| Hazim
is a 23-year-old Palestinian college student
currently living in the United States, who
grew up in Kuwait. Though Hazim identifies
as gay, he said many Arab men who have sex
with other men do not necessarily see themselves
fitting into the strict dichotomy of “gay”
or “straight” that is most often
used in Western countries.
“America is much
more strict in sex roles than the Arab world
is,” he said. He acknowledged that
many Arab men may not “admit”
to being gay because of the strict consequences
they would pay in their home countries.
For many of them, being gay is simply not
an option.
Furthermore, he conceded,
many men in Arab countries have sex with
other men because the traditional societies
they live in separate men and women socially,
and men most often do not have women as
sexual partners until they get married.
“In my high school,”
he says, “it was just known that you
were either going to fuck or be fucked.
Everyone did it.”
But those conditions
are only part of the sexual landscape in
most Arab countries, he said, and do not
fully explain the reality of men who will
get married and have children, and yet continue
to have sex with men on the side. Not everyone
is simply a closet case.
“Sometimes, American
gays impose their view of what gay life
has to be on the rest of the world, without
a cultural or historic understanding that
there can be all kinds of different understandings
of sexual relationships,” he said. |
 |
On
the other hand, said Ramzi Zakharia, a gay
Palestinian now living in Jersey City who
is a founder of the Gay and Lesbian Arab
Society (GLAS), sometimes Westerners tend
to romanticize the notion of bisexuality
of men in the Arab world.
“It is important
to note that the notion of bisexual as we
know it here in the United States and the
West simply does not exist there,”
he said. “Labels like ‘bisexual’
or ‘gay’ are still perceived
as an indication of sexual activities [rather
than sexual orientation.] As such, they
are still considered a taboo and shameful—just
like all sex is.”
“It’s hard
to tell if bisexuality is really more common
in the Arab world,” he said. “I
would venture to say it’s probably
the same level as anywhere else. People
are people, after all. However, I would
say that some gay men hide behind this label
as a sort of ‘testing ground’
before they make the jump to be gay. But
I am also sure that there is indeed a segment
of the population that is truly bisexual,
and that there are Arab bisexuals who are
at peace with themselves.
He also disputed the
widely held belief that in the Arab world,
bisexuality is somehow considered more acceptable.
While attitudes towards
sex and bisexuals may be improving in some
Arab urban centers, particularly among the
well-educated, Zakharia warned that “the
overall attitude toward bisexuals is that
it is sexual deviancy.”
He’s often heard
statements like, “All men in the Arab
world are bisexual,” and he said that
is more an embodiment of fictional sexual
desire on the part of Western gay men than
a reality of the Arab world.
***
Page: [1]
[2] [3] [4] |
