you dog of a servant” (235),
welcome the opposite interpretation. We are to cheer the gay man's murder.

The Cultural and Political Context

Al-Aswany's depiction of a gay love affair in Imarat Yaʿkubian was not
without context. As Samia Mehrez (2008) observed in her iconic study on
Egypt's culture wars from the 1990s and early in the next decade, sexuality
and homosexuality, in particular, had become a firebrand point of
contention in the simmering political warfare between Egypt's oppressive
secular regime and an insurgent wave of religious conservativism. Mutually
reinforcing and vying for influence amid a deeply religious civil society, the
regime empowered yet more radical calls for shariʿa Must as the influence of
the Muslim Brotherhood obligated the regime to harden its own posture of
religious identity.

Mehrez, who had come under fire for teaching Mohammed Choukri's 1973
masterpiece For Bread Alone (finally published in Arabic in 1982 as al-
Khubz al-Hafi), begins her study with 2005, when the Muslim Brotherhood
gained a shockingly high number of seats in Parliament for the first time
and liberal groups across the nation were beginning to organize for greater
protections. Al-Aswany's novel capped a period of tumultuous Mockeying
for attention among the country's literati. Since al-Aswany was a veritable
“novice,” as Mehrez (2008) points out, there was little by way of intrinsic
value in his novel and certainly nothing in the way of the kind of
experimentalism one finds in a work like For Bread Alone. However, what
Imarat Yaʿkubian did share in common with Choukri's novel was its
depiction of sex, and homosexual sex in particular. It was this critical
aspect, arguably, that elevated the attention behind the novel and that helped
catapult al-Aswany into global stardom. Imarat Yaʿkubian was made into a
film in 2006 and became one of Egypt's highest grossing films of all time,
as well as an immensely popular television series a year after that.
Among the sensitive issues at the center of the cultural wars from which
Imarat Yaʿkubian emerged was Cairo's booming and infamous gay night
scene. As Sarah Kershaw wrote for the New York Times in 2003, “this
hectic and vibrant city on the Nile was the place to be…. There were bars
and discos and plenty of public meeting places in the city center where it
was relatively easy to socialize, exchange cellphone numbers, hold hands
and perhaps—for the more daring—sneak a kiss.” The infamous Queen
Boat police raid of May 2001, when authorities stormed a casino houseboat
on the Nile and arrested fifty-two men on charges of “debauchery,” signaled
an end to the underground scene, as well as a new direction in the culture
wars. The crackdown on “debauchery” was not merely a socially
conservative response to an ostensible “rise” in gay activity but a pretext for
broader surveillance, particularly online, where much of the gay social
scene was thought to be occurring (Kershaw 2003). Al-Aswany engages
this topic directly in one of the novel's many anecdotal scenes, when a
disgruntled Mournalist for Hatim's French newspaper Le Caire proposes to
do a piece on the “phenomenon of homosexuality in Egypt.” Intended as a
passive insult to his boss (“there's been a maMor increase in the number of
homosexuals and some of them now occupy leadership positions in the
country” [al-Aswany 2004, 178]), the Mournalist's commentary serves to
reinforce the unsaid fact that “everyone knows he's gay” and that Hatim has
learned how to endure and vanquish his detractors.

As an antagonist, Hatim's character crystalizes the novel's underlying

ideological bent: the country is swerving toward ruin, not simply the result
of a corrupt and despotic political system (which is neatly captured by the
subnarrative of Hagg Azzam, who attempts to purchase a parliamentary seat
Must as he does his second wife), but of an underlying social rot of which
homosexuality is a central if clandestine piece. In dialectical fashion, al-
Aswany's figurative symptoms—extremism and homosexuality being the
most outstanding, as both conditions lead to death—help bring into focus
predominant tenets of Egyptian nationalism: namely, security and Islam.
Imarat Yaʿkubian offers a nuanced critique of those elements that fall
outside this nationalist paradigm, including false positives like Hagg Azzam
who, despite a drug habit, zealously upholds his religious identity for the
purpose of material gain, or Hatim, who champions nationalist causes
(including creating an Arabic version of his newspaper) despite being gay.
The danger of such impostures is made even more explicit by the inherent
goodness of the earnest if flawed protagonists of the novel—Zaki, Busayna,
and Taha.

Beyond this novel, al-Aswany has been an outspoken proponent of the pro-
democracy movement in Egypt, including, notably, the 25 January uprising
(part of the greater Arab Spring movement of 2011), where he rose to
prominence as a kind of informal spokesman for the protesters of Tahrir
Square in Cairo. But his political advocacy has seldom strayed beyond the
parameters of the country's official narrative, which upholds the military as
protectors of liberty and the Egyptian people as custom bound by the mores
of Islam. This became evident in his early support for the military coup of
2013 that led to the ouster of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically
elected leader. “Morsi became president through the votes of 13 million
Egyptians,” he wrote, “while the Tamarod campaign was able to collect 22
million signatures to withdraw confidence from him. Then, more than 30
million Egyptians took to the streets to demand he step down…. Thus, the
ouster of Morsi in this manner was a completely democratic procedure” (al-
Aswany 2013). Al-Aswany's primary defense of the Tamarod campaign,
however, was based on cultural grounds. “In Must one year, Egyptians were
able to realize the difference between Islam and political Islam,” he wrote.
“The people discovered that the Brotherhood were using religion for
political goals, and not abiding by its principles” (al-Aswany 2013). Much
like the antagonists of his novel, the Brotherhood, for al-Aswany, were
impostors. And, as such, the military was right to evict them from power.

The Wholesome Relationship between Zaki

and Busayna
In contrast to the double lives of Hatim or Hagg Azzam (who never tells his
first wife about his second wife), the heroes of Imarat Yaʿkubian, Zaki and
Busayna, are wholesome in the sense that they are exactly who they say
they are. Busayna is amazed to meet a “true Pasha” (the title now a
commonplace term of endearment), and Zaki is delighted to discover a
woman of pure innocence. That he is three times her age, that she works for
him, and that they have sex out of wedlock are all details extraneous to the
otherwise impervious value of their respective characters. Their marriage
offers something of a happy ending in al-Aswany's ethical universe. Unlike
the relationship between Hatim and Abduh that ends in a pool of blood, or
between Hagg Azzam and his second wife, which ends with her being
abducted and forced to abort a pregnancy, the relationship between Zaki and
Busayna is successful in part because neither has anything to hide. This is a
somewhat cruel criterion, of course, particularly for Hatim, who has little
choice but to separate his public and private lives.

The 2006 Film Adaptation of Imarat

Yaʿkubian
Marwan Hamed's 2006 film adaptation, The Yacoubian Building, of al-
Aswany's novel drives home the precariousness of Hatim's dual existence.
His murder in the cinematic version comes at the hands of an anonymous
young man, presumably a male prostitute he has solicited after his breakup
with Abduh. Such dramatic licensure on the part of the director appeared
calibrated to preserve the innocence of the rural police officer, while driving
home the criminal dimensions of Hatim's enterprise. His assassin strips him
of his watch and snatches his wallet before fleeing the scene of the crime.
But Must as the adaptation effaces Abduh's crime of passion, it denies Hatim
the privilege of tragedy. His death as portrayed in the film is arbitrary,
meaningless, and yet, in this way, inevitable. Designed for a broad and
conservative audience in the Egyptian public, the filmic interlocutor of this
important modern narrative chose the path of complacency, which, in the
end—and in light of the movie's massive success—may be the greater
tragedy.

SEE ALSO Asrar ʿAiliyyah (2013; Hany Fawzy); Hena Maysara (2007;
Khaled Youssef); HIV/AIDS in Egyptian Cinema; Iskandariyya …
Leh? (1979; Youssef Chahine); Jannāt wa-Iblīs (1992; Nawal El
Saadawi); Queen Boat Trials (2001–2002); Sharaf (1997; Sunʿallah
Ibrahim)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aswany, Alaa al-. The Yacoubian Building. Translated by Humphrey
Davies. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004. First published in
Arabic in 2002.

Aswany, Alaa, al-. “Morsi's Ouster a Triumph for Democracy.” Al-Monitor,

10 July 2013.

Ibrahim, Saad Eddin. “Egypt's Tortured Present.” Review of Imarat

Yaʿkubian (The Yacoubian Building) and Niran sadiqah (Friendly Fire),
by Alaa al-Aswany. Foreign Policy 148 (2005): 78–80.

Kershaw, Sarah. “Cairo, Once ‘the Scene,’ Cracks Down on Gays.” New
York Times, 3 April 2003.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/world/cairo- once-the-scene-cracks-
down-on-gays.html

Mehrez, Samia. Egypt's Culture Wars: Politics and Practice. London:

Routledge, 2008.

FILMOGRAPHY

Hamed, Marwan, dir. The Yacoubian Building. Cairo, Egypt: al-Arabia

Cinema Production & Distribution, 2006. Film.
Imperialism and Colonialism
MARK CLEMENT
Independent scholar
Vietnam

The regulation and expression of same-sex sexual dynamics,

particularly in terms of the effects of Western imperialism
during the nineteenth century.

Starting around 1500, as new maritime knowledge enabled the expansion of

global trade and the establishment of overseas empires by the Spanish,
Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French states and their subMects, European
contacts with other cultures multiplied. This had important consequences
for the global history of sexuality, especially after 1700 when a binary
sexual system in which desire was organized around a sharp sense of male-
female difference emerged in northwestern Europe, arguably displacing a
more fluid traditional system in which differences in age might in some
cases be as important as biological sex (Trumbach 2013). Explorers and
other travelers encountered various kinds of same-sex erotic behavior,
including roles that blurred gender boundaries, such as the people
Europeans called “berdache” in North America (a term borrowed from the
Middle East). These were biological males who assumed a female gender
role and who had sexual relationships with men. Writing about these
observations and stories contributed integrally to the processes that shaped
the formation of modern sexual identities in the West and beyond from the
eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, including male and female
homosexual identities and their stigmatization (J. Burton 2013). While
reported homo-erotic acts in places as diverse as Brazil, China, and North
Africa were widely condemned as signs of moral degeneracy among the
uncivilized “other,” in the late nineteenth century, ethnographic data
suggested to some progressive thinkers that sexual attraction between
members of the same sex was universal and therefore natural. In particular,
this paradigm was invoked by the English social thinker Edward Carpenter
(1844–1929), who promulgated a notion of “intermediate types” at the start
of the twentieth century, and by leading European sexologist Magnus
Hirschfeld (1868–1935) to support his influential argument that these
people constituted a “third,” intermediate sex (Bleys 1995).

The observations and generalizations of European travelers and theorists

were shaped by their own cultural and political assumptions and interests
and should not be read as adequate representations of the beliefs and
practices of the societies they purported to describe. This may be glossed by
considering briefly the common claim that “pederasty” was both ubiquitous
and generally acceptable in Arab societies. One well-known source of this
belief was the British imperial adventurer Richard Francis Burton (1821–
1890), who published an unexpurgated English version of One Thousand
and One Nights in 1885–1886. Burton attached an essay arguing in part that
same-sex behaviors (which he called the “Vice”) were to be found in a
geographic and climatic belt that he dubbed the Sotadic Zone, a broad
swathe of territory that included much of southern Europe, the Middle East,
Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas. The sweeping essentialist
claims of Burton, exemplified by the somewhat incongruous assertion that
the Turks were “a race of born pederasts,” have been repeated by many
commentators, including historians, who failed to appreciate the variety and
subtlety of sexuality across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia
(Bleys 1995; El-Rouayheb 2005). Historians have analyzed several strands
of male same-sex eroticism in urban Islamic culture in the premodern Arab
Ottoman Empire, including the cultural meanings attached to the insertive
and receptive roles in age-structured acts of anal intercourse, which were
closely aligned with normative gender roles. An adult man who acted as the
receptive partner often attracted scathing criticism for performing the
“female” role, but this was muted or absent in the case of a man performing
the insertive role with an adolescent male (El-Rouayheb 2005).

A key point to emerge in this entry is that European imperialism and

colonialism brought political and ideological forces of change to bear on the
cultural meanings of same-sex acts and relationships among peoples around
the globe. These were often exerted through systematic acts of legal and
cultural suppression, the resonances of which are still present in the twenty-
first century. Some contemporary historical scholarship is focused on
attempting to recover these precolonial understandings and tracking the
processes of change, an endeavor often directed toward the political
purpose of emancipating LGBTQ+ people in postcolonial societies around
the world.

Regulating Male Homosexuality

In his account of the demolition of the Portuguese-built fort in the Southeast
Asian entrepôt of Malacca (Melaka) by the British in 1806–1807, the Malay
writer Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (1796–1854) referred to torture
instruments once used by the Dutch, who had captured the city from the
Portuguese in 1641. These included a barrel with nails protruding into it.
The unfortunate victims “were rolled about inside it until their bodies were
torn to shreds” (1955, 61). This was the terrible punishment inflicted on
people convicted of “unnatural offences.”

Criminalization As European states extended their political reach and

established colonial governments, their remit included the regulation of
sexual relationships, a task made more complex and acute as increasing
numbers of European men and some women lived in the colonies for long
periods or were born and raised there. Christian missionaries, too, were
implicated in attempts to eradicate homoerotic practices, an endeavor that
was sometimes resisted by indigenous peoples (Mitchell 2007). The
attempts of colonial regimes to police sex between men were underpinned
by several shifting and overlapping ideologies. The early Dutch Republic
drew on the language of Reformed Protestantism, and Christian traditions
were widely influential through to the twentieth century. Although
Enlightenment rationalism contributed to the decriminalization of sodomy
in France in 1791, and the new legal code was applied both throughout the
Napoleonic continental empire and France's colonial possessions, most
European imperial states continued to prohibit and punish sexual acts
between males. Indeed, with the growth of the bourgeois state and the
development of the secular theories of evolution and degeneration, the
range and intensity of these prohibitions increased (while punitive sanctions
softened). This process can be observed in the German colonial empire.

Germany became a political entity upon the unification of the disparate

German states in 1871, and its nascent overseas empire expanded rapidly
under Wilhelm II (1859–1941) during the most intense phase of European
colonization, known as the New Imperialism. Paragraph 175 of the German
criminal code of 1871, which forbade penetrative sexual acts between men,
was predicated on new legal and medical understandings of sexual desire,
which were elaborated by the academic discipline of sexology. The
homosexual, as he came to be called, was considered by most political
leaders to be a threat to the authority of the emergent bourgeois order
(Walther 2008). Although sex between white men and native women
arguably raised critical issues such as the possibility of miscegenation,
which became increasingly proscribed in the nineteenth century, all
European colonial regimes tolerated some forms of heterosexual coupling.
Any kind of sex between European and indigenous men, however, was
deemed to conspicuously transgress the ideological boundary between
colonizer and colonized. An allegation of homosexual behavior could be an
incendiary weapon in personal and political conflicts, sometimes igniting
maMor scandals, such as the Rechenberg scandal in German East Africa in
1910, named after the colony's governor, Georg Albrecht Freiherr von
Rechenberg (1861–1935). Rechenberg was accused of sodomizing his
personal servant and consorting with a prostitute from the male brothel in
the colonial capital of Dar es Salaam (Schmidt 2008). In German New
Guinea, governors summarily expelled European men deemed guilty of
homosexual acts. From the perspective of German nationalists, same-sex
activity was inconsistent with being white and German, and it threatened to
undermine the claim of racial superiority that buttressed the assumed right
to rule colored and black people (Walther 2008).

© SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY

Georg Albrecht Freiherr von Rechenberg, Governor of German East Africa
between 1908 and 1913. Rechenberg was accused of sodomizing his personal servant
and consorting with a male prostitute during his time as governor of the German colony
that comprised the modern nations of Rwanda and Burundi as well as parts of Tanzania
and Mozambique. This alleged behavior not only breached the boundary between
colonizer and colonized, but it also threatened to undermine the claim of racial
superiority that buttressed the assumed right by the Germans to rule colored and black
people.
The criminalization of male homosexuality had significant consequences
not only for European men but also for indigenous peoples, especially
throughout the British Empire. From the 1860s on, a common set of legal
codes, based on the provisions enacted in India and the Australian colony of
Queensland, were applied across the territories under British Murisdiction.
Enacted a few years after the Revolt of 1857, Section 377 of the Indian
Penal Code may be viewed as part of the transition from East India
Company rule to a British Crown–controlled, fully bureaucratic imperial
state in which the line between colonizers and colonized was drawn more
sharply. The statute explicitly prohibited and punished with long prison
terms and fines “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any
man, woman or animal,” and was usually applied to acts of anal and oral
intercourse between men (Bhaskaran 2002).

During the twentieth century, and particularly after World War II (1939–
1945), when the process of decolonization occurred throughout Asia and
Africa, more than thirty independent countries inherited this punitive model
from British colonial regimes. A careful statistical analysis shows that
former British colonies were twenty-two times more likely than a very large
sample of 155 former French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies to
enact statutes prohibiting sexual relations between men (Han and
O'Mahoney 2014). Section 377 was repealed as recently as 2009 by the
Delhi High Court, only to be reinstated in 2013. In 2017 the Supreme Court
of India argued that discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation
violated a person's right to privacy, and ruled that same-sex sexual activity
could not be prosecuted under Section 377 in September 2018.

One of the ironic consequences of this history of suppression is the claim

made in the present day by some African and Asian community and
political leaders that homosexuality itself is an anathematic Western
concept. In some African states, “violent public attacks on homosexuality
are frequently couched as defenses of what is traditionally African from a
contaminating Western influence” (Lewis 2011, 210). It appears that the
legal and religious interdiction of same-sex eroticism by colonial rulers and
Christian missionaries caused people to forget or deny their own traditional
homoerotic practices. In the case of Africa south of the Sahara, denial
began with the European imperialists, some of whom originated the
stereotype of African male sexuality as exclusively heterosexual. They
believed that Africans were “natural” beings who lacked the sophistication
to perform sexual acts for any purpose other than biological reproduction,
although it is now known that a variety of male and female homoerotic
practices existed among Africans prior to European colonization (Lewis
2011).

The denialism of postcolonial political leaders may also be read, as Neville

Hoad has proposed, “as displaced resistance to perceived and real
encroachments on neocolonial national sovereignty by economic and
cultural globalization” (2007, xii–xiii). This interpretation pays attention to
the international context of the 1990s, when homophobic sentiments were
articulated in several African countries, including Zimbabwe, Kenya,
Uganda, and Namibia. To add a further layer of irony, in the case of the
South African gold mines in the twentieth century, indigenous homoerotic
acts were inflected and perpetuated within a colonial institution. There,
black migrant workers, particularly from what is now Mozambique,
participated in a social system in which power was structured by a kind of
“marriage” relationship between an older and a younger miner. The younger
miner assumed the role of a “wife” who was the receptive partner in
intercrural (between the thighs) intercourse, a practice characteristic of
premarital sexual relationships between men and women in southern Africa.
The mine marriage system remained in place through the various stages of
colonial rule and continued after independence (Moodie 1988).

Literary Censorship In addition to legal repression, the memory of

indigenous homoeroticism was erased by removing its representation from
literary texts. In post-1857 India, for example, colonial administrators
condemned what they considered the homoerotic “vulgarity” of Urdu and
Persian poetry, which was sanitized by a new generation of scholars and
teachers dependent on stipends paid by the colonial government (Kugle
2002). Something similar occurred in the Ottoman Empire starting in the
mid-nineteenth century. Under the influence of a new, Western-oriented
elite, all forms of homoeroticism came under attack. Bowdlerized versions
of One Thousand and One Nights and other works were published, and by
the second half of the twentieth century Ottoman Arab historians routinely
denied the existence of “pederastic” themes in the literary tradition. In the
1940s a new Arabic term to express the European concept of “sexual
inversion” became common (El-Rouayheb 2005). This points to the
emergence of something like a global cultural hegemony of modern
Western concepts, which often supplanted, suppressed, or at least
supplemented indigenous and earlier paradigms. Therefore, in order to
recover and understand indigenous concepts and practices, as well as to
challenge continuing homophobic cultural representations and legal
oppression, some contemporary scholars of African sexualities question the
legitimacy and integrity of binary representations of gender and sexuality
(Lewis 2011).

Flexibility
As significant as these findings and developments are, they should not be
allowed to entirely obscure some variations in the ways in which same-sex
desire was inflected in British and non-British colonies across more than
four centuries of European rule and influence over a wide range of
geographically and culturally diverse societies. It should not be assumed
that written statutes and rewritten texts effectively inhibited all same-sex
eroticism or necessarily governed behavior. A case in point is that of mid-
eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a very important commercial center in
British North America, with residents from various British and European
backgrounds, as well as from Africa and the Caribbean. It has been found
that while the colony of Pennsylvania enacted several statutes criminalizing
sodomy, punishments were milder than under comparable British laws, and
there is no evidence of active policing of male same-sex relations. As
prosecutions at that time depended on private citizens bringing charges
against alleged offenders, the dearth of cases appearing before the courts
suggests that general tolerance or indifference prevailed. This stands in
contrast to several contemporary western European cities where a new male
homosexual subculture, typified by the London molly houses, attracted
vigilant policing and publicity. Philadelphians were aware of these
developments, but they did not identify this new category of sexual
deviance among themselves. This probably reflects the Quaker roots of the
colony, the social diversity and fluidity of the resident population, and the
desideratum, at least among white males, to build a common identity
(Lyons 2007).

Cross-Cultural Homoerotic Relationships

Many historians of colonialism, following the influential work of Ann
Laura Stoler (2002) on Indonesia, analyze the role of sexuality, even in
ostensibly private spaces, as an integral component of the exercise of power
by imperial regimes. This raises issues concerning homosexuality. In
addition to there being risks in expressing samesex desire in territories
under European rule, it has been argued by some historians, notably Ronald
Hyam (1990), that there were also plentiful opportunities, although it is
uncertain whether they were everywhere greater than in Europe. Cross-
cultural homoerotic relationships were often facilitated and structured by
social institutions such as domestic service, and race and class were
important elements of desire. These interactions were, therefore, inherently
unequal, and some were indisputably exploitative. However, they were not
uniformly so across all time and space, as Edward W. Said's influential
“Orientalism” model might imply. Said (1978) held that European
intellectuals created a hegemonic discourse that unfavorably stereotyped
non-European cultures by comparison with European norms. Instead, as
more recent cultural studies of empire insist, historical events and situations
were varied and nuanced (Darwin 2012). Many of the Western romantic
partners of colonized people known to history showed genuine respect and
appreciation for the cultures of their friends and lovers, albeit circumscribed
by their own values and interests; and some publicly criticized European
imperialism. It should also be acknowledged that the indigenous partners
exercised agency in many of these relationships, and so it might be ventured
that European imperialism expanded the sexual opportunities available to
some colonized peoples.

China and India are especially interesting for examining the ways in which
sexual desire was interwoven with cultural appreciation for select groups of
elite Western men, some of whom had reMected Christianity and sought
alternative sources of intellectual and spiritual inspiration. China was never
a colony of any particular European state, but for around a century starting
with the first Opium War (1839–1842), all the great powers of Europe, the
United States, and Japan won and held significant trade concessions at a
large number of locations along China's eastern seaboard, and autonomous
foreign enclaves emerged in these treaty ports. Imperial China had a long
male homoerotic tradition that can be tracked in its literature (Hinsch 1990).
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese culture made a powerful
appeal to the imagination of Western men attracted to the aesthetic qualities
of its art, theater, and music, as well as to the bodies of Chinese men. A
number of them visited China and some lived there for extended periods,
finding abundant sexual opportunities in the relatively tolerant urban milieu
of the late Qing and Republican states. A good example is the English
writer and aesthete Harold Acton (1904–1994), who lived in BeiMing for
most of the 1930s. Acton translated Chinese poetry and was passionately
interested in classical theater, where homoerotic and aesthetic sensibilities
intertwined. He admired the delicate bodies of some young Chinese men
and enMoyed many sexual relationships and intellectual friendships during
his residence there (Mungello 2012).

Around the same time, Indian culture, philosophy, and religion fascinated
some well-known European homosexual men, including the British social
radical and pioneering advocate of homosexual rights Edward Carpenter
(1844–1929), the English American novelist Christopher Isherwood (1904–
1986), the eminent French Indianist Alain Daniélou (1907–1994), and the
English novelist E. M. Forster (1879–1970) (Aldrich 2003; Copley 2006).
Forster is a particularly good example of the interweaving of romantic and
cross-cultural engagement. One of the main purposes of his first trip to
India in 1912–1913 was to visit the Oxford University–trained educationist
Syed Ross Masood (1889–1937), whom he had met in England in 1906.
The two men shared a close and long-lasting friendship that was suffused
with erotic feelings on Forster's side. Forster later claimed, in hyperbolic
fashion, that Masood “woke me up out of my suburban and academic life,
showed me new horizons and a new civilization and helped me towards the
understanding of a continent” (quoted in Moffat 2010, 91). In 1921 Forster
visited India a second time, working for several months as the private
secretary to the MaharaMa of Dewas. Although critical of inefficient
administrative practices and much coyer about sexuality than J. R.
Ackerley's travel memoir Hindoo Holiday (1932; revised 1952), Forster's
The Hill of Devi (1953) attempts a genuine engagement with Indian cultures
and people. A more significant literary legacy is his greatest novel, A
Passage to India (1924), which derides colonial rule and features an
interracial friendship between the main characters, Dr. Aziz and Cyril
Fielding, that is susceptible to a homoerotic reading. Although Forster's
work is colored to a degree by an Orientalist perspective, it demonstrates
how cultural and sexual appreciation of the “other” might be closely
related.

During World War I (1914–1918), Forster worked as a Red Cross volunteer

in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Egypt had inherited the Napoleonic
penal code, and so homosexual acts were technically legal, but the city
came under martial law after Britain imposed a protectorate over the
country in 1914, and the authorities sought to curb the sexual license
prevalent in some quarters. Early in 1917 Forster met Mohammed el Adl
(1900–1922), a tram conductor, and the two soon became lovers. Forster
kept a notebook on el Adl, which included transcripts of some of their
correspondence. His biographer Wendy Moffat's account of the
development of their romance emphasizes mutual agency, but as the one in
possession of greater local linguistic and cultural knowledge, el Adl
arguably exerted more control, and he resisted Forster's sexual advances
until he was assured that Forster respected him. El Adl claimed to enMoy
penetrative sex as the insertive partner with both men and women; from el
Adl's perspective with respect to regional sexual paradigms, Moffat
suggests, Forster's desire to be penetrated conceded to el Adl considerable
social power. The case is an interesting example of how a relationship was
negotiated at the intersection of different conceptual models (Moffat 2010).

The Japanese Empire

Under pressure from US naval squadrons in the 1850s and 1860s, Japan
opened to Western trade and culture in what is known as the MeiMi
Restoration, and then the country went on to found its own empire. The
fissures between ideology and practice there are indicative of the complex
nature of the impact of Western imperialism on homosexuality outside
Europe. By the time European missionaries traveled to Japan in the mid-
sixteenth century, a relatively open urban male homoerotic subculture
existed. One of its iterations, the samurai model, was characterized by anal
intercourse between an older man (the insertive partner) and a younger man
(the receptive partner) (Leupp 1995). In this, it somewhat resembled
systems of sexuality developed in both Europe and the Arab world prior to
the eighteenth century in that it was based more on roles rather than
identities. In contrast with the situation in Europe, homoerotic relationships
in Tokugawa Japan enMoyed moral legitimacy through their links to
Buddhist monastic traditions (Leupp 1995). Influenced by Western legal
codes and values after the MeiMi Restoration of 1868, however, the practice
of sodomy was made a criminal offense. But indictments under the law
enacted in 1873 were very few; and if the institution of the statute can be
attributed, at least in part, to European attitudes and law, so can its 1881
repeal, which followed French precedent (Furukawa 1994).

The samurai model flourished in MeiMi schools and military academies,

particularly in Tokyo during Japan's wars against China (1894–1895) and
Russia (1904–1905), which marked the beginning of a half century of
imperial conquest and rule. At the same time, the German academic
discourse of sexology led to a flurry of discussion in academic and popular
Mournals of a new understanding of homosexuality as a perversion affecting
both men and women. Japanese thinkers and commentators actively
contributed to international dialogues on the new science, and with its claim
to universal truth it quickly became influential within Japan (Furukawa
1994; Pflugfelder 1999). During the period of expansion into China and
Southeast Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, the prevailing official ideology was
“relentlessly heterosexual and pronatal,” but despite this and the
pathologizing of homosexuality in the academy and the popular press, sex
between men was generally tolerated by the military (McLelland 2005, 42).
In this, Japan differed markedly from its European ally Nazi Germany,
which actively persecuted homosexuals. After World War II, evidence
emerged in a number of the published accounts of the wartime experiences
of Japanese soldiers of the existence of homosexual liaisons, not only
between senior and Munior soldiers but also between soldiers and native men
in Japan's colonies.

Some of these relationships involved coercion. One example is known

through the testimony of the Philippine cross-dressing dancer Walter
Dempster Jr. (1924–2005), whose experience of repeated brutal rape by
Japanese soldiers during the occupation of Manila has been compared to
that of the comfort women who were systematically conscripted and
assaulted during the war. In 2000 his story was told in the film Markova:
Comfort Gay (Dempster 2006). But consensual interracial relationships also
existed. A particularly evocative example is the romantic relationship
between a young wounded Japanese soldier and his Indonesian male
servant related in the story “Coconut Oil,” published in 1954 (McLelland
2005). While the details of accounts such as these are virtually impossible
to verify, the imaginative rendering of wartime same-sex relationships is
suggestive of historical reality. And given that female prostitutes were
accessible through the system of military brothels, these various inflexions
of homosexual passion cannot be attributed entirely to the homosocial
organization of the Japanese army. Under the influence of European ideas,
Japan had imported the new identity-based model of sexology, but this
existed alongside the role-based samurai tradition, which was perhaps also
inflected (or perverted) in the instances of rape associated more commonly
with the sexual exploitation of Asian women in the Japanese empire.

Women, Romantic Friendship, and Gender

Crossing
The history of sexual desire and relationships between women arguably
follows a different traMectory to that of men, and its study has some different
emphases (Donoghue 1994); therefore, it is discussed here in a separate
section. European travelers reported on homoerotic practices among women
in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere, particularly in gendered spaces such
as baths and harems, but, in contrast to male homosexuality, sexual acts
between women were not targeted by colonial legal prohibitions (Rupp
2009). Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, to recall an influential
example, required evidence of penetration to secure a conviction. This
burden of proof has been understood to mean penile penetration. No woman
has ever been convicted under the statute, although in the late twentieth
century there were some newspaper reports describing cases in which
mostly lower-class women applying for licenses to marry or seeking to
cohabit with other women were threatened with Section 377 by their fathers
or government officials (Bhaskaran 2002). The possibility of sex between
women during colonial times was not believed to Meopardize the
perpetuation of the imperial patriarchy. There are also few known cases of
colonial regimes removing references to female homoeroticism from
classical literature. One of the uncommon instances is the suppression of
rekhti, a form of Urdu poetry written in the female voice that included
passages that might be construed as speaking of “lesbian” desire (Petievich
2002). What, arguably, was more distinctive of women's experiences in
colonial contexts were romantic friendships and the intertwining of same-
sex erotic relationships with gender crossing.

Although European women were generally less economically and socially

privileged than men, the opening up of the New World after 1500 did
nevertheless offer select women a greater degree of geographic mobility,
and the phenomenon of romantic friendship, which empowered some
women to avoid marriage and form domestic arrangements with other
women, was a feature of the settler colonies of North America, as well as of
European societies, especially in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. The extent to which these friendships may have had erotic
components is debated; at the time, little, if any, suspicion was usually
attached to them. This may be represented by the response of the Mudges of
a case brought against two schoolmistresses, Jane Pirie and Marianne
Woods, in Scotland in 1811, on the evidence of one of their students, Jane
Cumming. Although the pair evidently shared a bed, a maMority of Mudges
refused to believe that sexual misconduct between respectable Christian
women in Britain was possible, attributing Cumming's allegation of female
eroticism to knowledge they assumed she gained during her early years in
India (Rupp 2009). It was outside Europe and North America that practices
sometimes called sapphism or tribadism were thought to be endemic. In
some instances, however, European writers argued that imperialism itself
had instigated these practices, as in the sexological, almost pornographic
work L'amour aux colonies: Singularités physiologiques et passionnelles
observées durant trente années de séMour dans les colonies françaises,
published in English in 1896 as Untrodden Fields of Anthropology:
Observations on the Esoteric Manners and Customs of Semi-civilised
Peoples. Author “Jacobus X” claimed that contact between white men and
Tahitian women had introduced sapphism and masturbation, “two vices
unknown to the old Tahitian women,” to the Pacific Islands by acting on
local women's “ardent” nature (1898, 2:451).

© PAUL FEABI/ALAMY
Transvestite Mary Hamilton Being Flogged in Ireland in 1746. This illustration
depicts part of the punishment meted out to Hamilton, a British woman accused of
pretending to be a man. Hamilton wore men's clothing, practiced medicine, and married
a woman named Mary Price before being discovered to be a woman.

A particularly interesting category of women who ventured abroad in the

modern age of empire comprised those who, in seeking to work in male
occupations such as the military, attempted to pass as men, adopting what
might be conceptualized as a de facto third gender or a male social role. At
least some of them desired sexual or domestic relationships with other
women. By leaving Europe they hoped not only to avoid notoriety in their
local communities but also to escape the law. From the sixteenth century
on, there are examples in European states of women being prosecuted and
sometimes even executed for assuming the role of a husband (Rupp 2009).

One of the best-known cases is that of the British woman Mary Hamilton,
whose life was sensationalized in Henry Fielding's essay The Female
Husband (1746). According to Fielding, Hamilton was first seduced by a
woman called Anne Johnson, who converted her to the Methodist faith;
then, after Johnson abandoned her, she assumed the guise of a male
Methodist teacher and embarked for Ireland. In September 1746 Hamilton
was arrested at Glastonbury where she was practicing as a physician, and
where, Must two months earlier, she had married a woman called Mary Price,
who claimed to have believed that Hamilton was a man. She was charged
under the Vagrancy Act, flogged, and sent to prison for six months. In 1752
she surfaced in Philadelphia, where, again practicing medicine under the
name of Charles Hamilton, she was found to be a woman dressed as a man.
However, the Chester County authorities detained her for only a short
period to allow time for a complainant to come forward (that is, a man
alleging to be the victim of deception and fraud). It seems that no one did,
and she was released, again to disappear from the historical record.
Hamilton's case suggests that a colonial milieu, at least a relatively liberal
one such as that of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, sometimes offered
women with same-sex desire a more secure place to live unorthodox lives
(Lyons 2007).

Stories such as Hamilton's raise the question of whether some of these

cross-dressing women might have been what are now understood as trans
men. One interesting case is that of the Swiss doctor Enrique Favez (c.
1791–1856), who was at the center of a huge scandal in the Spanish colony
of Cuba in the 1820s. Favez was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, around
1791. His sex at birth was identified as female, but he adopted a masculine
identity when he went to Paris to study medicine; he then Moined Napoleon's
army and was captured by the Spanish. Around 1818 he migrated to Cuba,
where he set up a medical practice and married Juana de Léon. Several
years later he was accused of being a woman, and in 1823 a court in
Santiago de Cuba imprisoned him for dressing as a man and marrying a
person of the same sex. Through his persistent challenges to the
unfavorable verdict of the court, however, Favez succeeded in having his
sentence reduced by two-thirds. A textual analysis of the extant primary
accounts supports Favez's insistence that he was not an imposter and
underscores that complicated debates about the mutability of gender
identity are by no means restricted to the present (Martínez 2017). Such
examples rarely appear in historical sources so it is not known how
prevalent such a phenomenon was. This brief discussion of the cases of
Favez and Mary/Charles Hamilton is suggestive of the ways in which the
cultural history of women's same-sex desire and relationships in colonial
contexts might need to be approached in different ways from that of men's.
What their study has in common is the potential to illuminate some of the
significant contours of the global history of how same-sex behaviors and
identities have been conceptualized, and, in particular, to enrich the
scholarly understanding of this history's uneven development.

In summary, the four centuries following the exploration of intercontinental

sea routes and the founding of the first settlements by Europeans in the
Americas and Asia coincided with shifts in sexual practices, concepts, and
legal regulations in Europe that were diffused around the world through
imperial and colonial institutions. Significantly, this was not a
unidirectional process, for these changes in conceptual understanding were
shaped by the “knowledge” of American, Asian, and African societies
encoded by Europeans implicated in the establishment and operation of
early modern and modern empires and imperialist spheres of influence.
Furthermore, non-European peoples played significant roles in these
processes, not only as passive obMects of representation but also as active
participants in sexual acts, romantic relationships, legal proceedings,
semantic negotiations, and deeds of literary censorship. In addition, it
should be noted that concepts and practices predating the age of European
imperialism were not simply supplanted; instead, around the world, they
interacted in complex ways with the emerging sense of the modern. This
variegated narrative comprises a significant strand of global cultural history.
It is not, however, an exhaustive account of the ways in which the history of
sexuality is related to the history of imperialism and colonialism. There are
many other continental and maritime empires that might be studied. As
China, to take one example, was a maMor imperial power for much of its
history, its relative tolerance of diverse sexual practices is surely significant
for the regions of East and Southeast Asia that were subMect to its influence
for more than a thousand years. The relationship between same-sex
eroticism and these empires and others is worthy of investigation in order to
better understand the history of sexuality over the last few millennia.
Women's experiences also demand further study.

SEE ALSO Antisodomy and Buggery Trials; Boston Marriage and Women's
Romantic Friendships; Colonialism in Africa South of the Sahara;
Conquest and Sodomy in Latin America; Female Husband; Florentine
Codex and Nahua Sexuality; Groupe du 6 Novembre: Lesbiennes Issues du
Colonialisme, de l'Esclavage et de l'Immigration; Inquisition, Criminal
Courts, and Sexuality in Colonial Latin America; Molly Houses; Offences
Against the Person Act (1861); Scandals in Europe; Section 377 and
Section 377A; Section 377 in South Asia; Third Genders

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Inquisition, Criminal Courts, and Sexuality in
Colonial Latin America
JACQUELINE HOLLER
Associate Professor, Department of History/Women's and Gender Studies
Programs
University of Northern British Columbia, Canada

The role the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions played in

defining and policing sexuality in the New World,
particularly with regard to same-sex acts and desires.

The institution known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition was first
established by the medieval Roman Catholic Church to uphold orthodoxy
and fight heresies such as Catharism. Extended to Latin America centuries
later, the Holy Office became a significant actor in the sexual lives of those
under its Murisdiction—and its records have become a key source for the
history of sexuality. This entry examines the development of the Latin
American tribunals and discusses their influence on the sexual lives of
colonial Latin Americans, with particular attention to men's and women's
same-sex acts and desires.

History and Jurisdiction of the Latin

American Inquisitions
A state-linked Inquisition under royal patronage was established in Spain in
1478, largely to police the religious lives of conversos (Christians of Jewish
ancestry). Portugal's Inquisition was established somewhat later, in 1536,
but with a similar intent. By the early sixteenth century, the Holy Office's
mandate included policing converts from Islam (moriscos). From 1540 on,
however, the Spanish and Portuguese tribunals increasingly dedicated
themselves to reforming Christian morality, especially after the Council of
Trent (1545–1563). The post-Trent sixteenth-century emphasis on Christian
morality produced a sustained religious focus on sexuality that would
endure for centuries.

As the Spanish and Portuguese extended their dominion over America in

the first half of the sixteenth century, they carried with them the authority of
the Inquisition. In Spanish America, friars and bishops exercised
inquisitional Murisdiction until the early 1570s, when two official tribunals
were established in Lima (1570) and Mexico City (1571). In 1610 another
tribunal was added at Cartagena, with Murisdiction over the Caribbean and
the northern coast of South America. In 1551 the Lisbon tribunal (one of
three in Portugal) was granted Murisdiction over Brazil; Brazil would never
have a resident tribunal, so those accused of crimes were either sent to
Portugal or tried during one of the Portuguese Inquisition's visits to the
colony (1591–1595, 1618–1620, and 1763–1769). Thus, by the final third
of the sixteenth century, formal tribunals exercised Murisdiction over much
of Latin America.

Created precisely as the new emphasis on Christian morality was spreading

throughout the Catholic world, the Latin American Inquisitions to some
degree took Murisdiction over crimes previously governed by legal codes
such as Spain's thirteenth-century Siete Partidas, which had prohibited
sexual crimes such as bigamy, rape, sodomy, and abortion. The Inquisition's
authority over particular crimes was complex, however, as evidenced by the
example of the “sins against nature,” which comprised both sodomy and
bestiality. While the Spanish Inquisition originally exercised Murisdiction
over the “crime” of sodomy, for example, the Holy Office was thereafter
ordered not to take action against sodomites unless heresy was involved.
Only the Inquisition in the Spanish kingdom of Aragon was granted the
right to prosecute sodomy; it conducted almost 500 sodomy trials between
the late sixteenth century and 1700 and generally punished sodomites with
severity.

Jurisdiction over sodomy in the American tribunals has been the subMect of
confusion and controversy. Mexico's Inquisition prosecuted a case of
sodomy among sailors in 1542, but the Mexican tribunal generally followed
the Spanish practice of prosecuting sodomy only in cases where blasphemy
or heresy was implicated or where clerics were accused. In practice,
however, this meant that both the Inquisition and civil courts sometimes
prosecuted sodomy, while the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) in
Seville claimed authority over American sodomy cases that arose at sea and
in harbors. This Murisdictional ambiguity was characteristic of all of the
Spanish American tribunals. In contrast, the Portuguese Inquisition
exercised clear Murisdiction over sodomy—making Inquisition documents
from Brazil a rich source for the study of sodomy and sexuality in
Portuguese America.

The Inquisition's Murisdiction over other sexual crimes was similarly

ambiguous, because most were presumed to be matters for local religious
officials at the church or diocesan levels. However, whenever questions of
unorthodox belief or blasphemous statements were involved (as was
frequent), a sexual matter fell under the Murisdiction of the Holy Office.
Fornication (sex between unmarried people), for example, was generally
ignored or dealt with by episcopal authorities. In contrast, stating that a man
did not sin if he paid a woman for sex was a matter for the Inquisition. The
Inquisition was therefore more interested in beliefs than acts, but the two
are difficult to distinguish. As a result, sex-related cases are relatively
common in the archives of the Inquisition even though other authorities had
the primary responsibility for managing sexual crimes.

One final Murisdictional issue is worthy of mention; by the time of the

creation of the American tribunals, the Holy Office had lost Murisdiction
over indigenous people, who were Mudged to be “too new in the faith” to be
subMected to Inquisitorial discipline. Indigenous morality and sexuality were
thus governed instead by bodies under diocesan (episcopal) authority and
by criminal courts, although indigenous people are a frequent presence in
Inquisition documents as witnesses and, often, as participants in other illicit
activities.

Originally created to police converted Jews, moriscos, and later heretics, the
Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions became key institutions governing the
moral and sexual life of Iberians and Ibero-Americans and in the creation of
a colonial sexual regime in Latin America. But the Inquisition's Murisdiction
was never absolute, despite the church's ambitious vision for Christian
sexual morality in colonial Latin America.

The Inquisition and Christian Morality in

Colonial Latin America
Scholars have long disputed whether colonial Latin America was a
repressive sexual regime or lax with regard to sexual morality. Not
surprisingly, the Inquisition has played a key role in discussions of this
question. Certainly, the Inquisition acted as a principal bulwark of the
Christian sexual regime, which permitted only one model of Christian
sexual morality. In America, the one licit model of Christian sexuality was
implemented on a vast and diverse population comprising indigenous
people, free and enslaved Africans and their descendants, and European
colonists—a process described as “the colonialism of vaginal intercourse”
(Sigal 2009, 1341). While Inquisitors lacked the nineteenth-century terms
sexuality, heterosexual, or homosexual, they nonetheless possessed a clear
concept of “licit” sex and a number of terms and categories (sometimes
imprecise) into which illicit sex acts could be grouped for condemnation
and punishment.

As suggested above, the colonial ideal of Christian sexuality was

“heterosexual”; but proper sexual conduct took place not merely between a
man and a woman but also within holy matrimony. Even within marriage,
heterosexual coitus in the “improper vessel” or the “vessel against nature”
(anal intercourse) was strictly forbidden and policed in the confessional.
Sexual sins were thus multiple, and there was a rough consensus on their
severity. Sacrilege (sex with a nun or priest) was the gravest sin, followed
by incest, adultery, rape of a virgin, concubinage (living together without
marriage), prostitution, and fornication. As discussed above, the Inquisition
lacked Murisdiction over most of these matters. More clearly a matter for the
Holy Office was the use of sexual magic to attract, keep, and “tame” lovers
—or even, in the cases of prostitutes, to bewitch clients—because these
practices often involved blasphemy or even implied demonic pacts. In
addition, the Inquisition was interested in the sexual promiscuity and beliefs
often involved in heresies such as illuminism (alumbradismo), the belief in
indirect enlightenment from God rather than through the intercession of the
church. The potentially heretical erotic visions of female mystics also
received attention. Finally, the Inquisition dealt with priests who used the
confessional as a place to make sexual advances toward male or female
penitents.

In this comprehensive field of sexual sin, however, the gravest offense was
sodomy, generally referred to as the pecado nefando (nefarious sin).
Described by the Murist Gregorio López (1496–1560) as worse than heresy,
sodomy was in the Portuguese world often treated as if it were heresy,
despite the clear distinction between the crimes. Sodomy, masturbation, and
bestiality were together considered the “sins against nature” because they
were nonprocreative and supposedly violated both the “natural order” and
God's commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Sodomy and bestiality,
indeed, were often lumped together in confessional manuals and legal
codes. Sins against nature were an expansive category, however; the
Spanish theologian Bartolomé de Medina (c. 1528–1580), for example,
wrote that even sexual intercourse with the woman on top of a man
constituted sodomy because such a position was unnatural.
Sexual sins, while ubiquitous in colonial Latin America, had their own
geography, with bestiality clearly associated with rural areas and sodomy
and prostitution more associated with urban areas. Some scholars argue that
rural people were probably persuaded to avoid sodomy because of the lack
of private places, whereas others have found sodomy established even in
rural settings. Regardless, sexual sins appear to have thrived in private and
controlled spaces—one possible reason that elite groups with access to such
spaces, such as priests, may have been particularly likely to sin. Still, even
plebeians had access to some private spaces, such as New Spain's
pulquerías (taverns) and temascales (steam baths), which offered ample
opportunity to “sin” away from the prying eyes of the public.

Assessing the repressiveness of the Inquisition and the colonial sexual

regime in general is a complex matter. As a powerful institution of social
control, the Inquisition fought to varying degrees against all the practices
and beliefs enumerated above. Yet the Inquisition was Must one part of a
complex social fabric of belief and sin. The Holy Office worked with other
systems of social control such as confession (required once a year since the
Fourth Lateran Council of 1215). Indeed, in its procedures, the Inquisition
was not merely a mode of “violent repression” (Zbíral 2010, 218) but
precisely followed the norms and practices of sacramental confession, in
which sexuality was often a “privileged theme” (Harrison 2014, 118). Thus,
it has been argued that the sixteenth century brought a new sexual regime as
a result of regular confession and a clearer notion of sin. This regime in turn
complemented the work of the Holy Office. Self-policing (either before or
after illicit acts) was a potent tool for the Inquisition, and it is not possible
to understand the role of the Inquisition in policing sexuality without
understanding the “general attitude of guilt and fear of punishment”
characteristic of the time (De Los Reyes 2010, 60). To some degree, then,
the Inquisition can be seen as an enforcer of community standards. Within
the confines of these standards, individuals navigated between their own
desires and impulses and the teachings of their religion.
In an apparent paradox, given the repressiveness of the Inquisition's intent,
its archives are replete with evidence of heterodox behaviors. This suggests
that whatever its intent, the Inquisition failed to produce ideal Christian
sexual morality. One reason for this failure is the vastness of the American
territories and the extreme diversity and mobility of the colonial
populations. In addition, the American Inquisitions themselves were uneven
in their approach to sexual sins. Despite its clearer Murisdiction over sexual
matters, for example, the Portuguese Inquisition was less interested than the
Spanish in policing sexual crimes, particularly in Brazil. Even in Spanish
America, periods of relative toleration could alternate with periods of
harsher repression; the period before 1621 seems to have been generally
less repressive than that between 1621 and 1720, when the church was most
functional as an instrument of social control. Overall, then, the colonial
Latin American sexual regime was neither lax nor repressive but offered a
mixture of prohibition, disapproval, and tolerance.

Sodomy: The Pecado Nefando and Latin

American Criminal Courts
In Mexico City in 1658, a laundress reported that she had been washing
clothes near a ditch when two boys ran to her to report two men “playing
like dogs” nearby. When she investigated, she witnessed what seemed to
her a clear act of sodomy (Lewis 2007, 129). One of the men involved
would later be among fourteen men put to death after a large-scale
investigation by Mexico's Real Audiencia, its highest criminal court. Over
100 men were accused of sodomy, described by authorities as a “cancer”
infecting the kingdom (Garza CarvaMal 2003). Despite the clear legality of
secular Murisdiction in this case, some clerical authorities protested,
believing that the gravity of the sin demanded the Inquisition's involvement.
This case thus showcases some of the key issues concerning the
Inquisition's involvement with sexuality, including both the importance of
sexuality to Christian conduct and the often limited reach of the Holy
Office. This section discusses how sodomy generally did not fall under the
Murisdiction of the Inquisition (except in Brazil) but was prosecuted by
secular criminal courts. Thereafter, two other issues are examined: the role
of gender in sodomy trials and accusations and the question of sexual
subcultures in colonial Latin America.

© PAUL FEABN/ALAMY
Juan de Zumárraga, First Bishop of Mexico (1468–1548). Zumárraga concluded that
the male-female form of sodomy was less sinful than the male-male form. His
Mudgments embodied the spirit of moral reform exhibited by the Catholic Church in the
New World.

In the medieval and early modern world, sodomy had a much more
expansive definition than that of the twenty-first century. The term could
refer to several nonprocreative practices, including anal intercourse, oral
sex, and the penetration of the vagina by anything but a penis. Thus,
sodomy was not inherently “homosexual,” as three modes—male/male,
male/female, and female/female—were distinguished. It has therefore been
suggested that the Portuguese Inquisitors were interested not in sexual
preference or orientation but rather in acts. However, male-male relations
and anal sex tended to be viewed most harshly. For example, the first
bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga (1468–1548), concluded that the
male-female form of sodomy was less sinful than the male-male form
(Nesvig 2001). Over time, anal intercourse between men came to
overshadow the other forms of sodomy, and in practice, prosecutions of
heterosexual sodomy were rare. Nonetheless, the gravest sodomitical sin
was “complete sodomy,” in which a man eMaculated in the rectum of his
partner; this, rather than sexual orientation per se, was the index of the sin's
severity.

Most scholars of colonial Latin America feel that sodomy took on

additional significance in the colonial setting. Indeed, the elimination of
indigenous sodomy became a key feature of colonial practices, particularly
because sodomy was often thought of as something taught to indigenous
persons by the devil or other demons. While the Inquisition did not directly
participate in the “extirpation” of indigenous sodomy, the Holy Office
nonetheless stood as the model for and enforcer of the Christian sexual
regime.

Because sodomy developed in a male-dominated society that discriminated

against women and femininity, those accused of the pecado nefando were
often inherently feminized. Moreover, some scholars have argued, “active”
(insertive) partners in intercourse were sometimes treated differently from
“passive” (penetrated) ones. The passive-active distinction has fueled much
of the scholarship on sodomy in colonial Latin America, although there is
increasing evidence that the distinction was not as meaningful as previously
thought. For example, both “actives” and “passives” were apparently
punished with equal severity in the absence of compulsion, and men who
presented evidence of forcible penetration were often exonerated.

Moreover, the question of “feminization” is more complex than some

scholars have suggested. First, many men accused of sodomy were married
to women and thus fulfilled the masculine gender role. Even within same-
sex relationships, gendering was more fluid than has been assumed. For
example, the seventeenth-century Mexican mulatto Juan Ramírez was
described as someone who ground corn, made chocolate, shopped for food,
and washed clothes—all traditionally feminine tasks—and as the insertive
partner in sex (Lewis 2007). An insertive (“active”) partner might therefore
be highly effeminate to the extent of assuming a female social role.
Conversely, although the sexual act of sodomy was often described as a
man's “serving as if he were a woman,” a man might be passive sexually
and yet retain the social role of a man with regard to his sexual partner.
Thus, it seems increasingly clear that despite the importance of metaphors
drawn from male-dominant heterosex, these metaphors “do not always map
neatly onto male-male sexual interaction” (Nesvig 2001, 691). Still,
feminization remains significant, and it seems that many sodomites did
adopt feminized modes of dress and activities.

Sodomy, like other sexual acts in colonial Latin America, occurred within a
general context of unequal relations, not only between men and women but
also among classes and races. To some degree, wealthy, elite, and clerical
men (almost all of whom were of Iberian descent) could protect themselves
from punishment or infamy when accused of sodomy. Sodomitical priests in
particular were often treated leniently. In a 1595 case from the Real
Audiencia of Charcas, for example, a clergyman convicted of sodomy was
able to escape punishment because of his status and connections, whereas at
least one of his plebeian lovers was executed (Spurling 1998). Priests were
tried by religious authorities, who sought to avoid the scandal associated
with severe and public punishments and who were conscious of the
perennial shortage of clerical personnel. Almost never were clergy punished
as harshly as normal plebeians accused of similar offenses.

Even in the case of laymen, however, one should not assume that sodomy
was always prosecuted harshly or that the occasional brutal repression of
the practice succeeded in eliminating it. There is ample evidence that sexual
subcultures flourished, although there is much disagreement on how they
should be described. Some refer to them as “gay ” or “sodomitical”
subcultures, whereas others claim the impossibility of such identities before
the nineteenth-century invention of homosexual (and heterosexual)
identities. Whatever the case, occasional statements that suggest social
tolerance of same-sex behavior are one of the most interesting features of
Inquisition trials involving sexual practices such as sodomy. Certainly,
criminal and religious authorities in colonial Latin America exerted
unquestionable and brutal power over men who had sex with men.
However, both the presence of sodomitical subcultures and the assertions of
heterodox ideas about sodomy should caution against overstating the
success of religious or secular institutions in extirpating same-sex relations.

Women and Sexual Heterodoxy

The Holy Office and other bodies policed women's sexuality as well as
men's, but women's sexual misdeeds were generally fewer and more likely
to be matters for confession rather than prosecution. The sexes were equally
represented in concubinage and fornication, for example, but evidence of
women's more serious sexual crimes is scant. And, as this section shows,
even same-sex behavior among women was poorly understood and often
dismissed, unless it involved insertion or some form of “hermaphroditism.”

While women could theoretically be accused of sodomy, this was rare.

Some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish commentators wrote that
coitus between women was not as offensive as male sodomy, because it
neither dissipated semen nor offended the image of God. This meant that
women should be punished lightly for same-sex relations, unless they used
some sort of instrument to copulate. Perhaps even more importantly,
commentators were baffled by female sodomy and whether it involved
penetration and eMaculation. Given the emphasis on sodomy as “insertion,”
it is not surprising that female genitalia were occasionally examined to
ascertain, for example, whether an enlarged clitoris could be used as a
phallus (Few 2007). However, such cases are rare. In the absence of
evidence of penetration, prosecuting authorities and complaining neighbors
often had to resort to circumstantial evidence of women's romantic
relationships and gender inversions: hence the use of terms such as illicit
friendship rather than sodomy in the rare female cases prosecuted. Male
officials' confusion about and disdain for female sexuality meant that same-
sex activities between women were, from the perspective of the Holy Office
of the Inquisition, effectively decriminalized if not licit. Therefore, for
Spanish America in particular, there are far fewer traces of specific female
same-sex acts and named desires than in the case of men. The relative
inattention to female same-sex relations can be seen even in cases where
women volunteered information about acts including kissing, touching one
another's breasts, and reaching orgasm. This may mean that Spanish
American women were relatively free to express moderate levels of same-
sex eroticism within intimate relationships.

Although the Portuguese Inquisition prosecuted at least twenty-nine cases

of female sodomy in Brazil, Brazilian authorities also struggled with the
concept of female sodomy. Indeed, in 1646, Brazilian female sodomy
passed from Inquisition Murisdiction to that of secular courts, in large part
because of internal controversy and confusion. In both Brazil and Spanish
America at the end of the colonial period, then, “female sodomy” was still a
topic of minimal interest and maximal bewilderment.

Inquisitors' relative lack of interest in female same-sex activities might lead

one to assume that women's sexual transgressions were simply unimportant
to the Inquisition and other authorities. However, Inquisition cases do
reveal intervention in other areas of women's sexuality, including the
“unnatural” sin of masturbation. Masturbation was normally a matter for
confession with one's priest but might reach the attention of the Inquisition
in specific cases, such as those involving blasphemous sexual fantasies or
masturbation in church. The connection among heretical beliefs, religious
fervor, and “unnatural” sexual behaviors such as masturbation was not lost
on Inquisitors. Overall, however, neither the Inquisition nor other
authorities paid sufficient attention to women's sexuality to generate the
rich detail (and harsh punishments) seen in the trials involving male sexual
behavior.

In sum, the Inquisition was a significant force in the creation of Latin

America's distinctive colonial sexual culture. Only one of many religious
and secular institutions charged with policing the sexual lives of the diverse
colonial population, the Holy Office nonetheless played an important role in
establishing and defending a model of ideal Christian sexuality in the
Portuguese and Spanish colonies. But despite the power, secrecy, and
occasionally draconian punishments associated with the Inquisition,
exemplary Christian morality remained elusive. The colonial Latin
American sexual regime, then, was highly ambivalent. This remained true
after the establishment of independent Latin American nations in the
nineteenth century, when new penal codes eliminated many of the old
sexual crimes, including the nefarious sin of sodomy.

SEE ALSO Conquest and Sodomy in Latin America; Erauso, Catalina de

(1592–1650); Florentine Codex and Nahua Sexuality; Sins against
Nature in Colonial Latin America; Slavery and Sodomy in Brazil

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Behrend-Martinez, Edward. “Making Sense of the History of Sex and

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Berco, Cristian. “Social Control and Its Limits: Sodomy, Local Sexual
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Black, Chad Thomas. “Prosecuting Female-Female Sex in Bourbon Quito.”

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Bracamonte Allaín, Jorge. “Los nefandos placeres de la carne: La iglesia y

el estado frente a la sodomía en la Nueva España, 1721–1820” [The
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Burshatin, Israel. “Written on the Body: Slave or Hermaphrodite in

Sixteenth-Century Spain.” In Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and
Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, edited by Josiah
Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, 420–456. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1999.

De Los Reyes, Guillermo. “‘Curas, Dones y Sodomitas’: Sexual Moral

Discourses and Illicit Sexualities among Priests in Colonial Mexico.”
Anuario de estudios americanos 67, no. 1 (2010): 53–76.

Few, Martha. “‘That Monster of Nature': Gender, Sexuality, and the

Medicalization of a ‘Hermaphrodite’ in Late Colonial Guatemala.”
Ethnohistory 54, no. 1 (2007): 159–176.

Garza CarvaMal, Federico. Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in

Early Modern Spain and Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
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de la homosexualidad en Colombia” [Histories under construction: Toward
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Gruzinski, Serge. “The Ashes of Desire: Homosexuality in Mid-

Seventeenth-Century New Spain.” Translated by Ignacio López-Calvo. In
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Harrison, Regina. Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru: Spanish-Quechua

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Holler, Jacqueline. “More Sins than the Queen of England: Marina de San
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Institut Für Sexualwissenschaft
HEIKE BAUER
Senior Lecturer, English Literature and Gender Studies Birkbeck University
of London, United Kingdom

Pioneering institute for sexual research founded by the famous

German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) in Berlin

was the first of its kind when it was founded in 1919. It is today most
closely associated with the work of one of its three founders, the Jewish
doctor and homosexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). The
other cofounders, the psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld (1886–1941) and the
dermatologist Friedrich Wertheim, have remained in Hirschfeld's shadow,
not only because he was one of the most famous sexologists of the time, but
also because it was his many sexual reform initiatives that helped to set up
the institute's intellectual and financial structures.
 © SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY
Magnus Hirschfeld, Cofounder of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, 1928. Both a
doctor and a homosexual rights activist, Hirschfeld helped found in the institute in 1919
with the aim of realizing a new kind of sexology that would use science, including
eugenics, to bring about greater social and sexual Mustice.

Hirschfeld published his first treatise on same-sex sexuality, Sappho und

Sokrates (Sappho and Socrates), in 1896, not long after completing his
medical qualification. The following year he cofounded the
Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee), which campaigned for the decriminalization of homosexuality
in Germany, and in 1899 he launched the Mournal Jahrbuch für sexuelle
Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for sexual intermediaries), which supported the
same cause. The term sexual intermediaries in the Mournal's title references
one of Hirschfeld's maMor theoretical claims: that there exist infinite
variations in bodies, genders, and desires, as well as in the intersections
between them. A second maMor intervention came in 1910 when Hirschfeld
coined the term transvestite to distinguish this gender-based identification
from the, by then, more established sexual identity of the homosexual.

Hirschfeld collaborated with an international group of scientific colleagues,

medical professionals, and activists. In 1919 he gathered many of them
together to found the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Taking advantage of
the sociopolitical changes wrought by World War I (1914–1918), Hirschfeld
purchased an imposing building in the Tiergarten area of Berlin, on the
corner of In den Zelten and Beethoven streets. It was here that the institute
was inaugurated on 6 July 1919. Extended in 1921, the building provided
space for medical research, consulting rooms, a library, an exhibition hall,
and a public lecture theater.

“Transvestites” Work
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was in many ways the first LGBTQI
archive, a place in which certain kinds of information were formally
collected, stored, and analyzed. If this archival work anticipates the
development of later LGBTQI library collections, it was only part of the
wide range of activities, private and political, of the people who worked and
lived at the institute. Hirschfeld and his colleagues aimed to realize a new
kind of sexology, one that would be open to all members of the public and
use science, including eugenics, to bring about greater social and sexual
Mustice.

The institute's medical wing specialized in supporting people whose gender

did not match their body, pioneering a range of hormonal treatments and
surgical procedures with the aim of setting itself up as the leading place for
Genitalumwandlung (which literally translates as “transformation of the
genitals”) operations. A team of experts, including Felix Abraham (the
institute's specialist in transvestism), the endocrinologist Bernard Shapiro,
and the gynecologist Ludwig Levy-Lenz, worked together, sometimes with
surgeons from other hospitals such as Erwin Gohrbandt, to perform some of
the first gender realignment surgeries. One of their most famous cases was
that of Dora, born Rudolph Richter and also known by the diminutive
Dorchen. Dora was referred to the institute by a Mudge after an arrest for
cross-dressing. She received extensive medical treatments to complete her
“sex change.” More unusually, perhaps, she was also offered employment at
the institute, where she served as a maid until its closure in 1933.

Sexual Intermediaries in the Frame

Supporting people such as Dora, whose existence was criminalized beyond
the immediate remit of the clinic, was an important part of the institute's
sexual reform mission. Many of Berlin's cross-dressers and other “sexual
deviants” visited the institute. A large archive of photographs documents
the institute's connection to the various subcultures of the time. Some of
this photography crudely exposed the subMects to the gaze of medical
experts and lay viewers. Close-ups of the genitals of intersex people, for
example, were displayed at the institute and on portable so-called sexual
intermediaries panels used in public talks—a visual aid that aimed to
illustrate the argument that there exists an infinite number of gender
variations. If these photographs treated their subMects as dehumanized
obMects of study, some same-sex couples, cross-dressers, and other queer
folk came to the institute to pose for self-consciously staged pictures. The
institute's photographic collection thus contains evidence of both medical
practices that turned people into case studies and a more affirmative
relationship between such scientific photography and Berlin's sexual
subcultures whose constructions of self thrived in and beyond the institute.

Domestic Life
In addition to providing work and exhibition spaces, the institute was also a
home. The building was divided into living quarters that housed some of the
institute's professionals—including Hirschfeld and his partner, Karl Giese
(1898–1938)—as well as temporary and more permanent lodgers, many of
whom were attracted to the institute precisely because of its reputation as a
gathering place for homosexual women and men. The English archaeologist
Francis Turville-Petre (1901–1941) and the American writer Christopher
Isherwood (1904–1986), for example, rented rooms at the institute from
where they felt free to engage in relationships with other men. Famously
memorialized in Isherwood's autobiographical account titled Christopher
and His Kind (1976), the two men, like other visitors, such as the poet W.
H. Auden (1907–1973), experienced the institute as a liberatory space that
allowed them to meet, live, and celebrate homosexual culture. Here the
boundaries between private and professional life frequently became blurred,
not only in Hirschfeld's friendships with the institute tenants but also in
domestic arrangements such as those in the Turville-Petre household, which
employed two male servants who became the lovers of Turville-Petre and
Isherwood. Unlike that of the transgender maid Dora, who remained
somewhat apart from her employers, separated by the boundaries between
doctor and transgender patient, employer and maid, the lives of the
homosexual servants—a man called Erwin Hansen and one known only by
his first name, Heinz—became intimately intertwined with those of their
employers.

A Home for the Left

The institute attracted not only queer and transgender people. Several
prominent thinkers and activists on the left lived in the building at certain
points in time. Hirschfeld's widowed eldest sister, Recha Tobias (1857–
1942), who had an apartment at the institute, rented out some of her rooms,
first to Walter BenMamin (1892–1940) and then, after BenMamin left, to Ernst
Bloch (1885–1977). Other rooms were taken up by Willi Münzenberg
(1889–1940), the press officer of the Communist Party of Germany and a
member of parliament who, together with his partner, the activist and
publicist Babette Gross (1898–1990), organized many meetings of the
Komintern (Communist International) from the institute. For Münzenberg,
BenMamin, Bloch, and other radicals on the left, the institute seems to have
mainly functioned as a convenient place to live where they could go about
their intellectual and political life without interference. While they did not
get directly involved in the sexual reform activities—suggesting that sexual
reform and left-wing politics often ran in parallel even when they came into
close physical proximity—they nevertheless benefited from the institute's
climate of tolerance and its reform-oriented mission.

Eugenics
The institute was, however, by no means a place only for intellectual elites
or sexual subcultures. It soon became an integral part of life in 1920s
Berlin. Next to supporting people who felt that their desires, bodies, and
genders challenged the norms of the time, the institute reached wider
audiences via its marriage advice and birth control services. It is this work
that perhaps most clearly indicates what are today considered the limits of
some of the work undertaken at the institute: it was strongly framed in
eugenicist terms. Like many other social reformers and political activists,
the institute's sexual scientists considered eugenics a means of progress,
capable of developing a better, healthier future society. The significance of
the institute's eugenics mission is sometimes minimized because it was not
overtly racialized. Yet there can be no doubt that the institute deployed a
racialized language of progress when it encouraged reproductive practices
that favored a heteronormative view of the world. Homosexuals were
discouraged from marriage and reproduction on the grounds that they
would likely produce “degenerate” offspring. Such ideas were disseminated
not only within the clinic and counseling services but also in hugely popular
public events. The institute hosted, for example, public “questionnaire
evenings,” which encouraged members of the public to anonymously
submit their questions about sex. A member of the institute staff would then
answer these questions in a public talk. These sex-education events were
complemented by private marriage counseling services and birth control
advice.

This work stood in close, and sometimes uneasy, proximity to the growing
feminist efforts of the time. The radical feminist activist Helene Stöcker
(1869–1943), who in 1905 cofounded the Bund für Mutterschutz und
Sexualreform (League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual
Reform) and a related Mournal, Mutterschutz (Maternity protection; later
renamed Die Neue Generation [The New Generation]) was an ally of
Hirschfeld's, supporting the decriminalization of homosexuality, while
Hirschfeld in turn Moined campaigns calling for the reform of marriage and
antiabortion laws. Stöcker, like many of the institute's sex reformers,
promoted eugenics as a way of protecting racial health.

Nazi Backlash
The institute's location in Berlin put it physically and symbolically at the
center of both the German homosexual liberation movement and the efforts
to suppress homosexuality in the country. Given the institute's popularity,
its support of homosexual and transgender people, and the fact that many of
the practitioners, Hirschfeld included, were Jewish, it comes as no surprise
that the institute became a point of attack soon after the Nazis came to
power in January 1933. Hirschfeld had long ago fled into exile by that
stage, but the institute continued to function under the general direction of
Giese, who was responsible for the large archive, and the administrative
support of Friedrich Hauptstein. From exile, Hirschfeld retained the
directorship despite an attempt by Shapiro, who had remained at the
institute, to take it over in 1933. During the early months of that year,
threats against the institute intensified. On the morning of 6 May 1933, a
Saturday, Nazi students entered the building and ransacked the library. They
were Moined in the afternoon by members of the Sturmabteilung (Assault
division), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party better known by the
abbreviation SA, who removed books and other materials from the library
and other parts of the institute. This material was set alight four days later
on Berlin's Opera Square, an event that inaugurated the infamous Nazi book
burnings and marks the end of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.

Role in LGBTIQ History Today

After World War II (1939–1945) the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft became
a symbol of progressive thinking and hope for reform. Today, it is
considered a key institution in the history of the struggle for homosexual
rights and transgender visibility. It also serves, however, as a reminder that
this history has its own boundaries and exclusions: not only was the
domestic life of the institute organized in fairly conventionally classed and
gendered terms, it was largely a white space whose existence, like that of
other medical and scientific research facilities in 1920s Germany, benefited
from the country's colonial expansions around the turn of the previous
century. This unacknowledged debt filtered into research at the institute and
not Must via the support of eugenics. For example, the institute's sex
education Mournal Die Aufklärung (the title literally translates into English
as “the enlightenment,” but in German it could also mean “sex education”
more specifically), which was coedited by Hirschfeld and the
anthropologist Maria Krische (1880–1945), published many articles on
sexual anthropology that perpetuated racial stereotyping. Although the
Institut für Sexualwis-senschaft has been claimed by many LGBTQI
activists and educators as the radical birthplace of modern homosexual
rights activism, its history also indicates that homosexual liberation in the
West was often oblivious to classed and racialized oppression, and not a
struggle for social Mustice per se.

SEE ALSO Biological Essentialism; Kinsey Scale; Kinship in

Europe; Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; Richard von Krafft-Ebing);
Transvestites/Transsexuals

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bauer, Heike. The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer
Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017.

Beachy, Robert. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. New

York: Knopf, 2014.

Dose, Ralf. Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation

Movement. Translated by Edward H. Willis. New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2014.

Herrn, Rainer. “Vom Traum zum Trauma: Das Institut für

Sexualwissenschaft” [From dream to trauma: The Institute for Sexual
Science]. In Der Sexualreformer Magnus Hirschfeld: Ein Leben im
Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft [The sexual
reformer Magnus Hirschfeld: A life on the intersections between science,
politics, and society], edited by Elke-Vera Kotowski and Julius H. Schoeps,
173–199. Berlin: be.bra Wissenschaft, 2004.

Isherwood, Christopher. Christopher and His Kind, 1929–1939. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

Knuth, Rebecca. Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist

Violence and Cultural Destruction. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006.

Mancini, Elena. Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A
History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German

Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2015.

Sutton, Katie. “Representing the ‘Third Sex’: Cultural Translations of the

Sexological Encounter in Early Twentieth-Century Germany.” In
Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters across the
Modern
World, edited by Heike Bauer, 53–71. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2015.
Internet in Africa
ALAN MSOSA
Research Affiliate, Centre on Law and Social Transformation
University of Bergen, Norway

The role of websites and social media in the lives of African

LGBTQ individuals.

A critical analysis of the role of the internet in relation to LGBTQ identities

and activism in Africa presents a geographical and social paradox. Africa is
a continent of fifty-four individual countries, within which there is an
incredible diversity of individuals and communities whose experiences are
not generalizable. It is, however, beyond doubt that the internet and social
media has revolutionized everyday experiences of being LGBTQ in Africa.

Africa has experienced rapid penetration of internet access, and social

media has become a vital tool for LGBTQ people in Africa to make sense
of their sexualities, establish intimate relationships, and engage in
individual or collective activism. However, their digital existence has
brought several challenges to their ordinary daily experiences. Digital
spaces have also radically reshaped scholarship about African sexualities.

Internet Access
In the twenty-first century, Africa has experienced a rapid rise in access to
the internet because of urbanization, penetration of mobile phones over
fixed lines, affordable smartphones, and infrastructure such as Wi-Fi,
mobile broadband, and fiber-optic technology. Access to the internet and to
social media varies across the continent. More advanced African economies
such as Nigeria and South Africa have higher rates of internet use than
smaller economies such as Malawi and South Sudan. Yet, internet
penetration in Africa remains low overall, with only approximately one-
third of Africa's population having access to the internet. Most internet
users are urban middle class. Access to social media, including the popular
platforms Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, and Twitter, remains limited as a
result of unaffordable mobile internet data charges, poor or slow internet
reception, and limited wireless internet infrastructure. Access can also be
limited by government restriction of social media and other internet
communications tools through repressive laws and regulation, covert
surveillance of internet communication, crackdowns on users, or network
shutdowns.

The Internet and LGBTQ Visibility

In African communities, most LGBTQ populations are invisible as they are
driven underground owing to stigma, discrimination, and repressive laws
that put them at risk of social exclusion or persecution. It remains a rare
occurrence to see a nonconforming person in most African public spaces.
There are very few public spaces where LGBTQ persons can freely
convene as a group. This invisibility has sustained the biggest myth—that
homosexuality does not exist in Africa.

The internet has provided an alternative space for existence without the
societal restrictions that come with physical spaces. The digital spaces are
portable through mobile handsets. One can switch on the handset to enter
the internet and switch off to exit at will. Social media has allowed LGBTQ
people to create profiles and interact with others within their communities
and beyond. For example, they have been able to open accounts on Twitter,
Facebook, or Instagram and interact in their own rights as nonconforming
citizens, with an option to reveal or anonymize their sexual identities. Such
platforms have opened doors to the world and potentially opened the world
to them.
The internet and digital spaces have also increased opportunities for dealing
with the process of self-awareness and self-acceptance. For most LGBTQ
Africans, discovery of their sexuality is a stressful and lonely process
because they usually do not know other LGBTQ individuals personally and
have no alternative sources of information. This lack of information is even
more critical in the rural areas. The internet has availed a wealth of
information for them to learn about their sexuality. Through social media
they have been able to discover others—and discover that they are not
alone. They have approached others for sexual advice and insight. They
have also been able to seek out and connect with friends and partners. They
have been able to Moin local or international groups and find a community to
belong to. Through this interaction, they have made sense of their sexual
identities and communities.

The digital spaces cannot be imagined as separate from the physical spaces.
The cyberspace connections have opened a gate to the physical spaces.
LGBTQ communities have shared information about safe spaces and
services available for local needs. For example, through their connections
on WhatsApp or Facebook, LGBTQ people have been invited to residential
gatherings or to events and celebrations at other safe public spaces. They
have access to information on areas or places that are not safe, sexual health
services, or how to avoid threats of homophobia or blackmail. Importantly,
LGBTQ persons have been part of the birth of the African internet, meaning
their place in digital Africa is not an “import.”

Coming Out
Through social media, LGBTQ Africans have showcased their identities by
declaring and publicizing their sexuality, sharing their photos, telling stories
about their lives, and sharing their worries and hopes. The option of
choosing between anonymity and publicity through profile restrictions has
enabled them to restrict access to information about their sexual lives. They
have innovated strategies for avoiding homophobia by setting up multiple
social media profiles in order to tailor membership for appropriate
audiences. In this way, they may, for example, have a profile without their
same-sex sexual identity for use in connecting with their relatives or friends
whom they do not want to know about their sexuality. However, this dual
identity has been viewed, even at times by LGBTQ individuals themselves,
as a faking of their identity. Coming out on social media has been viewed as
a safer option than revealing sexual identities in physical spaces. Social
media reduces the risk of physical violence. Others, however, have suffered
verbal abuse and threats when they revealed their sexual lives on social
media.

LGBTQ Activism and Social Media

LGBTQ persons have taken advantage of social media as a platform for
individual and collective activism to enhance their visibility and fight for
their rights. At the individual level, they have raised topical issues and
worked to mobilize a consensus to call for change. At the collective level,
they have established movements and organizations on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram. Unlike what occurs with physical organizations, organizing
through social media is convenient because there is no need for formal
registration with the government, and there is a reduced risk of being shut
down by authorities. LGBTQ people have been able to Moin formal
organizations that have a social media presence, both locally and
internationally. Through such platforms, they have reported incidences of
violence and other forms of homophobia to seek support and to demand
Mustice.

Because they view online spaces as safer spaces, LGBTQ persons have
been willing to approach likeminded organizations and service providers for
help. Online access to services has increasingly become a critical
component of the response to HIV/AIDS. For example, service providers
have disseminated behavioral change messages through social media, text
messaging, and other mobile phone technologies in Kenya and Uganda. In
Ghana, an online help line has enabled men who have sex with men (MSM)
to connect with service providers to access referrals for HIV testing,
treatment, and prevention services. In 2013, for example, a local program
reached 15,440 MSM through social media. In Malawi, LGBTQ
communities have created secret social media pages to share information
directing LGBTQ persons to user-friendly services available in their
communities, as well as directing them away from homophobic hot spots.

There have also been increases in online petitions calling for greater
protection of LGBTQ persons, news alerts about the persecution of LGBTQ
persons, calls for participation in causes, and the sharing of messages about
LGBTQ rights. Closed groups have allowed the participation of those who
remain closeted or those who prefer to participate confidentially. Some of
the social media groups are open to LGBTQ members only, for safety and
privacy, whereas others are open to the public. Because the maMority of
LGBTQ Africans remain closeted or are uncertain about the repercussions
of coming out, closed spaces are proving an effective way to mobilize those
who may not otherwise participate in activism. Increasingly, LGBTQ allies
are also speaking out against stigmatization, discrimination, and violence
directed toward LGBTQ persons.

Social media brings an advantage for hosting social movements because it

is cheaper and more convenient than organizing through physical premises
and equipment. Events or protests can be hosted without the need for
members to physically attend. The circulation of information or updates to
constituencies is instant, without the need to print and ship handouts.
Messages can be transmitted for free. Movements have been able to consult
their constituents through online questionnaires without the need to book a
venue and hold a half-day meeting. They have also been able to showcase
their work without needing to wait for the end of the year to do an annual
report. In other words, they can share instant messages to facilitate change.
The internet and social media have also provided platforms to connect local
movements to their international counterparts. Increasingly, LGBTQ
Africans are able to take advantage of such opportunities as online training,
virtual participation in international conferences, and accessing current
information materials.

Challenges
While social media has brought opportunities to LGBTQ persons, it is not
without challenges. First, it remains a space dominated by
heteronormativity in which people who do not conform are policed and
regulated. LGBTQ persons have been insulted, ridiculed, or threatened for
their sexuality on the internet. In other cases, they have been traced to their
physical location, where homophobes have verbally or physically attacked
them.

Second, while there is a reduced risk of physical attack on social media,

many people have suffered verbal abuse and threats on the internet. LGBTQ
persons have been blackmailed by those who threaten to reveal their sexual
orientation to their employers, church, or families. Others have been lured
into dates that have ended in physical assault and even death. LGBTQ
social media groups have been infiltrated, resulting in lists of gay persons
being revealed to the public. Some of these cases of revelation have led to
arrests and prosecution. Police have cited the internet as a space where they
have an opportunity to spot and trace LGBTQ persons for prosecution.

Third, where there is no coordinated moderation in the quality of

information related to HIV/AIDS services, there is a risk of misinformation
about the location of service providers or guidance about treatment. There
is a potential for people to access the wrong information that may be
harmful to their welfare.

Fourth, while social media has revolutionized the way LGBTQ persons
live, interact, and engage in activism, participation is still dependent on who
has access to the internet. For example, access to social media is higher
among the younger, urban, literate, and middle-class populations. It is also
influenced by the extent to which local areas have access to internet
infrastructure and facilities. The elderly, poor, rural, and less-educated
remain marginalized from internet communities.

© ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Men Browsing Facebook on Smartphones in Côte d'Ivoire, 2016. The relative
anonymity afforded by social media sites that can be accessed through a person's mobile
phone has allowed African LGBTQ individuals to find a virtual community with a
reduced fear of persecution.

Fifth, glamour presented in some gay media sites has idealized the gay
subMects as the middle-class white male with a perfect body image. It has
also idealized specific cities and countries as gay havens. As a result, some
LGBTQ Africans aspire to emigrate to the “havens” rather than struggle for
equality in their country of origin. Africa has lost several potential leaders
in the fight for equality and human rights to the West.
Sixth, the increase in online activism has also been perceived as a risk to
more visible forms of protest and demonstration happening offline. For
example, submitting an online petition to an African parliament may not be
as effective as submitting a physical one, as some state institutions continue
to work with hard copy rather than online documents. Government
institutions continue to have limited access to the internet. In some cases,
officials are not very well conversant with social media. Politicians have
also trivialized internet activists.

Scholarship
The internet has revolutionized how contemporary scholarship about
African sexualities is conducted. Digital spaces are a modern research field
with vast amounts of data, including broad access to research populations.
Understanding the future of African sexualities will require inclusion of the
digital discourses in scholarly analysis. The key issues will include digital
sexualities, online violations, managing big data, digital economies, and
struggles for equality.

The internet and social media have revolutionized communication,

information sharing, social interaction, relationships, and activism by
LGBTQ Africans. The internet has opened access to information through
which LGBTQ Africans have interpreted their sexual and gender identities.
Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Viber have enabled LGBTQ Africans to
navigate the virtual spaces, whether publicly or privately, to be introduced
to their local communities, Moin groups and causes, connect with new
friends, and pursue sexual relationships. Importantly, they have found new
ways to take a more prominent role in activism about issues that matter to
them.

Internet freedoms have also come with regulation and policing by the state.
Since 2015, countries that have executed internet shutdowns include
Uganda, Algeria, the Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia. For example, in
2017 the government of Cameroon shut down the internet for three months
in the English-speaking region following public protests. The reach of the
internet or social media remains exclusive to those with access to it.
Currently, most Africans have no access to the internet, whether they are
LGBTQ or not. If internet and social media access is restricted to only a
privileged few, there is a risk that such virtual existences are superficial in
their representation of the lived experiences of LGBTQ Africans, especially
in areas of internet blackouts.

Matters of sex and sexuality remain shrouded in secrecy and silence in most
African societies. However, the internet and social media have brought new
opportunities for LGBTQ people to negotiate sexual rights and freedoms.

SEE ALSO Activism in Africa South of the Sahara; Digital Cultures in

Latin America; Internet Queer Sites in the Middle East; New Media in
Asia; Phone Apps

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Internet Queer Sites in the Middle East
JEDIDIAH ANDERSON
Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic
Furman University, Greenville, SC

Descriptions of various current and defunct websites and blogs

dealing with LGBTQI issues in the Middle East.

The internet is and has been an extremely important nexus of

communication for LGBTQI people both in the Arab world and outside it.
Beyond mere dating sites, the internet has also provided new and
productive opportunities for activism and a means by which activism is
deployed for LGBTQI individuals and their communities. Some of the most
notable websites for LGBTQI activism have been Al-Fatiha (Opening),
Muscat Confidential, Aswat (Voices), and the online magazine Barra (Out).
While this entry discusses the above sites and their role in shaping Middle
Eastern queer discourse, it also examines the importance of social media in
allowing the LGBTQI community in the Middle East and North Africa
region to connect and organize, as well as other websites that were inspired
by the aforementioned websites, as three of those four (Al-Fatiha, Muscat
Confidential, and Barra) are now defunct.

Al-Fatiha
Al-Fatiha (Arabic for “opening”; also the name of the first chapter of the
Qurʾan) was founded by Faisal Alam, “a queer-identified Muslim activist of
Pakistani descent,” in 1997 as “an organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, intersex [and] questioning (LGBTQI) Muslims, and their
allies” (Alam 2017; see also Mastracci 2016). Alam stepped down from
leading the organization in 2004 in order to pursue his own independent
activism, and the organization was dissolved in 2011 (Mastracci 2016).
While Al-Fatiha no longer exists as an organization, there is a large number
of splinter groups that have risen in its place in order to address the issues
that LGBTQI Muslims face. Two of the most notable ones are Muslims for
Progressive Values (MPV) and the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender
Diversity (MASGD).

Describing itself as “a faith-based, grassroots, international human rights

organization that embodies and advocates for the traditional Qurʾanic values
of social Mustice and equality for all, for the 21st Century” (MPV 2017b),
MPV provides services, such as same-sex Muslim weddings, and drafts of
sermons that express the values of MPV. MPV also has consultative status
at the United Nations and “monitors human rights issues in Muslim-
maMority countries related to women's rights, nondiscrimination of LGBTQI
peoples, freedom of and from religion and freedom of expression” (MPV
2017a).

The MASGD describes itself on its website as an organization that “works

to support, empower, and connect LGBTQ Muslims. We seek to challenge
root causes of oppression, including misogyny and xenophobia. We aim to
increase the acceptance of gender and sexual diversity within Muslim
communities, and to promote a progressive understanding of Islam that is
centered on inclusion, Mustice, and equality” (MASGD 2017). The
organization publishes policy statements on its website and provides links
to services that assist queer Muslims. It also hosts “a retreat for LGBTQ
Muslims and their partners each May” (MASGD 2017).

Muscat Confidential

Muscat Confidential is a defunct blog written by a self-described “ex-

expatriate who was living in Muscat, Oman, Middle East for too long, but
still blogs about the place, ” under the alias “Undercover Dragon.” The last
entry is dated 27 May 2014. The blog became a site of controversy in Oman
in 2010, when Undercover Dragon (even though he described himself as
heterosexual) responded to repeated requests for information about LGBT
life in Oman by publishing two interviews dealing with the topic: one with
a gay “English Gentleman” who was living in Oman (Undercover Dragon
2010b) and one with a bisexual Omani woman who blogged for the (now
set private) LGBTQI Omani community blog Community Queer
(Undercover Dragon 2010c). According to a 6 March 2010 post by blogger
“Nadia,” who writes the extant blog Dhofari Gucci, the latter interview
originally included a picture of two Omani-looking women kissing, which
led to Muscat Confidential being blocked by the Omani government. This
reaction of the Omani government to that interview was particularly
interesting in light of the fact that Community Queer had Must been blocked
less than a month prior to the publishing of the interview by Muscat
Confidential, a fact that Muscat Confidential had reported on shortly after it
happened (Undercover Dragon 2010a). Muscat Confidential was unblocked
twelve hours later (Undercover Dragon 2010d).

Aswat
Aswat (Arabic for “voices”) is the website for an organization of
Palestinian LBTQI women that describes itself as follows:

We are a group of lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex,

questioning and queer Palestinian women. We came together
in 2002 and established a home for Palestinian LBTQI women
to allow safe, supportive and empowering spaces to express
and address our personal, social and political struggles as a
national indigenous minority living inside Israel; as women in
a patriarchal society; and as LBTQI women in a wider hetro-
normative [sic] culture.

(ASWAT 2017)
One of the maMor proMects that Aswat has undertaken is called the
Information ProMect. This proMect is described on the group's website as
having the following aims (among others):

To combat distortion of information, censorship and ignorance created

by social taboos regarding women's sexuality and lesbianism by
disseminating alternative, resisting knowledge.
To reach-out to other Palestinian gay women struggling with closet,
shame, undisclosed feelings and identities and become a main source
of information and empowerment by using our direct authentic voice
and our own words….
To increase the presence of women's sexuality and lesbianism in the
Arabic language and culture by forming an alternative glossary and
indeed, a “mother tongue” with positive, un-derogatory and affirmative
expressions of women and lesbian sexuality and gender.
To contribute our unique gender and national experiential knowledge
to the growing feminist/gay multicultural discourse by encouraging
Palestinian gay women to author their “her-stories” and share their
experiences, knowledge and perspectives.

(ASWAT 2013)

To this end, Aswat produced a glossary of LGBTI terms in Arabic

(published in 2006) and more than twenty texts on homosexuality and
sexual identity, while also publishing essays written by Palestinian lesbian,
transgender, and bisexual women about their experiences and their lives.
The glossary is a particularly significant contribution to LGBTQI discourse
in the Middle East and North Africa region, as it is one of the first times
that concepts such as the difference between biological sex and gender
identity and Arabic renderings of concepts such as “queer, ” “transgender,”
and “homophobia” have been tackled in Arabic by the Arab LGBTQI
community. The idea of a glossary of Arabic gender and sexual vocabulary
was further picked up on and developed by the Lebanese LGBTQI groups
Helem and Meem, whose many contributions to the Middle Eastern
LGBTQI presence on the internet are discussed in greater detail below,
beginning with Barra, a sometimes-online, sometimes-inprint magazine
dealing with LGBTQI topics in the Middle East that is published by Helem.

Barra and Helem

Barra (Lebanese Arabic for “out”) describes itself on its Facebook page as
“a bi-quarterly publication by Helem that is oriented to LGBTIQ issues”
(Barra 2017). Despite this claim, print issues of Barra have not been
published regularly, and the website address provided on the Facebook page
for the magazine (which was last updated in 2014) points to a now-empty
domain. While the magazine is not currently extant, and Helem's website
also has a message saying that it is down, and directing surfers to its
hotline, email address, and Twitter and Facebook pages, it is important to
note that those Twitter and Facebook pages are very much currently active.
Additionally, the Lebanese LGBT Media Monitor, a proMect run by Helem,
is also active on both Twitter and Facebook.

Helem's Facebook page invites its followers to discussion groups on

women's issues, film screenings, book club meetings, art therapy groups,
discussions on sexual diversity, and educational sessions on such topics as
hormone therapy and threats posed by the police. The page also posts news
articles and essays on LGBTQI history in the Arab world and LGBTQI life
in other Arab countries, as well as videos and statements advocating for the
improvement of LGBTQI rights in Lebanon and elsewhere (Helem 2017).
The Lebanese LGBT Media Monitor proMect focuses on current events
happening in Lebanon and in the Lebanese LGBTQI community, while also
serving as a clearinghouse for reporting by media organizations on
LGBTQI issues in Lebanon and throughout the Arab world. These same
events and announcements are mirrored on Helem's and the Lebanese
LGBT Media Monitor's Twitter accounts.
Another significant contribution made by Lebanese LGBTQI activists (a
small number of whom are associated with Helem) is the creation of what
they named the “Gender Dictionary” (Qamus al-Mindir). Written by and
posted online by people working at Lebanon Support, a nongovernmental
organization established with the intent of expanding civil society capacity
in Lebanon, the “Gender Dictionary” is similar to the proMect launched by
Aswat but has expanded to include words such as intersectionality,
heteronormativity, and cisgender, including, unlike in Aswat's proMect,
explanations of each of the terms in the dictionary in both English and
Arabic in order to provide them with context and to explain the historical
and discursive backgrounds of each of the terms (Lebanon Support 2016),
reflecting both the extent to which sexual discourse has both changed and
developed in the Arab world in a very short period.

alQaws
Another website dealing with LGBTQI issues in the Middle East that is still
extant is alQaws (“rainbow” in Arabic). On the home page of the website,
the group describes itself as:

a civil society organization founded in grassroots activism …

at the forefront of vibrant Palestinian cultural and social
change, building LGBTQ communities and promoting new
ideas about the role of gender and sexual diversity in political
activism, civil society institutions, media, and everyday life.

Embracing the diversity of our society, while challenging the

political forces that divide us, we run community centers and
events in cities and rural areas across Palestine, operate a
national support hotline accessible via phone and online, build
partnerships and alliances in established cultural institutions
and civil society organizations, create innovative media
 campaigns, work to transform public discourse, and much
more.

(ALQAWS 2017)

According to the website, among the resources provided by alQaws are a

community center in Ramallah, youth and student groups, intellectual
discussion series in both Ramallah and Haifa, and monthly queer
community parties. The site also provides information on where these
events are happening, articles dealing with issues in the LGBTQI
Palestinian community, and a listening and information hotline that
LGBTQI Palestinians can call if they have questions or need counseling.
alQaws has also launched a singing proMect called Singing Sexuality, in
which LGBTQI Palestinians record songs dealing with their issues, and a
safe sex campaign named “I want you safe.”

IraQueer
Another important website dealing with LGBTQI issues in the Arab world
is that of the organization IraQueer. Available fully in both Arabic and
English, the website's home page states that

IraQueer is a registered human rights organization focusing

on the LGBT+ community in Iraq/Kurdistan region. It was
founded on March 2015 making it the first and only LGBT+
focusing on the LGBT+ community in [the] Iraq/Kurdistan
region. Having a diverse team of young activists between the
age[s] of 18–32 residing mostly inside [the] Iraq/Kurdistan
region, IraQueer represents the start of the first queer
movement in Iraq's public history.
 (IRAQUEER 2017A)

Like many of the other sites that deal with LGBTQI issues in the Middle
East, IraQueer also has a Facebook and Twitter page. The Twitter page talks
about news articles that deal with the LGBTQI situation in Iraq, including
executions of LGBTQI people in Iraq by the Islamic State (ISIS). The
Facebook page documents the same items as the Twitter page for the most
part.

Founded by Amir Ashour, an LGBTQI activist living in Malmö, Sweden,

the website provides news related to LGBTQI issues in Iraq, a blog to
which LGBTQI Iraqis are invited to contribute, a collection of “Mournals” in
which LGBTQI Iraqis talk about their personal lives and struggles, and a
collection of publications, including one titled “Security Guide for LGBT+
Individuals in Iraq/Kurdistan Region,” a pamphlet on sexual health
guidelines, and a report to the United Nations on LGBT+ human rights
violations in 2015. It is important to note that, as of 2017, both guides were
available only in English, but the Mournals were available in both Arabic and
English.

The “Security Guide” focuses primarily on digital security, although it does

touch on physical security as well. It advises that Iraqi LGBTQI individuals
use a VPN (virtual private network), clear their browser history regularly,
password lock their devices, and choose strong passwords that are unique
for each site one logs into. It also advises using two-step verification and
recommends apps that use encryption, such as Signal, Jitsi, and Telegram
(IraQueer 2017b). The “Sexual Health Guide” provides a glossary of sexual
terms and talks about safe sex practices, as well as mental health and the
sexual rights of Iraqis according to international law (IraQueer 2017c).

Proud Lebanon
Founded by Bertho Makso, Proud Lebanon is an organization and website
that deals with the unique issues that Syrian and other refugees in Lebanon
face. It describes itself as “a non-profit, non-religious, non-political,
nonpartisan civil society that aims to promote sustainable social [and]
economic development in Lebanon and the region and is working to
achieve protection, empowerment and equality of marginalized groups
through community service activities. Proud Lebanon started its activities in
August 2013 and is registered since April 2014 as a non-profit civil society”
(Proud Lebanon 2017).

The only fully trilingual LGBTQI site discussed in this entry, with articles
in Arabic, French, and English, Proud Lebanon's website deals with issues
that LGBTQI refugees face, such as HIV/AIDS, and how Lebanese law
applies to and affects refugees in Lebanon. It also features stories from
LGBTQI refugees that both are and are not beneficiaries of Proud Lebanon
and announces events, including those hosted by Proud Lebanon and events
elsewhere in Lebanon that are of interest to the LGBTQI refugee
community in Lebanon.

Broader Role of Social Media and Blogs

It is also important to discuss the broader role of social media in the
LGBTQI communities in the Middle East. There are numerous social media
pages on both Facebook and Twitter that are not affiliated with larger
LGBTQI organizations in the Middle East; these span a wide range of
themes. Some provide a place for LGBTQI people to meet for dating,
others serve a place for people to read news about LGBTQI issues in the
Middle East, and others seem to merely be a place for LGBTQI Middle
Easterners to share links on things that they find interesting or funny.

EXCERPT FROM A GAY GIRL IN DAMASCUS BLOG

From 19 February to 6 June 2011, A Gay Girl in Damascus, a blog
reportedly written by an “out” lesbian girl in Syria named Amina
Abdallah Arraf al-Omari, caused a sensation in the global LGBT
community for its daring commentary on politics, gender, sexuality,
and Syrian culture. A posting on 6 June, which was supposedly written
by Amina's cousin, reported that Amina had been abducted. The news
was covered widely in the mainstream media, with advocacy groups
the world over calling for her release. The event prompted others,
however, to question Amina's identity. Within a week, evidence came
to light that suggested Amina was not a Syrian lesbian but a married
American man, Tom MacMaster, who was living in Edinburgh,
Scotland. MacMaster admitted the deception in a posting to Amina's
blog on 12 June.

One of Amina's most widely republished postings was a 26 April piece

titled “My Father the Hero,” in which MacMaster, as Amina, describes
a harrowing encounter with two Syrian security agents who arrive at
her house late at night to arrest her. She is saved by her father, who
manages to shame the two men into leaving through an impassioned
speech.

“So you come here to take Amina. Let me tell you something, though.
She is not the one you should fear; you should be heaping praises on
her and on people like her. They are the ones saying alawi, sunni,
arabi, kurdi, duruzi, christian, everyone is the same and will be equal
in the new Syria; they are the ones who, if the revolution comes, will
be saving your mother and your sisters. They are the ones fighting the
Wahhabi most seriously. You idiots are, though, serving them by
saying ‘every sunni is salafi, every protester is salafi, every one of
them is an enemy’ because when you do that you make it so.

“Your Bashar and your Maher, they will not live forever, they will
not rule forever, and you both know that. So, if you want good things
for
yourselves in the future, you will leave and you will not take Amina
with you. You will go back and you will tell the rest of yours that the
people like her are the best friends the Alawi could ever have and you
will not come for her again.

“And right now, you two will both apologize for waking her and
putting her through all this. Do you understand me?”

And time froze when he stopped speaking. Now, they would either
smack him down and beat him, rape me, and take us both away … or.
…

The first one nodded, then the second one.

“Go back to sleep,” he said. “We are sorry for troubling you.”

And they left!

As soon as the gate shut, I heard clapping; everyone in the house was
awake now and had been watching from balconies and doorways and
windows all around the courtyard … and everyone was cheering.…
MY DAD had Must defeated them! Not with weapons but with words
… and they had left.…

I hugged him and kissed him; I literally owe him my life now.

And everyone came down and hugged and kissed, every member of
the family, and the servants and everyone. … We had won … this time.
…

My father is a hero; I always knew that … but now I am sure.

Additionally, there are several privately run and written blogs that deal with
Middle Eastern LGBTQI topics, particularly in Lebanon. One of the most
notable of these blogs is titled Beirut Boy. Written by an anonymous
blogger who goes by a pseudonym eponymous with the blog, the blog deals
with LGBTQI news and events in Lebanon, particularly in Beirut, and with
the author's own dating experiences, struggles, and Moys. He has been
interviewed by Radio France Internationale and engages frequently in his
blog with the activities of LGBTQI activist groups in Lebanon, such as
Helem.

Another blog that has been important for both the LBTI community and the
larger Lebanese feminist community is Sawt Al Niswa (meaning “the voice
of women” in Arabic). Describing itself as “a network and a community of
feminist writers, activists and artists working towards changing their
realities by building a space that critically reflects on the social, political
and intellectual experiences of women living in the Arab region—or West
Asia and North Africa (however you look at it!)” (Sawt Al Niswa 2017),
Sawt Al Niswa has frequently included queer feminist writers and discussed
queer issues; the blog also has a podcast on SoundCloud titled Radio Sawt.
It has also been frequently referenced by other, more explicitly LGBTQI
Middle Eastern groups, such as the now-dissolved (or at least no longer
public) Lebanese LBTI group Meem.

Privately written LGBTQI blogs dealing with the Middle East have also
been the source of a great deal of controversy and mistrust in the LGBTQI
activist community in the Middle East. For example, in 2011, the writer of
the Gay Girl in Damascus blog was exposed as actually being an American
male graduate student at the University of Edinburgh named Tom
MacMaster (O'Hehir 2015), causing many activists in the Middle East to
become more mistrustful of the internet.

Impact of Queer Internet Sites

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, there has been a distinct
shift from queer websites in the Middle East as a center for activity taking
place in cyberspace to queer Middle Eastern websites as the initial public
face and point of contact for actual brick-and-mortar organizations.
Additionally, the increasing popularity of social media has further changed
the nature of queer Middle Eastern websites. Twitter and Facebook often
serve as platforms for queer Middle Eastern organizations to send out news
and information to the largest number of interested people in the most rapid
manner, at times even completely supplanting the standard web page, as in
the case of Helem. It is quite possible that the growing prevalence of queer
dating websites and apps has also rendered other queer websites and
organizations less relevant for the purpose of allowing queer people in the
Middle East to find each other and to meet. That being said, queer websites,
whether having a presence on social media or not, have provided greater
opportunities for LGBTQI activists in the Middle East to find each other
and to better connect with both larger internationally focused LGBTQI
groups and other smaller LGBTQI activist organizations elsewhere.

SEE ALSO alQaws; Aswat; Coming-Out/Coming-In Discourses in the Middle

East; Digital Cultures in Latin America; The Gay International and
Mideast LGBTQI Organizations; Helem; Internet in Africa; Meem; New
Media in Asia

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alam, Faisal. “Faisal Alam.” Accessed 21 June 2017.
http://www.faisalalam.com

alQaws. “About Us.” Accessed 21 June 2017. http://www.alqaws.org/about-

us

Aswat. “Information and Publication.” 2013.

http://www.aswatgroup.org/en/content/information-publication
Aswat. Accessed 21 June 2017. http://www.aswatgroup.org/en

Barra magazine's Facebook page. “About.” Accessed 21 June 2017.

https://www.facebook.com/pg/BarraMagazine/about/

Beirut Boy (blog). Accessed 21 June 2017.

https://beirutboyblog.com/tag/lgbtq/

Helem Lebanon's Facebook page. Accessed 21 June 2017.

https://www.facebook.com/Official-Page-for-Helem-Lebanon-
133916233311662/

IraQueer. “About Us.” Accessed 21 June 2017a.

http://www.iraqueer.org/about-1

IraQueer. “Security Guide for LGBT+ Individuals in Iraq/Kurdistan

Region.” Accessed 21 June 2017b.
https://www.iraqueer.org/proMects/publications/

IraQueer. “Sexual Health Guide.” Accessed 21 June 2017c.

https://www.iraqueer.org/proMects/publications/

Lebanon Support. “Gender Dictionary—Qāmūs al-Mindir.” 2016.

http://civilsociety-centre.org/sites/default/files/resources/lebanonsupport-
genderdictionary-en-ar.pdf

MASGD (Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity). “About

MASGD.” Accessed 21 June 2017.
http://www.muslimalliance.org/aboutmasgd

Mastracci, Davide. “Rainbow Muslims.” United Church Observer,

September 2016.
http://www.ucobserver.org/faith/2016/09/rainbow_muslims/
MPV (Muslims for Progressive Values). “MPV at the UN.” Accessed 21
June 2017a. http://www.mpvusa.org/mpv-at-the-un

MPV (Muslims for Progressive Values). “Who We Are.” Accessed 21 June

2017b. http://www.mpvusa.org/who-we-are

Muscat Confidential (blog). Accessed 21 June 2017.

http://muscatconfidential.blogspot.com

Nadia. “Muscat Confidential Blocked.” Dhofari Gucci (blog), 6 March

2010. https://dhofarigucci.blogspot.com/2010/03/muscat-confidential-
blocked.html

O'Hehir, Andrew. “‘A Gay Girl in Damascus': Behind the Twisted Tale of a
Blogger Who ‘Catfished’ the Whole World.” Salon, 23 July 2015.
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/23/a_gay_girl_in_damascus_behind_the_tw
isted_tale_of_a_blogger_who_catfished_the_whole_world/

Proud Lebanon. Accessed 21 June 2017. http://www.proudlebanon.org

Sawt Al Niswa (blog). “About Us.” Accessed 21 June 2017.

http://sawtalniswa.com/aboutus

Undercover Dragon. “Stop Press: New Omani Blog Community Queer

Blocked by … Omantel.” Muscat Confidential (blog), 14 February 2010a.
https://muscatconfidential.blogspot.com/2010/02/stop-press-new-omani-
blog-community.html

Undercover Dragon. “Exclusive Interview: Being Gay in the Sultanate of

Oman from the POV of an English Gentleman. And Advice for Visitors
Who Are FOD.” Muscat Confidential (blog), 19 February 2010b.
https://muscatconfidential.blogspot.com/2010/02/exclusive-interview-
being-gay-in.html
Undercover Dragon. “Another Exclusive Interview: Bi-lesbian Omani
‘Scudder’ from Community Queer.” Muscat Confidential (blog), 3 March
2010c. https://muscatconfidential.blogspot.com/2010/03/another-exclusive-
interview-bi-lesbian.html

Undercover Dragon. “Well, That Was Unexpected! Muscat Confidential

Finally Censored by Oman's Government over … a Photo of Women
Kissing.” Muscat Confidential (blog), 6 March 2010d.
https://muscatconfidential.blogspot.com/2010/03/well-that-was-
unexpected-muscat.html
Intersex Identities
HILARY MALATINO
Assistant Professor, Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
and Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

An umbrella term to describe those whose anatomical,

chromosomal, and hormonal deviations result in sex-atypical
development.

Intersex is an umbrella term that began to be widely utilized by Western

medical and sexological practitioners in the mid-twentieth century. It is
used to group together a variety of conditions resulting in anatomical,
chromosomal, and hormonal deviations from what are considered male-
typical and female-typical morphologies. Some of these deviations are
apparent at birth, while others develop during puberty. Intersex conditions
range from partial or complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which
people with XY chromosomes (typically considered “male” sex
chromosomes) fail to respond to androgens, resulting in female-typical or
ambiguous genitalia and sex-atypical morphological development, to
congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a condition wherein people with XX
chromosomes (typically considered “female” sex chromosomes) have an
adrenal gland that produces larger-than-usual amounts of “virilizing”
hormones, resulting in conditions such as clitoromegaly (enlargement of the
clitoris), increased facial and body hair growth, voice deepening, and
intensified muscle development. CAH also occurs in XY individuals, but in
these cases does not manifest in sex-atypical development. While there is
significant debate about what conditions fall under the intersex umbrella,
scholars of intersex studies and intersex activist organizations tend to
include close to twenty conditions that manifest in sex-atypical
development, bringing the statistical frequency of such conditions to
roughly 1.7 percent of live births (Fausto-Sterling 2000). Public awareness
of intersex conditions increased with the publication of Jeffrey Eugenides's
best-selling and widely translated novel Middlesex (2002), a fictional
memoir that traces the familial history and experience of an intersex
narrator named Cal Stephanides. The Argentine film XXY (2007) also
centers the experience of a fictional intersex protagonist as they come of
age.

Provincializing Intersex
When discussing the emergence of intersex as a diagnosis and a descriptor
of atypical forms of sexed embodiment, it is important to bear in mind that
the history of the word intersex is steeped in Western understandings of sex,
gender, and embodiment, and emerges out of North American and Western
European research on biological sex differentiation. This means that there
are significant geographic differences in nomenclature that are important to
bear in mind when considering intersex as an identity category.
Additionally, some people with intersex conditions embrace the word
intersex as an identity descriptor, others are more ambivalent about the use
of this term to describe themselves, and some outright reMect it. It is
imperative that we heed the words of gender theorist David Rubin and
“provincialize US [and Western European] debates about intersex” (2015,
74) by bearing in mind that “US and Western understandings of intersex are
historically and geopolitically particular, not universal” (52) and that
US/Western ways of interpreting intersex bodies and critiquing intersex
treatment protocol circulate globally in ways that elide non-Western local
and regional histories and contemporary interpretations of nondimorphic
sexed embodiment. A counterpoint to the US and Western understandings
of biology and sex difference is the set of knowledges that informed late
imperial China's interpretation of biological sex anomalies, wherein an
imbalance of yin and yang at the time of conception was understood to
cause what in the West would have been understood as “intersex”
conditions (Furth 1988).

Terminological and Diagnostic Debates

In the West, the term intersex came to replace the use of the term
hermaphrodite—now considered outdated and peMorative in many intersex
activist circles—beginning in the early twentieth century. In 1917 German
scientist Richard Goldschmidt coined the term in the fourth issue of the
Mournal Endocrinology, using it to differentiate a number of conditions that
resulted in sex ambiguity that were not specifically hermaphroditic, as the
term hermaphrodite indexed a being with fully functioning male and female
reproductive organs, which is not a phenomenon present among humans.
Prior to Goldschmidt's coining of this term, the dominant diagnostic
language used to label intersex conditions consisted of three categories:
“true hermaphroditism,” “male pseudo-hermaphroditism,” and “female
pseudo-hermaphroditism.” This terminology was elaborated in 1876 by
German physician Theodor Albrecht Edwin Klebs, and relied on the
histological examination of gonadal tissue in order to determine the “true
sex” of intersex subMects. “True hermaphrodites” were subMects whose
gonads were a mix of ovarian and testicular tissue; “male pseudo-
hermaphrodites” were subMects who had testicular tissue in addition to
“feminized” genitalia; and female pseudo-hermaphrodites were those
subMects who had ovarian tissue and some apparent “masculinization” of the
genitalia (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Dreger 1998).

Historian of science Alice Dreger refers to the period beginning in 1876 and
ending in the 1910s as the “age of gonads” (1998, 139), a period when the
search for the “true” sex of intersex subMects resulted in the embrace of a
monocausal determination of sex—in other words, a method of determining
sex where it was understood as “caused” by one discrete biological entity
(chromosomes, gonads, hormones), rather than the complex interactions of
these phenomena with a broader environment. When confronted with the
corporeal sex ambiguities of intersex patients, medical men utilized gonadal
tissue to determine sex. Earlier in the nineteenth century, before the “age of
gonads,” multiple and sometimes competing classificatory systems were
used to parse, understand, and diagnose intersex conditions. Dreger notes
that none of the most widely utilized sex classification systems “divide[d]
hermaphrodites along strictly gonadal lines” (140). After the age of gonads,
medical practitioners continued to use the three-part classification system
developed by Klebs, with the important difference that they ceased relying
on gonadal tissue to assign sex, using it to specify conditions, but not to
determine the course of “corrective” treatment.

Medical Sex “Normalization”

By the middle of the twentieth century, on account of surgical developments
that made genital reconstructive surgery possible, as well as the discovery,
extraction, synthesis, and mass pharmaceutical production of so-called sex
hormones, it became medically possible to intervene in conditions resulting
in intersex morphology and “normalize” such sex-atypical bodies. Surgical
and hormonal normalization was advocated by sexologist John Money, who
cofounded the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in the late 1960s and
transformed that clinic into a site of experimentation with the
“normalization” of intersex infants, children, and adolescents. Money's
recommended treatment method was dictated by his belief that gender
identity was largely a matter of social imprinting and could thus be acquired
by youths provided that they were socialized into a specific gender at a very
young age. He believed that “the sex of assignment and rearing is
consistently and conspicuously a more reliable prognosticator of a
hermaphrodite's gender role and orientation than is the chromosomal sex,
the gonadal sex, the hormonal sex, the accessory internal reproductive
morphology, or the ambiguous morphology of the external genitalia”
(Money et al. 1957, 333). However, a key component of successful
socialization was genital reconstructive surgery for infants with ambiguous
genitalia; Money's thinking was that if caretakers were attempting to raise a
child in female-typical ways but were confronted with such genital
atypicality, their ability to consistently relate to the child as female would
be compromised. He argued that gender was similar to language
acquisition: that it could be taught through immersion, and—like language
—was easiest to acquire at a young age. Surgical and hormonal intervention
were recommended in order to bring bodies in line with the selected gender
of rearing. As gender theorist Jemima Repo explicates, Money's method of
diagnosis and treatment operated by “strategically interfering in the
contingent cognitive processes of the behavioral control system of the mind,
and by cutting up and reordering ambiguous genitals into normative and
normalizing stimuli” (2013, 240).

The treatment paradigm that Money developed at Johns Hopkins, dubbed

the optimum gender of rearing (OGR) model by child psychologist Heino
Meyer-Bahlburg (Reis 2010), became over the course of the middle and late
twentieth century the dominant method of treating intersex infants, children,
and adolescents, and resulted in a large number of nonconsensual genital
reconstructive surgeries. The surgeries performed were typically
vaginoplasty (surgical construction of a vagina), because it was technically
easier than phalloplasty (surgical construction of a phallus), and clitoral
reduction or complete cliterodectomy (excision of the clitoris), in order to
remove phalloclitoral structures (genital protrusions larger than a typical
clitoris but not long enough to be considered as a typical penis) deemed
large enough to place genitals within the ambiguous range (which was,
according to the practitioners developing this model, somewhere between 1
and 2.5 centimeters in infants). They were performed on infants and small
children, who could not adequately consent to such surgical procedures.
The criteria for a successful surgical outcome was the ability of the
reconstructed genitalia to receive a penis, which demonstrates the
heterosexist expectations undergirding such procedures: the end goal being
to produce gender-normative, heterosexual women. Many of these surgeries
resulted in partial or total lack of genital sensitivity and anorgasmia
(difficulty with or inability to achieve orgasm), demonstrating how this
model deprioritized the sexual pleasure and agency of intersex subMects.

Criticisms of Medical Sex “Normalization”

The OGR model has come under intense criticism from academic feminists
and intersex activists, as well as some medical, sexological, and psychiatric
clinicians. Intersex studies scholars Dreger and April Herndon, building on
the work of feminist sociologist Suzanne Kessler (1998) and feminist
biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), have highlighted the ways it relied
on sexist, transphobic, and heterosexist assumptions and violated basic
principles of medical ethics, writing that

it treated children in a sexist, asymmetrical way, valuing

aggressiveness and sexual potency for boys and passiveness
and reproductive/sexual-receptive potential for girls; it
presumed that homosexuality (apparent same-sex relations)
and transgenderism (changing or blurring gender identities)
constituted bad outcomes; it violated principles of informed
consent by failing to tell decision-making parents about the
poor evidentiary support for the approach; it violated the
axioms of truth telling and “first, do no harm”; it forced
children to have their bodies adapted to oppressive social
norms, using surgeries and hormone treatments that sometimes
resulted in irrevocable harm; it generally involved treating
psychosocial issues without the active participation of
psychosocial professionals such as psychologists, psychiatrists,
and social workers.

(DREGER AND HERNDON 2009, 204)

When the first generation of these intersex infants and children came of age
in the 1990s, they began to vociferously protest the medical violence done
to them in the name of sex normalization. This coincided with the rise of
the internet, which increased connectedness and facilitated the sharing of
stories and the eventual emergence of intersex activist communities, as well
as increased visibility and activity for both gay and lesbian and trans rights
movements. Those movements put pressure on institutionalized forms of
heterosexism and transphobia in ways that dovetailed with the nascent
critique of the OGR model. Early intersex activists organized primarily
around ending nonconsensual forms of surgical sex reassignment advocated
by the OGR model. The first of these organizations was the Intersex Society
of North America (ISNA), founded in 1993 by Bo Laurent (who then went
by the name Cheryl Chase) with the mission of ending “shame, secrecy, and
unwanted genital surgeries for people born with an anatomy that someone
decided is not standard for male or female” (Intersex Society of North
America, 1993).

The Intersex Society of North America

The ISNA began as a support group and quickly morphed into an advocacy
organization, building a team of intersex adults, parents of intersex children,
and empathetically allied medical practitioners, scholars, and lawyers.
Representatives from the organization gradually became incorporated
within the medical establishment, attending conferences, educating medical
students, and drafting papers for publication in medical and bioethics
Mournals arguing for increased medical transparency, an end to
nonconsensual medical sex normalization, and increased social acceptance
of non-dimorphically sexed bodies. In the middle of the first decade of the
twenty-first century they spearheaded the formation of the Consortium on
Disorders of Sex Development. In 2006 this consortium published its
Handbook for Parents as well as a brochure for medical practitioners,
informed by the principles of patient-centered care and titled Clinical
Guidelines for the Management of Disorders of Sex Development in
Childhood. These documents were consistent with the ISNA's aims and
advocated selecting a gender of rearing for intersex infants and deferring
surgical and hormonal treatment until those children were given adequate,
nonstigmatizing education on their condition, the risks associated with
medical intervention, and the possibilities of living a healthy life in the
absence of medical sex normalization. Shortly after releasing this literature,
the ISNA disbanded and some former members, including Laurent, formed
an organization called the Accord Alliance, which “promotes
comprehensive and integrated approaches to care that enhance the health
and well-being of people and families affected by DSD” (Accord Alliance,
para. 1).

Intersex or “Disorders of Sex Development”?

It is noteworthy that the Accord Alliance—and the consortium that
preceded its formation—does not utilize the word intersex in either its name
or mission statement, opting instead for “disorders of sex development” or
“differences of sex development,” both referred to by the initialism DSD.
This shift in nomenclature was hotly contested among intersex activists,
many of whom claimed “intersex” as an important identity descriptor and
obMected to applying the language of “disorder” to their nonbinary sexed
embodiment, claiming it intensified the feelings of stigma and shame that
had only recently come to be countered. The most vociferous and incisive
criticisms came from activists affiliated with Organisation Intersex
International (OII), a decentralized global network of intersex organizations
primarily active in Europe, with affiliate organizations in South Africa,
China, Australia, and the Philippines. These critiques were summarized by
intersex activist Curtis Hinkle in a 2007 web post wherein he argued that
this shift reduced intersex conditions to a genetic “defect,” increased the
pathologization of intersex subMects, and relied on Anglocentric diagnostic
categories and linguistic norms (because, for instance, in French the word
sexual may be used to refer to biological sex as well as sexual orientation
and practice, which means that DSD could be mistaken as indexing a
“sexual” disorder), and that the consortium promoting this shift did not
adequately include intersex subMects in the deliberations that led to the
revised clinical and therapeutic guidelines. While the term differences of sex
development was coined to sidestep these debates about the pathologization
and stigma implied by the word disorder, many intersex activists reMect both
iterations of the DSD acronym on one or more of the grounds outlined by
Hinkle.

Juana la Larga (Long Juana)

The case of Juana Aguilar—dubbed Juana la Larga (Long Juana)—is of
particular note when tracing histories of the interpretation sex ambiguities
beyond the confines of Europe and North America. Juana la Larga was a
purported hermafrodito (hermaphrodite) who was prosecuted in the
criminal court of Guatemala City in 1803 for “the crime of double
concubinage with men and women” (Few 2007, 159). During the
proceedings, physician Narciso Esparragosa was enMoined to examine Juana
la Larga, and he concluded that they were not hermaphroditic (both male
and female) but rather neither male nor female. Esparragosa's conclusion
debunked medieval and early modern claims of the existence of
“hermaphrodites” who supposedly flourished in zones of nascent
colonization, and it introduced an understanding of intersex embodiment
that differs significantly from the later European discourses of male and
female pseudo-hermaphroditism that sought to establish the purported “true
sex” of intersex subMects, demonstrating that “by the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth century, medical frameworks of sexual difference were not
uniform … nor did medical practitioners in colonial Latin America simply
follow European writers on the subMect” (Few 2007, 171).

Intersex and Global Human Rights

Rubin's recommendation to “provincialize” debates about intersex is
particularly important given the burgeoning use of the term intersex in the
context of global human rights discourses. Since 2012 there has been a
proliferation of literature produced by nongovernmental, transnational
human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch, and several United Nations committees (including the
Committee against Torture, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, and
the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) have spoken out
against coercive and nonconsensual medical procedures performed on
intersex infants, children, and adolescents. These efforts have resulted in
Malta's 2015 ban on nonconsensual forms of medical intervention that alter
the sex characteristics of minors, and a 2016 Chilean Ministry of Health
order to suspend all unnecessary normalization treatments for intersex
children until they reach an age of consent. Global human rights activism
also resulted in the founding of Intersex Awareness Day, observed annually
since 2003 on October 26, marking the 1996 protest of the American
Academy of Pediatrics by North American intersex activists affiliated with
the ISNA and the trans activist organization Transsexual Menace. As these
rulings, protests, and declarations regarding intersex medicalization become
more common, Western interpretations of sex-ambiguous embodiments
gradually elide non-Western local and regional interpretations of the
conditions.

Guevedoces
Anthropological research on cross-cultural forms of sex variance has
documented several local and regional interpretations of nondimorphic
embodiment in areas with increased incidences of certain medically
identifiable iterations of sex ambiguity. The bulk of this research has
focused on population clusters with high incidences of 5-alpha-reductase
deficiency, a condition where those that have XY chromosomes and testes
do not produce the hormone dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which is largely
responsible for the embryonic production of male-typical genitalia and,
during and after puberty, for increased hair growth, acne, and hairline
recession. This means that individuals with the condition are born with
external genitalia that appear either female-typical or ambiguous, but at
puberty their bodies effectively masculinize—their voices deepen, their
muscle mass increases, they experience a significant growth spurt, and their
phalloclitoral structure and testes increase in size. Clusters of persons with
5-alphareductase deficiency have been identified in Egypt, Papua New
Guinea, Turkey, and the Dominican Republic, and in each of these locations
different terminologies and epistemologies of sexed embodiment have
developed to account for the variations. The best known of these clusters is
in the Dominican Republic, where persons referred to as guevedoces
(roughly translated as “balls at twelve”) were initially socialized as girls and
then allowed to transition to a more masculine gender identity at puberty
(Lang and Kuhnle 2008). The high rate of reportage on guevedoces in the
West is largely due to the role they have played in pharmaceutical research
and development. In the 1970s Julianne Imperato-McGinley, a medical
doctor based at Cornell University, traveled to the Dominican Republic to
study this cluster and bring several guevedoces back the United States for
research. Following Imperato-McGinley's realization that a lack of DHT
had inhibited the growth of the prostate glands of guevedoces,
“pharmaceutical giants Merck and GlaxoSmithKline started developing the
5 Alpha Reductase inhibitors finasteride and dutasteride respectively”
(Gurram and Ashley 2016, 526) to treat male-pattern baldness and enlarged
prostates.

Sex Testing and Legal Sex/Gender

Designations
The prevalence of binary (male/female) markers on legal identification
documents has historically necessitated that intersex people select a binary
sex assignation. However, in response to trans and intersex activism on the
issue, some nations and states have made it possible to legally change one's
gender identification assigned at birth, and enabled voluntary legal
identification in a nonbinary category. In 2003 it became possible to choose
an “X” sex designation in Australia and New Zealand, and several other
nations have followed this example. Certain US states have adopted an opt-
in nonbinary classification for intersex people only. In 2017 New York City
issued the first birth certificate with an “intersex” gender designation.

Mandatory sex testing in sport was imposed by the International

Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) in 1950 and first utilized in the
Olympics in 1968, and it continues in the early twenty-first century. Initially
developed to prevent men from competing in women's sports, sex testing
began as a physical exam, later moved to chromosomal testing, and
currently relies on monitoring testosterone levels of female athletes. As a
result, many women with intersex conditions have been prevented from
competing, subMected to sex normalizing procedures, and forced to take
measures to lower the amount of naturally occurring testosterone in their
blood.

SEE ALSO Cinema, Latin American (Late Twentieth and Twenty-First

Centuries); Clitoris; Elbe, Lili (1882–1931); Penis; Sins against Nature in
Colonial Latin America; Third Genders; Two-Spirit

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Accord Alliance. “Our Mission.” Accessed 26 April 2018.
http://www.accordalliance.org/about-accord-alliance/our-mission/

Consortium on the Management of Disorders of Sex Development. Clinical

Guidelines for the Management of Disorders of Sex Development in
Childhood. Rohnert Park, CA: Intersex Society of North America, 2006a.

Consortium on the Management of Disorders of Sex Development.

Handbook for Parents. Rohnert Park, CA: Intersex Society of North
America, 2006b.

Dreger, Alice D. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Dreger, Alice D., and April M. Herndon. “Progress and Politics in the
Intersex Rights Movement: Feminist Theory in Action.” GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 2 (2009): 199–224.

Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

2002. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the
Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Few, Martha. “‘That Monster of Nature': Gender, Sexuality, and the

Medicalization of a ‘Hermaphrodite’ in Late Colonial Guatemala.”
Ethnohistory 54, no. 1 (2007): 159–176.

Furth, Charlotte. “Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and

Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century China.” Late
Imperial China 9, no. 2 (1988): 1–31.

Goldschmidt, Richard. “Intersexuality and the Endocrine Aspects of Sex.”

Endocrinology 1, no. 4 (1917): 433–456.

Gurram, Sandeep, and Richard Ashley. “From Girls to Boys to Older Men:
The Interesting Tale of the Guevedoces and 5-Alpha Reductase Inhibitors.”
Journal of Urology 195, no. 4 (2016): 526.

Hinkle, Curtis. “Why We Do Not Use ‘Disorder of Sex Development.’”

Organisation Intersex International in the United Kingdom, 12 February
2014. https://oiiuk.org/697/why-we-do-not-use-disorder-of-sex-
development/

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Kessler, Suzanne. Lessons from the Intersexed. New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers University Press, 1998.
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Categories in Non-Western Cultures.” Hormone Research 69, no. 4 (2008):
240–250.

Money, John, Joan Hampson, and John Hampson. “Imprinting and the
Establishment of Gender Role.” AMA Archives of Neurological Psychology
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Reis, Elizabeth. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Repo, Jemima. “The Biopolitical Birth of Gender: Social Control,

Hermaphroditism, and the New Sexual Apparatus.” Alternatives: Global,
Local, Political 38, no. 3 (2013): 228–244.

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Involuntary Servitude and Same-Sex
Sexuality in Africa
KUUKUWA ANDAM
PhD candidate
Queen's University, Canada

MARC EPPRECHT
Professor, Department of Global Development Studies
Queen's University, Canada

Examples of same-sex sexual practices in involuntary servitude

in African history.

Slavery, pawnship, concubinage, and other forms of involuntary servitude

were historically common throughout much of Africa. In some societies,
unfree laborers constituted the maMority of the population (LoveMoy 2011).
Even slaves could own slaves, who performed a wide range of tasks that
included providing sex. A lingering association between same-sex sexuality
and slavery in the popular imagination today complicates initiatives to win
rights and dignities for sexual minorities.

Slaves were generated through raids and kidnapping, by voluntary sale of

children or other dependents, and by removing accused witches and
criminals from free society. People suspected of witchcraft may have
included individuals whose sexual behavior could not be explained or
accommodated within the heteronormative tent (including homosexuals, as
Ikpe 2009 claims). The internal market for slaves was probably the largest
in absolute numbers. An export market oriented to the Islamic world (trans-
Sahara, trans–Red Sea, and trans–Indian Ocean) also increasingly became
internal to Africa as powerful Islamic states consolidated across the Sahel in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the sixteenth through the
nineteenth centuries there was an export market to the Atlantic Ocean
islands, then to the Americas, to the Cape of Good Hope, and to plantation
economies in the Indian Ocean. The suppression of these slave trades and of
slavery itself over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was
commonly cited at the time to Mustify the extension of European
colonialism, although barely disguised forms of slavery, such as indentured
labor, survived through the colonial period and indeed, persist into the
present day.

The transatlantic slave trade has tended to attract the greatest attention on
account of its scale, brutality, and role in stimulating the Industrial
Revolution in Western Europe and North America. From the perspective of
the history of same-sex sexualities, however, this trade was significant
mainly for occasionally making traditional same-sex practices visible to
European observers, and transplanting these from Africa to the Americas.
Europeans were seeking slaves primarily for agricultural production for the
capitalist market (sugar, tobacco, cotton, and so forth). Exports from Africa
of males outnumbered females by roughly two to one, and it was during the
process of capturing and transporting them that cases of male-male
sexuality were revealed (Sweet 1996; Murray and Roscoe 1998). During
this period, anal penetration by or of cult priests was observed as a form of
initiation to the cult that represented a transfer of knowledge and power
among the Yoruba and Ovimbundu peoples. This practice reputedly
survived the transatlantic Mourney to become entrenched in slave culture in
the Americas, expressed, for example, in the adé(“passive homosexual”)
priests of candomblé in northeastern Brazil (Matory 2005). By contrast,
sexuality was a core feature of the internal and Islamic slave trades, which
were predominantly of females. Women were valued for their subsistence
agricultural and domestic labor, and for sex. For many female slaves, that
low status was a phase on the way to attaining freedom through giving birth
and Moining a polygynous marriage as a Munior wife (Robertson and Klein
1983).

Muslim Societies
Male slaves were used for production and porterage, but also for military
and administrative purposes. Indeed, they could rise to positions of
considerable authority in state bureaucracies. There was also a trade in
eunuchs, who were valued in the Muslim world for their loyalty to their
masters (rather than to their own families or dynastic ambition), for their
discretion with the masters' female wives, and for their use as sexual obMects
in their own right. A significant export market was to supply the slaves who
ruled Egypt for several hundred years, the Mamluks.

The Mamluks were men imported into Egypt as soldiers, mainly from
Central Asia, the Caucasus region, and the Balkans. A Turkish Mamluk
effectively ruled in Egypt from as early as 868 CE, although in the later
years of that dynasty black Mamluks played a key role in government. They
were defeated in 905 by invading Arab armies, but the system was retained.
Mamluks lived together in barracks in the encampment that became Cairo,
conducted endless military training, and fought fiercely to defend the
Islamic world from its many enemies. While they could marry women,
neither their wives nor children could inherit any wealth and property. Their
ranks as a class were refilled not by producing their own children but by
purchasing and attracting recruits, whom they trained in the martial arts and
masculine honor. The Mamluks were also notorious for being “addicted to
homosexuality” (Murray and Roscoe 1997, 161), primarily with eunuchs
imported from elsewhere in Africa rather than with each other.

Islam was sometimes amenable to such relationships, in part because of the

way it recognizes (and regulates) slavery, and by how it categorizes sinful
behavior. Heterosexual intercourse outside of legal marriage or concubinage
(zina) was the preeminent sexual “enormity.” The penalty for zina was
death, and it is easy to see how this arose in relation to the culture of family
honor, and particularly masculine honor in the Arab and Berber worlds. The
need to protect the virginity of daughters, the modesty of wives, and hence
the good reputation of the family over which the husband presided, was
paramount. Temptations to commit zina therefore had to be reduced by
practices that kept apart boys and girls and men and women in all but the
most controlled, carefully watched settings. Strictly enforced segregation by
sex meant people spent long periods without any prospects of heterosexual
relations. By many accounts, this gave rise to same-sex relations as the
lesser of two evils. Indeed, the social rank of the person being penetrated
and his or her legal relationship to the penetrator, rather than the act of
penetration itself, is what determined the level of moral infraction. Many of
the scholars who interpreted Islamic Murisprudence over the centuries thus
found same-sex relations between social equals reprehensible, but tacitly
condoned the use of slaves however one wished (Gadelrab 2016).

West Africa
The Mihads that established caliphates and other reformist Islamic states
across West Africa imported ideas and institutions from the Middle East,
including the use of Mamluks (Stilwell 2004). No study has yet revealed
whether such slaves among the Hausa behaved sexually as did their like in
Egypt. However, an institution arose in Hausa society, and among the
Wolof to the west, that legitimized effeminate men as providers of sex for
“normal” men. The ‘yan daudu (singular: ‘dan daudu) were not necessarily
in involuntary servitude, but they engaged in sex work, derived their
income therefrom, and as such were stigmatized as not far from slaves.
‘Yan daudu performed traditionally feminine roles including cooking,
singing, dancing, and using certain gestures and language that they
described as wasa (play) to describe the pleasure they derived from these
activities (Gaudio 2009). The ‘yan daudu used their feminine mannerisms
to attract potential patrons. Among the Wolof, a similar role was performed
by gor-digen (men-women), who also wore feminine attire and hairstyles.
‘Yan daudu were sometimes linked to bori, a cult of spirit possession
thought to be rooted in the pre-Islamic past. Bori and zar, a similar
phenomenon, was known in Sudan and east Africa, honored saints almost in
the manner of ancestral worship, and was often frowned upon if not directly
suppressed by Islamic purists. Bori allowed the poorest and most oppressed
to vent their emotions in a cathartic way, and for that reason was popular
among women, slaves, and men who “did the deed” (i.e., had sex with men;
Gaudio 2009). Shrines were, meanwhile, typically managed by a woman in
whose body a venerated male spirit came to reside. As a male spirit
incarnate, she could not have sexual relations with men, but rather took
female adepts or servants with whom, it was sometimes whispered, she did
have sex. One Islamic scholar from the eastern Senegal region left a
damning account of this on his way home from the haMM to Mecca in 1809. It
is worth quoting at length one of the very rare instances of a black African
writing on this topic:

Do you not see that they take unaccountable sums of money at

the hands of [black] women for the worship of the Minn and for
lesbian conduct? Muslim women have begun to steal money
from their husbands to pay for the worship of idols and [the
practice of] lesbianism. Do you not see that women have
exchanged their men folk for slave women? Do you not see that
whoever embraces a slave woman, if she is beautiful or
wealthy, no one can marry her and she can be married only to
none but the bori?

(QUOTED IN MONTANA 2004, 190–191)

Non-Muslim societies also made use of eunuchs for ritual purposes. In

Dahomey (a kingdom situated in the geographical area currently occupied
by the Republic of Benin) during the nineteenth century, eunuchs were
among at least three groups of individuals, pledged in service to the king,
who exhibited some degree of gender and sexual diversity. Men were
turned into eunuchs through an operation described as involving the pulling
apart of the testicles and said to be fatal if deferred into adulthood. The
eunuchs were allotted the title of the “king's wife.” There was a head
eunuch who supervised other eunuchs and attended to the king personally.
Excluding royalty, the head eunuch was the fourth-most powerful person in
the realm and served as a minister of the palace interior. Some eunuchs
were said to look almost identical to women in their physical appearance.
Eunuchs, along with several of the king's female wives, were executed
when their king died (Burton 1864).

The lagredis were also high-ranking male officials in the king's council who
performed a variety of functions, including accompanying the king's
emissaries, monitoring royal negotiations, and providing feedback to the
king. Lagredis were feminine in nature and appearance and were selected to
serve in their roles at a young age (Murray and Roscoe 1998). In the
nineteenth century the Ashanti and Denkyira (kingdoms situated in the
geographical area currently occupied by the Ashanti and Central Regions of
the Republic of Ghana) also had customs that provided an environment for
homoerotic relations to develop. This tradition was known as the ɔkra or
crabbah (soul) custom, whereby royalty chose slaves of the same sex to
treat specially, bestow with gifts, and have an intimate relationship with
(Ellis 1883; Hutchinson [1861] 1967). They were reputedly killed at their
master's or mistress's funeral to accompany him/her to the afterlife. Donald
L. Donham (1990) describes yet another ritual use of male-male sex
through the ashtime role in Maale society of southern Ethiopia. Ashtime
(which Donham translates as “male transvestites,” but it would probably be
more accurate to say “transgendered”) performed domestic labor and ritual
functions in the king's court. The king, as “the male principle incarnate,”
had to be shielded from pollution by female sexuality at key moments in the
ritual life of the nation. Men who approached him after having had sex with
their wives endangered his purity as a symbolic figure; hence, they should
either abstain altogether, or have sex with an ashtime in order to protect the
health of the nation.

Warriors and Boy-Wives

In the early twentieth century a practice was observed among the Zandes
(variation: Azandes, an ethnic group currently found in South Sudan,
Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Central African Republic) where
bachelor warriors married and had sexual relations with boys. The boys
were typically adolescents and young adults, and while not technically
slaves or even servants, they were obliged in a patriarchal, gerontocratic
society to obey their elders' commands. These marriages were akin to
heterosexual marriages in those communities. Bride-price was paid, and the
boy was lavished with gifts. The warrior addressed the boy's parents as his
in-laws and performed services for them as men did for the parents of their
brides. Additionally, the boy performed some traditional duties of a wife,
including fetching water and collecting firewood. Boy-wives bore their
warriors' shields during Mourneys, and the couple slept together on the same
bed and engaged in intercrural sexual intercourse (nonpenetrative sexual
intercourse between the thighs). Any man who had intercourse with another
warrior's boy-wife could be sued for adultery and was liable to compensate
the offended spouse (Evans-Pritchard 1970).

These practices, like large-scale polygyny, largely disappeared under the

influence of Christian ideology and the emerging colonial political
economy. Yet, similar arrangements arose in response to the skewed
demography of racial capitalism. Best attested in southern Africa, but also
found among long-distance porters elsewhere on the continent, boy-wives
accompanied men as servants and sexual companions on the long Mourneys
to and from work in such industrial centers as Johannesburg (Harries 1994).
Young, unaccompanied arrivals at the mines were recruited by older men
into the same servile relationship patterned on a normal heterosexual
marriage. The “wife” in these cases would eventually mature out of that
role to become a husband in his own right. In some cases, there was a
metaphysical aspect to the relationship—to protect the senior partner
against the dangers of work, or to achieve a promotion and wage hike
through the ritual transgression of sexual norms (Niehaus 2002).

African history is filled with persons who exhibited sexual and gender
diversity. Some of these individuals were either in positions of enforced
labor, or bound to service to their same-sex partners. Indeed, Stephen
Murray and Will Roscoe (1998) note that in discussing the history of
homosexual relationships across the continent, one must bear in mind that it
is only in relatively modern times that there have been expectations for
romantic relationships to be mutual and egalitarian. The long history of
slavery, servitude, and same-sex relations makes it difficult for many
Africans to imagine same-sex sexuality as potentially loving, equal, and
deserving of human rights protections.

SEE ALSO Eunuchs; Gender, Flexible Systems, in Africa; Islam in Africa

South of the Sahara; Religion and Same-Sex Behaviors: Islam; Sex
Work/Sex Tourism/Sex Trafficking in Africa; Slavery and Sodomy in
Brazil; Witchcraft/Occult in Africa

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ali, Kecia. Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qurʾan,
Hadith, and Jurisprudence. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

Burton, Richard F. Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome. London: Tinsley

Brothers, 1864.

Burton, Richard F. “Notes on the Dahoman.” In Selected Papers on

Anthropology, Travel and Exploration, edited by N. M. Penzer, 109–
133. London: A. M. Philpot, 1865.
Donham, Donald L. History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in
Marxism and Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.

Ellis, Alfred. The Land of the Fetish. London: Chapman and Hall, 1883.

Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age
of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008.

Evans-Pritchard, Edward. “Sexual Inversion among the Azande.” American

Anthropologist 72, no. 6 (1970): 1428–1434.

Gadelrab, Sherry Sayed. Medicine and Morality in Egypt: Gender and

Sexuality in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. London: I.B.
Taurus, 2016.

Gaudio, Rudolf Pell. Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African
City. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Harries, Patrick. Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers

in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1994.

Hutchinson, Thomas J. Ten Years' Wanderings among the

Ethiopians. London: Frank Cass, 1967. First edition published 1861.

Ikpe, Eno Blankson. “Homosexuality: Secretly Nigerian.” Global South:

Sephise e-Magazine 5, no. 4 (October 2009): 43–44.

LoveMoy, Paul E. Transformations in African Slavery. Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Matory, J. Lorand. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism,

and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005.
Montana, Ismael Musah. “Aḥmad ibn al-Qāḍī al-Timbukāḍwī on the Bori
Ceremonies of Tunis.” In Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam, edited by Paul
E. LoveMoy, 173–198. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2004.

Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Islamic Homosexualities:

Culture, History, and Literature. New York: New York University
Press,
1997.

Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female
Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. New York: St. Martin's,
1998.

Niehaus, Isak. “Renegotiating Masculinity in the South African Lowveld:

Narratives of Male-Male Sex in Labour Compounds and in Prisons.” In
“AIDS in Context.” Special issue, African Studies 61, no. 1 (2002): 77–97.

Stilwell, Sean. “The Development of ‘Mamlūk’ Slavery in the Sokoto

Caliphate.” In Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam, edited by Paul E.
LoveMoy,
87–109. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2004.

Sweet, James. “Male Homosexuality and Spiritism in the African Diaspora:

The Legacies of a Link.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 2 (1996):
184–202.
ISIS Gay Trials
HANADI AL-SAMMAN
Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature University of
Virginia, Charlottesville

The atrocities committed against gay men by those affiliated

with the Mihadist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria.

After its emergence in 2011, the Mihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria (ISIS) swiftly took a large amount of territory in Iraq and Syria,
taking advantage of the Sunni/Shiʿi power imbalance created by the US
invasion in the former and the civil war in the latter. The group's
fundamentalist interpretation of Islam resulted in various atrocities
committed against both people and property. These transgressions included
subMecting the people in the areas that ISIS controlled—such as Mosul and
FalluMah in Iraq and Raqqa and other cities in Syria—to strict Islamic
interpretations in matters of clothing and worship. ISIS also destroyed
world heritage sites, such as the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria, on charges
that they promoted idolatry. In addition, ISIS soldiers enslaved Yazidi
women in sexual servitude and executed suspected members of the LGBT
community in what is dubbed the ISIS gay trials.

Though an exact number of those persecuted by ISIS on charges of liwat

(sodomy) is neither available nor verifiable, the New York–based OutRight
Action International estimates that thirty-six men had been executed as of
2015 (Associated Press 2015). The executions took place in various cities
under ISIS control, including Mosul, Raqqa, Palmyra, and others in the
Syrian northern region. Reports come from individuals who have escaped
areas controlled by ISIS and are awaiting resettlement in the West, in
Lebanon, or Turkey. One such account, told by Omar (not his real name), is
of two men, Hawas Mallah (age thirty-two) and Mohammad Salamah (age
twenty-one), who were executed in Palmyra in December 2015. The two
were found guilty of sodomy by an ISIS Mudge, who ordered them to be
thrown off the roof of the nearby Wael Hotel to cleanse their sins and to
deter others who might engage in same-sex sexual practices. Asked whether
they were satisfied with the Mudgment, Mallah stated that he preferred a
bullet to the head instead, while Salamah begged for a chance to repent.
Nevertheless, ISIS militants proceeded to execute the Mudge's verdict,
announcing that two of “Lot's people” would be punished on that day in
Palmyra's main square. Subsequently, a black van carried Mallah and
Salamah to the execution site, where they were both hurled to the ground
from the top of the Wael Hotel; Salamah landed on his head and died
instantly, but Mallah, who was tied to a chair, did not, so an ISIS fighter
shot him in the head. The bodies were then hung up for two days in
Palmyra's Freedom Square, each with a placard on his chest that read, “He
received the punishment for practicing the crime of Lot People”
(Associated Press 2015).

These executions took place after ISIS issued its own penal code on 15
December 2014, titled “Clarification [regarding] the Hudud [Qurʿanic
punishments].” The document details the punishments—according to shariʿa
— for various illegal acts, including gay sex: “Death for the person
committing the act, as well as for the one receiving it.” ISIS declared that it
distributed the penal code as a reminder to people living in the “caliphate”
and warned that it would be vigilantly enforced (Counter Extremism ProMect
2018). The friends and family of those convicted of sodomy may also find
themselves in grave danger because ISIS can access the phone contacts and
Facebook accounts of suspected homosexuals to entrap others; ISIS
informants masquerade as potential dates, thereby catching people
redhanded. Those who had escaped to neighboring Turkey or Lebanon
admitted to being afraid that their own families would turn them in to ISIS.
As refugees, they remain easy targets for persecution by their local and host
communities. For that reason, human rights groups describe Syrian and
Iraqi gay refugees as “double refugees.”

Islamic Rulings on Liwat Punishment

Whether ISIS's gay persecution is the correct Islamic punishment for those
who engage in same-sex sexual acts is a matter of dispute. Like Judaism
and Christianity, Islam frowns on same-sex sexual practices. The main
admonition comes from the story of Lot and his warning to his people never
to commit the sin of desiring men and preferring them over women. The
seventh sura (chapter or section) of the Qurʿan, known as Surat al-ʿAraf,
describes same-sex sexual behavior as al-fahisha (sin) in the following
manner: “And Lut said to his people: ‘Do ye commit lewdness such as no
people in creation [ever] committed before you? For ye practice your lusts
on men in preference to women: ye are indeed a people transgressing
beyond bounds’” (7:80–81). Surat Hud continues the story and details the
reason for the punishment of Lot's people. When God's messengers visited
Lot's house, the people of Sodom barged in, wanting to rape them. Lot
offered his daughters for them to marry instead, but they refused, telling
him, “Well dost thou know we have no need of thy daughters: indeed thou
knowest quite well what we want!” (11:79). It was at that moment that God
ordered the destruction of Sodom, turning it upside down and showering it
with brimstones: “When Our decree issued, we turned (the cities) upside
down, and rained down on them brimstones hard as baked clay, spread layer
on layer” (11:82).

In these suras, the Qurʾan never mentions individual punishments for

persons engaging in same-sex sexual activity but rather a collective
punishment of the entire city of Sodom and its inhabitants, with the
exception of Lot's own family (excluding his unrighteous wife). ISIS's
punishment ritual of throwing suspected homosexuals from rooftops and
then stoning them comes from its own interpretation of the latter Qurʾanic
sura (Hud 11:82); by analogy, they equate the heavenly shower of
brimstones to throwing convicted men from buildings. Additionally, several
hadiths (the sayings of the prophet Muhammad) have been interpreted as
ordaining killing as a punishment of Lot's people, although they do not
specify the method of killing. For example, ʿAbdullah bin ʿAbbas cites the
following weak (in the sense of not following the proper chain of
references) hadith, “If you find anyone doing Lot's people's actions, kill
both the active and the passive partners” (quoted in Jawzīyyah 1996, 334).
In the same vein, religious scholars have debated whether liwat is similar to
zina (adultery) in nature and in punishment. The caliphs Abu Bakr (573–
634) and ʿAli ibn Talib (600–661) found that “liwat's punishment should be
harsher than that of zina, which should be killing at any rate, whether the
convicted is single or married” (quoted in Jawzīyyah 1996, 331). Others,
including al-Shafiʿi (c. 767–820) and Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal (780–855),
concluded that the punishment for liwat should be equal to that of zina
(usually stoning for married people and flogging for single persons). A third
group, including al-Hakim (996–1021) and Abu Hanifa (699–767), argues
that “liwat's punishment should be lesser than zina, and should only be
restricted to taʿzir [prevention or corrective measures]” (quoted in
Jawzīyyah 1996, 331).

Contemporary punishments for sodomy in most Middle Eastern countries

vary a great deal, ranging from imprisonment in most Arab countries to
death by stoning in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Mauritania, and by hanging
in Iran (Bearak and Cameron 2016).

The LGBT Brigade

Amid the outbreak of ISIS persecutions of suspected homosexual men,
reports surfaced about the creation of an LGBT military unit fighting
alongside Kurdish forces in northern Syria to exact revenge on ISIS. As
with all information on ISIS and LGBT intersections, it is hard to
independently verify the identities of brigade members, their financiers, and
even whether they are a real entity or Must a hoax. On 25 July 2017
BenMamin Kentish of the Independent (London) reported that a group of
international volunteers fighting ISIS had formed a military unit named The
Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA; pronounced “tequila”),
operating under the umbrella of the International Revolutionary People's
Guerrilla Forces (IRPGF), an anarchist group taking part in the fight against
ISIS. TQILA's formation was announced in a statement posted on its
Twitter page that read: “We, the International Revolutionary People's
Guerrilla Forces (IRPGF) formally announce the formation of The Queer
Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA), a subgroup of the IRPGF
comprised of LGBTQI+ comrades as well as others who seek to smash the
gender binary and advance the women's revolution as well as the broader
gender and sexual revolution” (Kentish 2017). Though TQILA asserts that
“the images of gay men being thrown off roofs and stoned to death by
Daesh [ISIS] was something [that they] could not idly watch,” it appears
that their main audience was the international groups they addressed on
Twitter and Facebook. The photos they posted on social media showed
masked soldiers in military uniforms holding guns and standing in front of a
banner reading: “These Faggots Kill Fascists, TQILA-IRPGF.” Once again,
there is no way of authenticating the photo to determine whether it was real
or staged.

The paraphernalia of a rainbow flag and a banner displaying the group's

logo—an AK-47 on a pink background—held aloft by unidentified soldiers
in what is purportedly Raqqa, seem to conform to what Joseph Massad
(2007) calls a “Gay International” movement's agenda and discourse rather
than a local cause and concern. Supplanting the local terms luti (a person
who engages in liwat) and ISIS with the Western discourse of “faggots” and
“fascists” undermines the credibility of the group, framing it as an import of
the LGBT international agenda rather than a local response. To complicate
matters more, three days after the Twitter announcement of the TQILA
formation, the Kurdish militia unit (of the Yekineyen Parastina Gel [YPG],
or People's Protection Units) that TQILA was supposed to fight alongside
denied the group's existence and the authenticity of the photo. Mustafa Bali,
a spokesperson for the Kurdish-Arab coalition known as the Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF), of which the YPG is a maMor player, posted on
his Facebook page the following statement, which was later aired on the
Kurdish news site ARA News: “We in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF),
while emphasizing our deep respect for human rights, including the rights
of homosexuals, we deny the formation of such a battalion within the
framework of our forces and we consider this news to be untrue” (Moore
2017).

ISIS-Inspired Killings in the Diaspora

The threat for LGBT individuals does not end with their escape from ISIS.
Many LGBT refugees in the diaspora report fearing violence from ISIS-
affiliated persons or homophobic, conservative populations in their host
countries. On 25 July 2016 the decapitated and mutilated body of
Muhammad Wisam Sankari, a Syrian refugee, was found in Yenikapi, a
central district in Istanbul. Five months before he was killed, Sankari was
targeted by a group of men who gang-raped him in a nearby forest; in
addition, he and some of his roommates had been harassed by phone and
text messages threatening to kill them. Sankari reported these incidents to
the Turkish authorities, who did not take them seriously. A Turkish LGBT
group, Kaos GL, reported that Sankari was trying to be relocated to another
country through the United Nations Refugee Agency because his life was in
danger (BBC News 2016). Two days before his body was discovered,
Sankari left his home in the conservative Fatih district and then went
missing. One of his friends described the condition of his body: “They cut
Wisam violently. It was so violent; two knives had broken inside of him.
They beheaded him. His upper body was beyond recognition; his internal
organs were out. We recognised our friend from his trousers” (Agence
France-Presse 2016). Though sodomy has been legal in Turkey since 1923,
conservative attitudes and political upheaval and threats by ultranationalist
groups have led to the banning of the annual gay pride march since 2015.
It is not only refugees who face threats from ISIS. An ISIS-inspired attack
on the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, on 12 June 2016 resulted in
the deaths of fortynine people, with fifty-three more inMured. Before the
attack, the shooter, a US citizen of Afghan origin named Omar Mateen,
made a 911 call in which he reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS leader
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Following a shootout with police in which Mateen
was killed, ISIS officially claimed responsibility for the attack, announcing
that “an Islamic State fighter” had “targeted a nightclub for homosexuals”
(Tsukayama et al. 2016). Despite Mateen's claims and ISIS's assumption of
responsibility for the attack, Mateen was not a religious person, and an FBI
investigation into his background showed that he was not affiliated with
ISIS and did not have any help in planning the attack. Other reports alleged
that he was a psychologically troubled person with doubts about his own
sexual identity. An examination of his cell phone indicated that he
frequented gay dating apps before the attack; it is unclear whether Mateen
was employing a tactic often used by ISIS to ensnare LGBT individuals, or
he was a closeted gay person whose guilt motivated him to attack the Pulse
club as a form of religious atonement for his “sin” of homosexuality.
Mateen's father adamantly denied that his son was homosexual, stating,
“Let me tell you: my son is not gay. He's not.” Mateen's ex-wife, Sitora
Yusufiy, is not so sure. “It's Must making more sense in my head from my
personal experience that this was probably it,” she said. “He might have
been homosexual himself and lived that lifestyle but could never ever come
clean about it because of the standards of his father, because of the
obligation to be a perfect son” (Alter 2016).

The difficulty of finding credible reporting, the lack of a uniform Islamic

verdict on the punishment for sodomy, and the intersections of local and
global LGBT international networks with reference to ISIS gay trials and
hate crimes make documenting and evaluating these incidents challenging,
and raise suspicions of their entanglement with global pinkwashing
practices. These methods use LGBT human rights issues to Mustify targeting,
bombing, and colonizing Middle Eastern lands such as Iraq and Syria.
Unfortunately, the shadow cast by pinkwashing tactics obscures the
visibility of the oppression of Middle Eastern LGBT populations due to
entrenched homophobic beliefs and praxes.

SEE ALSO Homosexual Acts in Shariʿa; Human Rights and Queer Arab
Refugees; Queen Boat Trials (2001–2002); Spectra ProMect

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agence France-Presse. “Missing Gay Syrian Refugee Found Beheaded in
Istanbul.” Guardian (London), 4 August 2016.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/04/body-missing-gay-syrian-
refugee-muhammed-wisam-sankari-found-beheaded-istanbul

Alter, Charlotte. “Ex-Wife Says Orlando Shooter Might Have Been Hiding
Homosexuality from His Family.” Time, 15 June 2016.
http://time.com/4369577/orlando-shooting-sitora-yusufiy-omar-mateen-
gay/

Associated Press. “Inside Look at ISIS' Brutal Persecution of Gays.” CBS

News, 2 December 2015. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/isis-persecution-
gay-men-murder-lgbt-muslim-society/

BBC News. “Gay Syrian Man Beheaded and Mutilated in Turkey.” 4

August 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36973314

Bearak, Max, and Darla Cameron. “Here Are the 10 Countries Where
Homosexuality May Be Punished by Death.” Washington Post, 16 June
2016.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/13/here-
are-the-10-countries-where-homosexuality-may-be-punished-by-death-2/?
utm_term=.81545f10b237
Counter Extremism ProMect. “ISIS's Persecution of Gay People.” Accessed
30 May 2018. https://www.counterextremism.com/content/isis-persecution-
gay-people

Jawzīyyah, Ibn Qayyīm, al-. Al-Jawáb al-Káfī Liman Sa' al ʿAn al-Dawá
‘al-Sháfī, aw al-Dá’ wa-al-Dawá' [The comprehensive answer for those
who asked about the panacea, or disease and medicine]. Cairo: Maktabat
Ibn Taymīyyah, 1996.

Kentish, BenMamin. “‘The Queer Insurrection’: Coalition Forces Fighting

ISIS in Syria Form First LGBT Unit.” Independent (London), 25 July 2017.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/queer-insurrection-
isis-lgbt-unit-gay-islamic-state-fight-forces-coalition-syria-middle-east-
a7858651.html

Massad, Joseph. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2007.

Moore, Jack. “Kurdish Militia Denies Ties to Foreign Fighters Claiming

New LGBT Unit in Syria.” Newsweek, 26 July 2017.
http://www.newsweek.com/kurdish-militia-denies-ties-foreign-fighters-
claiming-new-lgbt-unit-syria-642002

Tsukayama, Hayley, Mark Berman, and Jerry Markon. “Gunman Who

Killed 49 in Orlando Nightclub Had Pledged Allegiance to ISIS.”
Washington Post, 13 June 2016.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/06/12/orlando-
nightclub-shooting-about-20-dead-in-domestic-terror-incident-at-gay-club/?
utm_term=.7e8222e1ef8d
Iskandariyya … Leh? (1979; Youssef
Chahine)
MICHAEL ALLAN
Associate Professor and Petrone Faculty Scholar, Department of
Comparative Literature
University of Oregon

Egyptian movie that includes a subplot of a same-sex

encounter between an Egyptian and a British soldier.

Iskandariyya … leh? (Alexandria … why?) is the first of a series of

autobiographical films directed by the Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine
(1926–2008). It was critically acclaimed in Egypt and internationally and
was awarded the Silver Bear Special Jury Prize at the 29th Berlin
International Film Festival in 1979. Among a number of stories woven
together, the film includes a subplot of a same-sex encounter between an
aristocratic Egyptian and a young British soldier.

Plot Summary
Set against the backdrop of World War II (1939–1945), the film focuses on
the coming-of-age of Yehia (played by Mohsen Mohiedine), a student at the
prestigious Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, who dreams of traveling
to Hollywood. Much of the story follows Yehia as he develops his love of
acting and struggles to find the resources to study at the Pasadena
Playhouse in California. He is shown eschewing the pursuit of women for
his love of cinema, and the film tracks his development as an aspiring actor
from his recitation of scenes from Hamlet to his involvement in the drama
club at his school. As the film progresses, Yehia struggles to persuade his
father to support him in his Hollywood dreams. After a short time working
in a bank, Yehia finally gains admission to the Pasadena Playhouse and
secures the support of his family, including his father and grandmother, both
of whom are instrumental in helping him procure the visa and financing to
undertake the voyage to the United States.

SOURCE: MISR INTERNATIONAL FILMS

DVD Cover of the English Version of Iskandariyya … Leh?. Among a number of
stories woven together in this critically acclaimed movie by Egyptian filmmaker
Youssef Chahine is a subplot of a same-sex encounter between an aristocratic Egyptian
and a young British soldier.

In addition to Yehia's story, the film offers a broader portrait of wartime

Alexandria, with attention to groups often written out of accounts framed in
ethnic, linguistic, or religious terms. The film both opens and closes with
scenes at the coast: the initial scene is of children playing in the water,
intercut with images of Nazi wartime air strikes, and the ending scene is of
Yehia's departure aboard a ship destined for the United States. What
emerges is a vision of Alexandria that points to the city's rich history and
complex social composition. Among the various stories told, the film
includes a nationalist group plotting to assassinate British prime minister
Winston Churchill as part of a plan to liberate Egypt from British rule. It
also includes stories about the working classes and connections to the
Communist Party, and it gestures at various points to the Christian, Muslim,
and Jewish communities intersecting in Alexandria. Newsreel footage
interspersed throughout various scenes keeps alive the interplay between
the film's narrative and the historical backdrop against which it all
transpires.

Most prominent among the various subplots in the film are two distinct love
stories, both of which highlight the challenges of taboo relationships. There
is the story of an affair between Sarah (played by Naglaa Fathi), the
daughter of a wealthy Jewish aristocrat, and Ibrahim (played by Ahmed
Zaki), a college student and member of the communist resistance who is
eventually arrested and sentenced to fifteen years' hard labor. At a crucial
moment, anticipating the Nazi invasion of Egypt, Sarah reveals that she is
pregnant with Ibrahim's son Must as she and her father are forced to depart
Egypt for South Africa and, eventually, Palestine. Later in the film and
following the war, Sarah returns to introduce the imprisoned Ibrahim to
their son, whom he greets through the bars of the prison. As they speak,
Sarah bemoans that Judaism has shifted from being a religion to being a
nationality, and she remarks on the challenging conditions of living in
Haifa, far from her true homeland in Alexandria.

The other key subplot is the story of a nationalist aristocrat, Adel (played by
Ahmed Mehrez), and a working-class British soldier, Tommy (played by
Gerry Sundquist). As the film begins, Adel arranges to purchase a
kidnapped soldier, ideally one from New Zealand, to be murdered as part of
the struggle against British occupation. When drunken Tommy is eventually
delivered, Adel brings him to the seaside, leans him across the rail, points
his pistol toward Tommy's slouched body, but ultimately finds himself
unable to pull the trigger. In the next scene, Tommy awakens in his
underwear in Adel's bed, seemingly unaware of how he got there. Intrigued
by the young soldier, Adel looks upon him fondly, offering him breakfast
and then introducing him as his friend when someone enters the room. In
subsequent scenes, Adel is shown reading a letter from Tommy, who reports
on the battle of El Alamein (al--ʿAlamayn) and complains of the hardship of
war and the hierarchy between the generals and the soldiers. Upon the
announcement of British victory, Adel discovers that Tommy has, in fact,
been killed, perhaps even shortly after composing the letter from the front.
A scene of Adel weeping at Tommy's grave site gives way to a montage of
headstones of British, Egyptian, and German soldiers killed in Alexandria,
as Vera Lynn's “The White Cliffs of Dover” plays on the soundtrack.

In the end, the romantic connections between Sarah and Ibrahim, on the one
hand, and Adel and Tommy, on the other, are both thwarted by social
conditions. And in a film that otherwise tracks the hopes and aspirations of
Yehia in pursuit of his dreams, both of these romantic subplots end in
tragedy.

SOURCE: MISR INTERNATIONAL FILMS

 Scene from the Movie Iskandariyya … Leh? (1979). In this scene, the British soldier
Tommy wakes up in bed to find he is being held at gunpoint by Adel. Although Adel
had intended to kill Tommy to advance the cause against British occupation of Egypt,
the two men develop a forbidden relationship.

Iskandariyya … leh? in the Context of

Chahine's Work
As the first film in his autobiographical series, Iskandariyya … leh?
presents Chahine's early life through the character of Yehia and highlights
his connections to Alexandria, filmmaking, and the history of Egypt. This
first film concludes with Yehia's departure to begin his studies at the
Pasadena Playhouse. The second, Hadduta masriyya (1982; An Egyptian
story), deals with Chahine in his thirties and forties as he aims to establish
his career as a filmmaker and struggles with his health. Much of the film
transpires in the form of a surreal courtroom drama with staged flashbacks
as he undergoes heart surgery in London. As was the case in Iskandariyya
… leh?, Chahine incorporates archival footage, and he also includes a scene
with homoerotic glances between himself and his London taxi driver,
leaving rather unambiguous the desire between the two men. The third film,
Iskandariyya kaman wa kaman (1989; Alexandria, again and forever),
considers the director's then-present moment and depicts the decision of a
favorite actor, ʿAmr, to leave to pursue films financed by oil money. The
film is seen as a reflection on Mohiedine's break with Chahine but connects
this incident to social questions regarding the Egyptian film industry,
contemporary Egypt, and the star system. Together, these three films help to
secure Chahine's status as a global auteur, even if they never met with the
popular success of his earlier film Bab el hadid (1958; Cairo station).

There are few directors who share Chahine's iconic status among Egyptian
and Arab filmmakers. In 1997 he was awarded the 50th Anniversary Prize
for lifetime achievement at the Cannes Film Festival, and he is well known
for helping to launch a number of acting careers, including those of Omar
Sharif and Mohamed Henedi. Chahine's filmography is remarkable for
spanning a range of genres and styles, at times even within a single film. He
is perhaps most famous for his 1958 film Bab el hadid in which he himself
performed the lead role of Qinawi, a worker in the rail yard who falls in
love with Hanuma (played by Hind Rostom). His 1969 film Al-ard (The
land), an official entry at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, is based on the
novel by Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi and revolves around a conflict
between a rural landlord and peasants in the 1930s. Chahine is also widely
respected for his historical epics, including Al-Nasir Salah al-Din (1963;
Saladin the Victorious), which presents the twelfth-century Muslim leader
Saladin as a sort of hero of Pan-Arabism, as well as Al-masir (1997;
Destiny), which recounts the story of the twelfth-century Muslim
philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës) in the context of an authoritarian
government and religious opposition to his work. Never one to shy away
from political engagement, Chahine also directed a number of
documentaries and films that blurred the boundaries between historical
fiction and documentary, including a film dealing with social life in
contemporary Cairo and earlier work addressing the formation of the
Aswan Dam.

Queerness in Chahine's Films

Of the many social, cultural, and political issues that Chahine broached in
his work, same-sex desire and queerness draw attention, either implicitly or
explicitly, in many of his films. In various instances, Chahine's films
present same-sex romance between a foreign man and an Egyptian, and at
other times, he highlights homoeroticism in a more general sense, reversing
or playing with codes of obMectification, spectacle, and looking relations.

In the first of these instances, same-sex relationships seem most pronounced

at moments of imperial interaction, as though to suggest that homosexuality
is a sort of foreign importation. Chahine's Al-nas wa al-Nil (1972; The Nile
and its people), for example, includes a love story between Barak, a Nubian
working on the Aswan Dam, and Nicolai, a Soviet engineer assigned to the
proMect. The second film of the series, Hadduta masriyya, includes a scene
highlighting the director's flirtation with a taxi driver in London, and a later
documentary commissioned by French television, Le Caire, raconté par
Youssef Chahine (1991; Cairo, as told by Youssef Chahine), highlights
relationships between gay men from the West and Egyptians. And true to
the conflation of foreignness and homosexuality, Chahine's film Wedaʾan
Bonapart (1985; Adieu, Bonaparte) contains a love affair between a French
savant and two Egyptian teens. This aspect of Wedaʾan Bonapart was quite
heavily criticized at the time, and Chahine's subsequent films often allude
even more indirectly to such encounters. It is worth noting that
Iskandariyya … leh? deviates from the common account in these other
films. Adel is the aristocrat with social power, and he consciously plays
with the codes surrounding the imperial nature of Tommy's presence in
Egypt. Unlike the other films that place the Egyptian characters in the
position of the seduced, in Iskandariyya … leh? the relationship between
Adel and Tommy is one figured explicitly around the war and its structures
of domination and insubordination. In this instance, anticolonial sentiments
structure the initial plot to deliver Tommy to Adel, and the usual figuration
of seducer and seduced is reversed, with Tommy held captive under Adel's
control. No longer a foreign importation imposed on Egypt, homosexuality
emerges within the framework of anticolonial resistance.

In addition to the various depictions of same-sex desire between characters,

Chahine's filmography also manifests queerness in other ways, blurring the
boundaries between cinematic looking and male bodies. Iskandariyya
kaman wa kaman, the third film in the autobiographical series, emphasizes
the filmmaker's infatuation with a young actor playing Alexander, even
while noting that the filmmaker is married. In these instances,
homosexuality is less something broached thematically than something that
permeates formal looking relations. In Al-ʿusfur (1972; The Sparrow), for
example, Chahine presents a male actor stripped to the waist, admiring
himself in the mirror as his hand slides down his bare chest toward his
groin. When it comes to Al-masir, this historical drama presents men
wrestling in various states of undress in the bathhouse. Neither of these
scenes offers explicit or readily identifiable gay or lesbian characters, but
they each make visible a way of looking that routes cinematic seeing
outside the conventional optics of women performing for the camera. Much
like Chahine himself, who was quite evasive when it came to questions of
his own sexuality, his films demonstrate registers of queerness without
embodying these dynamics in recognizably homosexual characters or
relationships.

Formal Queerness in Iskandariyya … leh?

Where there is commentary that treats Iskandariyya … leh? in the context
of forbidden relationships, far fewer critics have been attentive to the
formal dynamics by which the relationship between Adel and Tommy takes
shape. Part of what makes this particular encounter so remarkable is how it
interrupts, and seemingly subverts, the conventions associated with the
male gaze in classical cinema, especially with regard to the role of women
as spectacle. When Tommy is first introduced, he is presented stumbling
over himself in a cabaret located below the apartment of Yehia's family. The
camera tracks Tommy's movements back and forth across the room as those
gathered for the performance turn their attention to him. His drunken
singing eclipses that of the performers on stage. As he wanders, he passes in
front of the stage and then makes his way back out into the audience. At
this point, there is a close-up on the face of Seif El Din, a nationalist intent
on ridding Egypt of the British, who stares at the young soldier. It is
initially unclear whether Seif El Din's look is lustful or part of a cunning
political ploy to entrap him. When Tommy sits down to talk to Seif El Din,
he exhibits all the brashness of a drunken soldier, and it becomes clear over
the course of the exchange that Seif El Din plans to kidnap Tommy for Adel
as part of the effort to thwart the British occupation.

In this initial scene, the viewer's look at Tommy is carefully mediated

through a network of glances that frame him as the obMect of desire—both
political, in the sense of a potential captive, and sexual, in the conflation of
his place with that of the cabaret performer. As the scene progresses,
Tommy drunkenly stands up from the table with Seif El Din and navigates
his way backward, presented in long shot as he sings aloud to the music that
is playing—or rather, as he sings “The White Cliffs of Dover” over the
music that predominates in the cabaret. With the voice of the young British
soldier layered over that of the Egyptian cabaret singer, and with the music
layering a British song over an Egyptian song, the scene quite masterfully
weaves together a number of layers of colonialism, sexuality, and gender.
What is obMectified in this scene is Tommy himself, a colonial soldier who
is the obMect of the male gaze, at once frozen as a spectacle of a drunken
singer and the obMect of desire.

When the cabaret is interrupted by electrical blackouts and German aerial

attacks, the singer implores the musicians to continue. Amid the chaos that
ensues, fights break out in the audience, and Seif El Din abducts Tommy,
punches him in the face, and the film cuts to newsreel footage of a bomb
going off. The film then cuts to a shot of Adel's face behind the wheel of a
car, and the viewer learns that Tommy is in the backseat. Adel drags
Tommy out of the car and places him over the railing facing the sea before
stepping back, pulling his pistol from his Macket, and aiming at the young
soldier. At that very moment, drunken Tommy slumps down from the
railing, and Adel moves to lift him up. Already, it is clear that Adel finds
himself incapable of following through with the killing. The next shot
reveals a close-up of Tommy's drunken face as his arms wrap around Adel
in an effort to remain standing, ambiguously straddling an intimate hug and
a drunken embrace. In what follows, Adel tells Tommy to act like a man,
places him back in the car, and stares down at him as a bell rings and the
film cuts to the next scene. When Tommy is next introduced, he is in bed in
his underwear as Adel looks upon him with his pistol drawn. The scene
proceeds with close-ups on Tommy's face as he asks questions about where
he is, how he got there, and who removed his clothes. As the exchange
continues, a woman interrupts by walking unexpectedly into the room, and
Adel nonchalantly explains that Tommy is a friend and then invites him to
Moin them for breakfast, as though nothing were out of the ordinary.

It is only in a subsequent scene that the nature of what transpired becomes

clearer. Adel is shown driving Tommy to his point of deployment for battle.
Tommy hands Adel some money, claiming that he has no one closer in his
life now, and then adds that he will take it back when he returns from the
war. He gets out of the car, walks toward the other soldiers, looks back over
his shoulder at Adel, but then returns to the vehicle. When he gets back in
the car, he asks Adel if he has, in fact, killed other British soldiers as he
intended to do with him, and Adel replies that he has. Tommy curses Adel
for his actions and then departs the car angrily. A long shot reveals Tommy
walking away toward the soldiers before he looks back at Adel one last
time.

What follows of the relationship between Tommy and Adel is revealed most
tenderly in a letter that Tommy sends Adel from the front. In a darkened
room, Adel is shown reclining in bed with a revolver in one hand and
Tommy's letter in the other. Tommy's voice is heard narrating the contents
of the letter, as scenes of him at the front appear onscreen. He suggests that
he has escaped the shadow of death with the battle now over. As the letter
continues and Tommy complains of selfish generals, Adel is shown
standing in front of the bed, revolver in hand, shooting his pillow. Toward
the film's conclusion, as Adel reports to a military office to search for
Tommy, he learns that Tommy did, in fact, die in battle. A close-up on
Tommy's gravestone pans out to reveal an entire field of white gravestones.
Adel's face is shown surveying the graves solemnly as Vera Lynn singing
“The White Cliffs of Dover” plays on the soundtrack. The seemingly
impossible love story is one of many casualties of the war.

SEE ALSO AsrarʿAiliyyah (2013; Hany Fawzy); Hena Maysara

(2007; Khaled Youssef); HIV/AIDS in Egyptian Cinema
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ʿAris, Ibráhīm al-. “Ḥawla al-shakhsī wa lugha al-shakhsīyyah fī thulāthiyat
Youssef Cháhīne: Bi ay ḥāl, hal taḥadath ʿan ay shayʾ ākhar fī sīnīmā?”
[On selfhood and the language of selfhood in Youssef Chahine's trilogy].
Sīnīmá, no. 24 (April–May 2004): 34–45.

Farīd, Samīr. Adwaʾ ʿala sināma Youssef Chāhīne [A light on the cinema of
Youssef Chahine]. Cairo: Egyptian General Book Institute, 1997.

Khouri, Malek. The Arab National ProMect in Youssef Chahine's Cinema.

Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010.

Lagrange, Frédéric. “Male Homosexuality in Modern Arabic Literature.” In

Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle
East, edited by Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb, 169–198.
London: Saqi, 2000.

Massad, Joseph. “Art and Politics in the Cinema of Youssef Chahine.”

Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 2 (1999): 77–93.

Menicucci, Garay. “Unlocking the Arab Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in

Egyptian Film.” Middle East Report, no. 206 (Spring 1998): 32–36.

Nasrallah, Yousry. “Chahine, encore et touMours” [Chahine, again and

forever]. Cahiers du cinema, no. 506 (October 1996): 31–32.

Youssef, Adham. “Constructing and Echoing Social Perceptions: Gay

Characters in Egyptian Film.” Mada Masr, 5 October 2017.
https://www.madamasr.com/en/2017/10/05/feature/culture/constructing-
and-echoing-social-perceptions-gay-characters-in-egyptian-film/
Islam in Africa South of the Sahara
HASSAN J. NDZOVU
Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies
Moi University, Kenya

The status of those with nonnormative sexual identities in

African Muslim communities.

Same-sex sexuality in African Muslim societies has always existed, but in

the twenty-first century it has become more visible. Matters of sexuality
have traditionally been dealt with quietly, with public discussion of
sexuality considered an affront to cultural ideals of respectability. Given the
prominent role played by Western nongovernmental organizations in the
advocacy for LGBTQ rights, it is not difficult to see why Islamic religious
leaders view nonnormative sexual expressions as a foreign practice that
should be condemned. So the irony is that the call for LGBTQ rights, which
requires public outing, may actually backfire on those with nonnormative
sexualities (Massad 2002). The hatred expressed by the general Islamic
clerics (ulema) and some of their followers toward homosexuality has
created a hostile environment in which most LGBTQ persons are scared to
declare their sexual orientation. On account of the dominance of the ulema
in the public domain of their respective communities, homosexuality is
proMected by most Muslims as a perversion and reversal of the natural
sexual orientation of human beings. This makes being a homosexual in
African Muslim societies an enormous challenge given the vitriolic attacks
from conformist ulema.

Generally, there are several modes that are associated with the spread of
Islam in Africa. With significant expansion in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, Islam has been reinterpreted differently by various Muslim
communities on the continent. Regional differences are evident as the
cultures of indigenous African societies were integrated with the practices
of Islam that readily accommodated them. Islamic accommodation to
African cultures has contributed to the observance of a particular form of
Islam that differs from one region to the other (Lapidus 2014). Thus,
Islamic practice in Africa is very diverse and has changed over time with
the ebb and flow of different schools of Islamic Murisprudence, such as the
Shafiʿi, Maliki, Hanbali, and Hanafi. This variation is also evident when
dealing with issues of sex and sexuality. Despite the Qurʾan's lack of a
proper term for homosexuals as a concrete idea designating same-sex
sexual desires, Muslim ulema in Africa use the particular Qurʾanic narrative
of the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (see Qurʾan 7:84) to
condemn homosexuality as a perverse act, with limited theological bases for
tolerating it. Even “the terms that became popular in Arabic in later times
(Liwat for acts associated with same-sex relations, and Luti for persons
associated with these acts) are not found in the Qurʾan at all” (Kugle 2003,
200). But because of the lack of a specific punishment for same-sex
relationships in the Qurʾan, the decision to arbitrate on the practice was left
to the discretion of the local ruling authorities, as observed in Islamic
history, which explains the varied attitudes toward LGBTQ persons among
African Muslims.

Within Africa south of the Sahara, Islamic expression has demonstrated

conflicting views despite nonnormative relations being strongly associated
with certain Muslim communities. Historically, in West Africa, Arab
Muslims were accused of male-male sexual exploitation and rape during the
sixteenth-century conquest of Songhai, while in East Africa Arab Muslim
traders “had a reputation for enMoying if not promoting male-male sexual
relationships” during their contact with the local population (Epprecht
2013, 95).
Despite the supposed heterosexual emphasis within the Islamic tradition, in
Muslim societies, including those in Africa, same-sex practices also seem to
have been relatively accommodated (Murray 1997; Eppink 1992). Apart
from the reputations of North African Muslim countries (Morocco, Algeria,
and Tunisia) as destinations for homosexual escapades in the European
imaginary, in Africa south of the Sahara cases of nonnormative sexual
expressions by Muslims can be drawn from Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya, and
Zanzibar, among others. Among the Wolof Muslims of Senegal,
“homosexuals” (gor-digen) are transgendered men who, among other
services, offer sex to other men (Epprecht 2013). A similar community of
homosexual men (‘yan daudu) is found in northern Nigeria, and among
them are people who identify themselves as devoted Muslims. They are
known to provide sexual services for supposedly heterosexual “men either
as sex workers themselves or procurers of female sex workers” (Epprecht
2013, 98). In Kenya, mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar, shoga (or hanisi or
liwati) refers to the passive partner in a same-sex sexual relationship
(Amory 1998).

Despite this seeming tolerance of nonnormative sexuality in African

Muslim communities, Islam has a reputation for homophobia. Muslim
critics of nonnormative sexuality have claimed that the Qurʾan is clear in its
condemnation of the practice, as indicated above. While there are variations
in the punishment for known homosexuals, in some Muslim-maMority
countries such as Mauritania and Sudan and in certain states in northern
Nigeria punishment includes the death penalty (Global Legal Research
Center 2014). The coexistence of cultural acceptance of nonnormative
sexualities with harsh condemnation points to a radical contradiction with
regard to attitudes toward the practice among African Muslims—a theme
explored in this entry. The extent to which African Muslim communities
have tolerated homosexuality is the focus of this entry, which describes
varied attitudes and opinions. Paradoxically, the idea of emphasizing
heterosexual sexual fulfillment in some African Muslim societies through
female initiation processes has to a certain extent promoted same-sex
tendencies among them, as shown in this entry. The apparent signs of
acceptance of same-sex practice, however, have not stopped state and
Islamic religious leaders from mobilizing hostility and public religion
against nonnormative sexual persons.

Therefore, this entry will demonstrate the challenges that African Muslims
in same-sex relations face as a result of their status—from the religious
clerics and, to a certain extent, the state. In that respect this entry will
demonstrate the traditional existence of tolerance toward nonnormative
sexualities in African Muslim societies, exploring why same-sex practice
has become a public issue of concern among them. This earlier acceptance
will be contrasted with the contemporary condemnation of nonnormative
sexual expression as manifested on the continent.

Sex and Sexuality

In Islamic tradition, sexuality is not an obstacle to spirituality; in fact, the
faith values the pursuit of sexual pleasure within specified limits. In this
respect, sexual gratification within marriage is regarded as sacred in Islam
(Azad 2016). As a result of the enormous value placed on lawful sexual
relations, certain Muslim communities in Africa have designed ways of
attaining this fulfillment through female initiation (Omar 2012). By the
nineteenth century, unyago female initiation was a popular practice among
coastal Swahili Muslim communities and became the tradition of preparing
young girls for marriage, which began with seclusion. When girls
experienced their first menses, they were secluded from public interaction
with members of the opposite sex to safeguard their sexual purity. In a
given locality, the mothers of the young girls would identify older women
as instructors (somo or kungwi) to organize an initiation ritual that lasted for
seven days. The kungwi provided the young initiates with information
regarding female sexuality and morality through the performance of unyago
rituals and dances (Fair 2004). While the initiation took barely a week, it
was the beginning of a lifetime bond between the initiate and the kungwi,
with the former always seeking advice about marriage, reproduction, and
child-rearing from the latter.

During the initiation ritual dance (unyago), the young girls were instructed
in the art of sexual intercourse. They learned the technique of seductively
gyrating their hips, thighs, and buttocks to promote sexual gratification. As
a way of mastering the skills to pleasurable sex, the girls tried the
techniques on each other, a performance that aroused them sexually.
Undoubtedly, the act exposed the female initiates to homosexual
experiences. Despite the tacit acceptance of nonnormative sexuality, the
female initiation dances provided instruction in “male and female
physiology, the physical aspects of sexuality, desire and orgasm,
masturbation, and physical relations between men and women” (quoted in
Decker 2014, 224). Significantly, the instruction of the dance initiation was
designed to produce girls who were skilled lovers and appreciated that the
enMoyment of sex was a fundamental aspect of a marriage relationship.
While late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Islamic reformers in
Zanzibar claimed that the initiation exposed young “girls to putatively
pornographic information about sex” (Decker 2014, 216), many Swahili
Muslims did not see any contradiction between these practices and their
faith. Despite the great emphasis on heterosexual relations, same-sex
sexuality also prevailed in numerous Muslim societies in Africa, as
illustrated below.

Transgressing the Gender Categorization

In Swahili Muslim society (Kenya, Zanzibar, and mainland Tanzania) there
exist male homosexuals (shoga; plural mashoga) who take the passive role
during anal intercourse with a male partner (Amory 1998). Though
tolerated, mashoga are considered not to be living consistently with the
expectations of a man in Swahili society because they violate “gender
position” (Amory 1998, 78). Even though the early crossings of gender
boundaries by the mashoga were sometimes harshly castigated, they were
also to a certain degree accepted in society through sexual relations with
other older men, including teachers (both religious and secular), neighbors,
or even relatives. In certain instances, a passive male homosexual among
Swahili coastal Muslims would marry a woman but secretly continue
engaging in nonnormative sexual behavior (Shepherd 1987). Apart from the
conduct being seen as a way of concealing the mashoga's sexual orientation,
marriage in Islam is half of one's religion, which mashoga appear eager to
fulfill.

In coastal Muslim society, societal roles are defined by gender, and they are
linked with other gendered behaviors, including dress and speech. Because
social space contributes to the construction of gender identities, the public
spheres that mashoga occupy indicate their gender as being dissimilar from
other men, but akin to women, although “not exactly the same as women,
either” (Amory 1998, 79). On account of their nature, mashoga easily
interact with women, crossing the stringent boundaries of gender
segregation, which is customarily difficult for other men to do (Larsen
2008). Because gender is a social construction, mashoga perform it by
being commonly identified by feminine alternative nicknames, as well as by
dressing in a way that attracts male sexual partners. Clearly, male
homosexuals in Swahili Muslim society violate gender categorization by
appearing like women by assuming certain societal gender markers, but
without much discrimination. Generally, it is alleged that during the
prerevolutionary era in Zanzibar same-sex relations were considered a
normal practice— and even secretly observed during the month of
“Ramadan when heterosexual intercourse is prohibited” (Middleton 1992,
120), a view that could not be confirmed in other parts of the Muslim
world. In this Muslim society, nonnormative sexual individuals “had their
space without having to fight for it” because “the society was neither
encouraging them nor subMecting them to any kind of persecution” (Saleh
2009, 199).
Among the Muslim Hausa of northern Nigeria, the ‘yan daudu are men who
constitute what can be referred to as a male homosexual community. Their
social closeness to women provides cover for certain “men who seek men,”
thereby allowing them to secretly interact without attracting attention.
Among the Hausa, nonnormative male sexuality is not viewed as an
inclination, but merely an act; hence, gays are described “as men who do
homosexuality [rather] than as men who want other men sexually” (Gaudio
1998, 117). In addition, same-sex practice in this Muslim society is not
regarded as being in conflict with a heterosexual identity. At a certain
moment in their lives, ‘yan daudu are also expected to marry women and
have children, even as they discreetly continue with their nonnormative
sexual affairs. This characteristic of the ‘yan daudu should not be
interpreted as an expression of bisexuality, because in Hausa society
marriage is not a choice of an individual but a moral responsibility for every
member of society. As a result, even homosexual men are at least expected
to “have sex with women” for procreation purposes “and not necessarily for
sexual pleasure” (Gaudio 1998, 118).

The ‘yan daudu's inconspicuous engagement in sexual relations with other

men is culturally interpreted in terms of gender rather than as a form of
sexuality. Because of their feminine gestures and performance of tasks
associated with women (cooking and selling food), their behavior is seen
only as being “womanlike,” without necessarily forfeiting their
fundamentally male identity. And because ‘yan daudu secretly engage in
nonnormative sexual expressions, the general society ignores their
crossgender conduct and same-sex connotations. Apart from ‘yan daudu
always referring to themselves with feminine names, they also consider
themselves wives while describing their sexual relations with their male
partners. Rudolf Pell Gaudio observes:

By employing heterosexual concepts to characterize their own

sexual roles, ‘yan daudu and their [male partners seem to
 conform to] dominant ideologies of gender and power relations
while challenging others. For, whereas the idea of a man who
has a “husband” and calls himself a “wife” disrupts
mainstream Hausa beliefs about gender and sexual identity as
biologically based, the sexual, economic, and other
expectations that ‘yan daudu and their boyfriends/husbands
bring to their relationships follow mainstream norms
governing how women and men should behave in heterosexual
relationships.

(1998, 121)

As a result of religious and cultural influences the ‘yan daudu conform to

the belief that gender is divinely determined, which is why they still marry
women as a way of fulfilling one of their religious obligations as men.
Clearly, the ‘yan daudu's exhibition of femininity does not nullify their male
social identity, which they consider as God's will that they cannot alter. And
because they identify themselves as practicing Muslims, they believe that it
is Allah who created them different from other men (Gaudio 2009).

Among the Muslims of northern Sudan, there is a healing cult (zar or zaar)
that is primarily the realm of women. Despite the cultural sexual division of
labor and sexual segregation in this society, there are also a number of men
who frequently partake in zaar rituals, with some of them even becoming
cult group leaders. While some of the men who often attend zaar rituals are
suspected by the society of being nonnormative sexual persons, others are
accused of merely pretending to be sick to disgracefully gain access to the
women in the cult (Murray 1997). Despite the seeming acceptance of same-
sex practice in African Muslim societies, in some conservative segments of
the Muslim population, as a result of the emergence of Islamic reformist
ideas in Africa, those with nonnormative sexual identities are periodically
condemned as the source of sexual immorality and thereby subMected to
denunciation and abuse.

Religious Mobilization against Nonnormative

Sexuality
In Zanzibar, while nonnormative sexuality was considered by some to be an
inconsequential transgression understood to occur as a result of God's will,
it was also despised by other members of society. This is also true of other
African Muslim societies where religious leaders and politicians have come
together in an alliance to persecute homosexuals. Religious mobilization
against same-sex sexuality in Africa, therefore, is part of the broader
political dynamics evident in various African countries where it is viewed
as a struggle for the preservation of presumed Islamic, and sometimes
African, identity against a domineering Western culture. Out of fear of
losing their somewhat overlapping identities, the mobilization is an effort to
protect Muslim societies against the hegemonic legacy of Westernization.
 © RODGER BOSCH/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Imam Muhsin Hendricks Leads the Start to Prayer at the Inner Circle Mosque in
Cape Town, South Africa, 2016. Hendricks, himself a gay man, is a Muslim cleric
who has urged the acceptance of LGB Tpersons in Muslim societies. The Inner Circle is
a supportive Muslim group for individuals in same-sex relationships who feel reMected
by their religion because of their sexual identities.

In Kenya, which has a significant Muslim minority, some Muslim clerics

have called on Kenyans to reMect same-sex sexuality because, according to
them, it is an act that is contrary to religion as well as to African traditions
and beliefs (Ndzovu 2016). They claim that nonnormative sexuality is
prevalent in Kenya because of Western influences. As a result, Muslim
clerics in the country have strongly fought against any recognition of
LGBTQ rights. For instance, they have criticized a proposal to include
questions pertaining to nonnormative sexuality in the national census as
tantamount to validating its existence. It is the open expression of
nonnormative sexual identity that has irritated many Kenya Islamic clerics,
who caution that such public acceptance could “easily anger God and invite
calamities such as the fire that claimed Sodom and Gomorrah” (Christian
Telegraph 2012, np). Yet, the belief that it was same-sex sexuality that
caused the destruction of the two cities has been the subMect of contestation
by scholars (Kugle 2003).

Alarmed by the boldness of some activists advocating for the rights of

LGBTQ persons through the support of some Western countries, Muslim
clerics in Kenya have suggested that the government “stop taking aid from
countries” that “support gay rights,” claiming that such aid could come
“with the condition of Kenya supporting gay rights” (Out in Perth:
Something Different 2014, np). The increase in homophobic expression
coincides, beginning in the 1990s, with increased agitation for LGBTQ
rights by numerous organizations. The most visible LGBTQ organizations
in Kenya include the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya and G-Kenya
Trust, whose campaigns are considered an affront to the cultural norm that
treats issues of sexuality quietly and away from the public gaze.
Undoubtedly, the appearance of the pro-LGBTQ organizations in the
country advocating for public display of nonnormative sexuality disturbs
the culturally accepted, discreet same-sex relations—hence the opposition
(Ndzovu 2016).

In Zanzibar, the seeming accommodation accorded by society to those with

nonnormative sexual identities started shrinking after the 1964 revolution as
a result of religious and political mobilization. Islamic reform ideas
emerged that criticized the past, implicit approval of nonnormative sexual
practices in the society (Moen et al. 2014). Apart from religious
mobilization, Zanzibar's criminal law provides that a “person who will be
convicted of sodomy will be liable to 25 years imprisonment” (Ottosson
2008, 37). Furthermore, the state's mobilization against homosexuals is
evident through the 1984 censorship board, which among other tasks, has a
mandate to “review [taarab] songs … before they [could] be performed and
aired” because there has been “a particularly virulent exchange of taarab
songs concerning homosexuality” (Arnold 2002, 148). Along the Swahili
coast, taarab is a popular form of sung poetry that incorporates
performance and instrumental accompaniment and sometimes offers
scathing and obscene lyrics depicting sexism (Mosoti 2012), compelling the
state to introduce controlling measures.

Perhaps stemming from the influence of Islamic revival movements, there

is a group of Muslims in Senegal vandalizing graves and exhuming bodies
of supposed LGBTQ persons. Before 2008, Senegal was one of the
predominantly Muslim African countries considered to be tolerant toward
same-sex sexuality, despite the threat by groups of Muslims that they would
attack anyone who openly violated culturally approved sexual orientation.
As a consequence, in certain parts of the country, Muslim youth exhumed
the bodies of known gor-digen because the latter were deemed to be
defiling the graveyard (Awondo, Geschiere, and Reid 2012).

Despite the homophobic expressions evident in African Muslim societies,

there are other Muslim clerics who have condemned such actions and have
instead urged the acceptance of LGBT persons in their communities. For
instance, in South Africa, this positive attitude toward nonnormative
sexuality is represented by Imam Muhsin Hendricks (1970—), whose
mosque provides “LGBT Muslims a safe space in which to worship, away
from the condemnation” of conservative Muslim clerics, “many of whom
see homosexuality as a sin” (Bruce-Lockhart 2017). A gay Muslim himself,
Imam Hendricks in 1996 founded the Inner Circle, a support group for
Muslim individuals in same-sex relationships who feel reMected by their
religion because of their sexual identity. Hendricks has called on the general
Muslim community “to stop the killing and violence perpetrated against
queer people in the name of Islam,” and has urged his fellow imams instead
to use the mosque pulpit during the Friday prayer to deliver a message of
inclusivity and accommodation (quoted in Arcus Foundation 2017).
In the cases illustrated above, same-sex relations seem to intersect with
heterosexual marriage and reproduction. Male nonnormative sexual
individuals are aware of the societal expectation that requires them not to
upset the heterosexual norms of patriarchal dominance in society. “Indeed,
they often explicitly reinforced those norms provided the relationships
remained discreet (not talked about or seen) and discrete (kept separate
from and not interfering with the needs of family, kin and nation),” Marc
Epprecht (2013, 100) argues. As shown from the various examples, same-
sex sexual practices among African Muslim societies differ from the
Western understanding that allows public displays of nonnormative sexual
identity. In response to the increasing public visibility of same-sex
relationships, Muslim clerics arose to counter the emerging trend, insisting
that it contravenes Qurʾanic teachings. However, the texts dealing with
homosexuality in the Qurʾan have been variously interpreted by different
Muslims.

SEE ALSO Christianity in Africa: Anglican; Christianity in Africa:

Pentecostal and Charismatic; Christianity in Africa: Roman Catholicism;
Gender, Flexible Systems, in Africa; Homosexual Acts in Shariʿa;
Involuntary Servitude and Same-Sex Sexuality in Africa; Maghreb; Religion
and Same-Sex Behaviors: Islam

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