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[Recently the Egyptian Government has been systematically attacking gays by putting them on trial, detaining and torturing them. The author suspects that there are two reasons behind the Government’s attacks of gay men: firstly, as a strategy to divert attention from its failure to address the declining economic situation in Egypt, and secondly, to increase the perception that it takes the Islamic faith seriously. The latter is particularly important to the Egyptian Government as it owes its increasing popularity largely to the Muslim Brotherhood. By attacking gays, the Egyptian State successfully distracted the public’s attention from its woes, while also shoring up the State’s Islamic credentials. The author also considers mistakes made when engaging in gay rights activism before his ultimate exile from Egypt. The author, who used the language of gay identity and of ‘coming out of the closet’ as part of his activism, examines the problems associated with such language. In particular, the author points out that by deploying the language of gay identity, he played into the hands of the Egyptian State, which then successfully appropriated the same language to distract the Egyptian public from its own problems. The author considers the problems with his activism to be his engaging in a ‘Stonewall’ model of gay rights in which one openly comes out of the closet and declares one is gay. The author concludes by considering a new form of activism that is not open, but hidden, which he calls ‘activism from the closet’. The hope behind the article is to allow LBGTQ groups to express their sexuality, as well as engage in activism, while reducing potential threats directed at them.]
It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of time are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.— Gabriel García Márquez[1]
He looked me up and down and said, ‘Do you pray?’ I really didn’t know what to say. … The thing is … I know that I have more values and more honesty than him. And I know my relationship with God is more than he knows. But to him I am just an accused person — worse than an accused person, an animal — because I am gay.
— Amgad[2]
I was so scared that in the end I said, ‘I don’t know anything about contempt of religion, I am just gay.’
— Murad[3]
I used to think being gay was just part of my life and now I know it means dark cells and beatings. It is very, very difficult to be gay … If I have to go back to prison, I will kill myself. What do they want from us? I have no one to talk to, no one to ask. No one who can understand. What do they want from us? Why do they want our lives?
— Ziyad[4]
There have been many attacks in Egypt on allegedly gay men, including the famous Queen Boat 52 incident in which the Egyptian Government staged a sensational trial of 52 allegedly gay men who were publicly arrested, detained, and tortured.[5] While in Egypt, I too was arrested, imprisoned, tortured and ultimately exiled for my open advocacy of equal rights for gay people. My activism primarily consisted of demonstrating how Islamic Law and gay rights were reconcilable. Having been trained as an expert on Islam, I have been reflecting on ways to open spaces in Islamic countries for lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender and questioning (‘LBGTQ’) groups. My time after leaving Egypt has been marked by contemplation about the fate of gay rights in Egypt and by reflection about possibilities for expanding safe spaces for people who identify as gay or who engage in same-sex sexual relations.
Since my exile from Egypt, I have also contemplated some of the problems associated with my own personal activism. I have come to the realisation that I was constrained by the human rights discourse I received through gay rights organisations and other human rights movements. Often, human rights activism, as described by non-government organisations, activists and scholars, relies exclusively on open strategies — strategies that can be characterised as public, such as demonstrations, speaking out and public awareness campaigns. This has been no different in the gay liberation movement, in which ‘coming out of the closet’ and openly declaring one’s gay identity was, and continues to be, considered central to American gay rights activism. My own personal experience was similar: I pursued gay rights activism by openly speaking out through demonstrations and by publishing my ideas about how gay rights and Islam were reconcilable. However, this only seemed to attract the wrath of the State, revealing the utter inefficacy of an open gay rights strategy in contemporary Egypt.
The current project — while cognisant of these undoubtedly important ‘open’ approaches — takes a somewhat different strategy in considering whether more ‘hidden’ approaches to human rights activism are possible. The goal of these approaches would be to keep activists and their advocates anonymous, thereby protecting them from attacks by the state while allowing them to further their goals. Considering hidden approaches is certainly important in the context of gay rights activism in Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt where gay men are persecuted by repressive regimes. With this in mind, the present article provides reflections about a research agenda to consider hidden activist approaches.
Part II describes the Egyptian Government’s recent attacks on gays. These attacks include trials, detainments and torture. One highly publicised attack was the 2001 raid of the Queen Boat, a discotheque on the River Nile in Cairo. In this Part, the article also explains how the Egyptian Government deployed the Emergency State Security Courts — which were initially established to protect the country’s national security — as a means to carry out its violent crackdown on gays.
Part III turns to describing my activism and the way in which I was influenced by a more open activist approach that may have led to my downfall. In order to do this, the article explores my activism through a mixture of personal narrative and analysis. Using myself as the case study, the article will show how elements of gay rights activism in the United States and Europe have been exported to Egypt, in part because of my actions. To explore this idea, the article will draw on my personal experience of being constructed as a gay rights activist. ‘Coming out of the closet’ and declaring a gay identity not only provides an easy target for the State to attack gays, it also provides the opportunity for the State to deploy gays as a scapegoat for other problems such as rising unemployment and poverty. This has made gays a tempting target for state actors in Egypt that want to appease Islamic fundamentalists (eg the Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan-al-Musleemeen, Gihad, Gamaa-al-Islamaya) by demonstrating that the Egyptian ‘State’ is complying with at least some semblance of their vision of Islamic Law.
In Part IV, the article explores ways to engage in hidden activism without attracting the wrath of the Egyptian State. Instead of allowing gay rights activists to play into the hands of the State, the article considers more ‘hidden’ gay rights approaches that do not exclusively rely on the language of gay rights, gay identity, or ‘coming out of the closet’. The article refers to these strategies as ‘activism from the closet’.
When I was in Egypt, I engaged in gay rights activism by ‘coming out of the closet’ and by demonstrating how gay rights and Islamic Law were potentially reconcilable. During the same period, many attacks on gay men were perpetrated by the Mubarak Government.
In May 2001, officers from the local Cairo Vice Squad and Egypt’s State Security Investigations Unit raided the Queen Boat nightclub and arrested 30 men.[6] In the days before the Queen Boat raid, additional men were picked up from the streets of Cairo with the aid of informers.[7] Together, the men were referred to as the ‘Queen Boat 52’[8] and were tried before an Emergency State Security Court (‘ESSC’).[9] The main charges brought against the allegedly gay men were for obscene behaviour and ‘habitual debauchery’.[10] Other charges included ‘contempt for religion’.[11] There were no explicit charges of being gay or of engaging in gay sex, since Egyptian law does not explicitly criminalise homosexuality.[12] Eventually, 23 of these 52 men were convicted by the ESSC.[13] Subsequent appeals and retrials have been unsuccessful in quashing these convictions.[14]
The ESSCs were established after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981, with the purported aim of protecting Egypt’s national security.[15] Since then, the current President, Hosni Mubarak, has ruled Egypt in a state of emergency, often deploying the emergency court system as a means to try to detain Egyptians without due process in order to preserve his power base.[16]
The state-sponsored media publicised the arrests and trials of the accused, including their names, places of employment, and their pictures.[17] At first, the initial reports in the Egyptian media indicated that those arrested were part of a ‘Satanic cult’ and were being charged with ‘exploiting religion to promote extreme ideas to create strife and belittle the revealed religions’.[18] This resembled previous scandals coordinated by the Egyptian Government in which young men were arrested and detained on the basis of accusations that they were worshipping Satan in nightclubs.[19] For example, in 1997, many adolescents from middle and upper-class households were arrested in Cairo and Alexandria and detained for three months, yet never charged with a crime.[20] However, in the case of the Cairo 52, it soon became clear that the arrests were made because the men were thought to be gay.[21]
The raid on the Queen Boat was not the beginning of the persecution of allegedly gay Egyptian men.[22] There had been many earlier incidents of sporadic individual arrests, detainments, and imprisonments (sometimes with, and other times without, criminal charges) of men engaging in same-sex sexual activity or in activism to promote gay rights.[23] There had also been individual arrests of men who had been entrapped by the police on the internet. In those cases, police officers would pose as potential sexual and romantic partners, and would then meet with the men who were seeking sex or friendship online, only to interrogate, detain and torture them.[24] One month before the raid on the Queen Boat, one Egyptian was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for engaging in the act of advertising for sex on the internet. There have been many more such entrapments that have not been recorded.[25] As homosexuality is not explicitly prohibited in Egyptian law, the men entrapped by the police on the internet were arrested, detained, and tortured on the grounds of ‘habitual debauchery’.[26] Other times, these allegedly gay men were arrested, detained, and tortured without any charges laid against them. Some were quietly abducted from their families, not to be heard from for long periods of time. While some arrests and detainments of allegedly gay men have been quiet, the Egyptian Government has also continued its practice of arresting and detaining gays in a more public way. After the arrests and detainments of the Cairo 52, there were many public arrests that the state-sponsored media reported to the entire nation. In fact, on the evening of 28 August 2003, another spectacle was arranged by the Egyptian Government, in which 62 men who were in a well-known gay cruising area were arrested and detained. Police officers humiliated the men, abusing them both physically and verbally throughout the process of arrest and detainment. One person, whose anonymity has been protected, stated the following:
[A police officer] made me walk back and forth … sit down … open my shirt, and he looked at my chest hair. I was very embarrassed when he asked me to pull down my pants. He looked at my underwear ... Then he grabbed me and took me down to a holding cell and had the guard open it, and he threw me in. He told the prisoners in the cell, ‘Here’s a khawal, maybe. Find out if he’s a khawal.’ And he locked the door.[27]
Once detained, the men were tortured by electrocution and by the beating of sticks on the soles of their feet (a practice known as falaka). There are many reports also pointing to detainees being suspended by their wrists or ankles.[28] Many reports also indicate that these men were humiliated: they were forced to strip down to their underwear while being shouted at and insulted for being gay, or khawal. The police would deem prisoners gay if they had colourful underwear or had a shaved chest.[29] In addition, forensic experts would invasively examine the anuses of the detainees in order to establish that they had had anal sex.[30] The police have also been known to force the men to confess that they were ‘gay’.[31]
These attacks by the Egyptian State on gay men provide a picture of the events that have been taking place in Egypt in the past five years. Considering these attacks, it is safe to say that the Egyptian Government is engaging in systematic attacks on gay people, and that it is carrying out its acts deliberately as part of an overall strategy to distract the Egyptian public’s attention from its own failures. The Egyptian Government’s attacks on gay men have prompted activists to speak out against the State, while also demonstrating to the Egyptian public the importance of respecting diverse types of sexual identities. In the next section, this article turns to contemplating the value of the activism triggered in response to these attacks on gays. The above information about the trials, detainments, and torture of gay men sets the scene and the context, showing how gay men are treated, before moving to a discussion of types of activism currently adopted in Egypt and the problems they pose.
During my adolescence, while in Egypt and prior to the Mubarak Government’s publicised campaigns against gays, I ‘came out of the closet’. After I came out, I informed people that I was gay and began sharing my beliefs that being gay and being Muslim were not contradictory.[32] In my activism, I used the language of gay identity[33] that I had learned from gay rights organisations and from other online outlets describing gay pride.
My initial activism was restricted to talking to small groups of friends and family members, as well as Islamic scholars. Using my knowledge of Qur’an, sunnah (sayings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad) and the shari’a (Islamic Law), I demonstrated how being gay was not presumptively illegitimate in Islamic Law as other scholars have argued. I developed arguments based on the sources of jurisprudence (or usul-ul-fiqh). One source that I have used is a verse from the Qur’an in which Allah says that ‘He … createth what He will. Lo! Allah is able to do all things.’[34] This verse points to Allah’s power to create whosoever He wants, including gays.
In a sense, I was engaging in the type of activism that Madhavi Sunder describes in Piercing the Veil:
Individuals in the modern world [are] increasingly demand[ing] change within their religious communities in order to bring their faith in line with democratic norms and practices. Call this the New Enlightenment: Today, individuals [are] seek[ing] reason, equality, and liberty not just in the public sphere, but also in the private spheres of religion, culture, and family.[35]
I am not alone in having engaged in a type of activism that Madhavi Sunder describes as a New Enlightenment. Consider the words of this Muslim who passionately states the following in relation to the acceptability of being gay in Islam: ‘I am gay, by nature, and I refuse to believe that Allah created people who are sinful by their very nature.’[36] In agreement with other LBGTQ Muslims such as Khaled that being gay could not be a violation of Islam, I was outraged by the systematic persecution of gays and decided to speak out more openly by engaging in public lectures and demonstrations in Egypt. These public declarations about being gay eventually led to my imprisonment and torture.[37] The torture to which I was subjected included verbal and physical abuse such as beatings, being forced into small confined spaces, withholding of food or delivery of food with filth in it, electrocution, and rape.[38]
After being released from prison and exiled from Egypt, I began questioning the effectiveness of opening the closet doors — ‘coming out’ and openly declaring a gay identity and the legitimacy of such an identity within Islam. I recognised that my socialisation, my being interpolated by discourses of Western gay activism, seemed to be at the root of my reasons for believing that such strategies would be effective. The US, for example, has taken several decades since the 1950s to reach a place in which some of the rights of gays are protected. These developments are borne out in a number of judicial decisions on gay rights over the past two decades.[39] The relatively mature culture of gay rights in the US stands in sharp contrast to the contemporary situation in Egypt and in many other Middle Eastern countries in which the notion of ‘gay’ identity is only beginning to be recognised, and in which the notion of ‘gay rights’ is even less recognised.
After my period of imprisonment, I traced the way in which gay rights activism had come to be associated with ‘coming out of the closet’ and with open political activism. While in Egypt, my knowledge about gay rights activist approaches derived from generalised exposure to websites of gay rights organisations,[40] knowledge about pride parades, and readings on human rights activism, rather than reading particular history books on the history of gay rights activism. However, it seems that I can trace the activist approaches I internalised through works by such scholars as John D’Emilio,[41] George Chauncey,[42] and William Eskridge.[43] In D’Emilio’s book, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970, he traces the emergence of the gay liberation movement, locating the move toward open activism in the 1969 Stonewall riots in which LBGTQ groups in New York City resisted the continued police raids of gay bars and clubs.[44] In fact, the annual New York Pride Parade is a ritual commemoration of that event.[45] It celebrates openness, and the right to be oneself, fully and without impediment. As I was coming to terms with my own sexuality in Egypt, my reliance on the language and ideas of gay rights activism was inextricably connected to a narrative about gay identity and ‘coming out of the closet’ that was related to the events of Stonewall.
In a sense, gay organisations worldwide and in particular in the US are exporting two primary paradigms: ‘the universalising of same-sex sexualities as identities’[46] and the ‘Stonewall’ model of sexuality, identity, and liberation.[47]
In her book, Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick sees gay identity and the
‘post-Stonewall’ gay liberation movement as a ‘narrative structure … attached to coming out’.[48] According to the Stonewall narrative, one’s sexual identity —being gay — is part of one’s being. The key moment of identity formation is ‘coming out’[49] and declaring one’s being to others as part of a ‘political act’.[50] This tradition is inextricably attached to the idea of gay pride that scholars have characterised as ‘America’s global gay export’.[51] The idea of pride was a pivotal part of my formation as a gay rights activist — I saw it as a declaration of oneself and a radical way to prove the visibility of gays, who were believed to be non-existent in Egypt.[52] Coincident to the pride parades, in which gay groups and individuals ‘come out’ to declare their presence, was the emergence of the rainbow flag as the symbol of gay rights. The flag openly declares the presence of gay people and gay communities worldwide — the existence of gay identity.[53] In a sense, I internalised the ‘coming out’ narrative; I was an heir of the rainbow flag, the pride parade and, without knowing it at the time, of Stonewall. In effect, I acted as a conduit for the dissemination of a notion of gay rights activism in which gay identity is a key part of an attempt to open spaces for gay Egyptians. According to one commentator, the mode of gay rights activism that I internalised was not atypical,[54] but has, through globalisation, become the paradigm of gay rights activism:
There are many examples that demonstrate the export of an Anglo-American, ‘Stonewall’ model of sexuality, identity, and liberation. In the Stonewall model, same-sex sexuality marks an identity category that comes to be labelled as gay, lesbian, or both (and the two are often problematically conflated). Put crudely, who (in terms of gender) one has sexual relations with is the key to who you are, and the ‘coming out’ is the central moment of identity formation. The sexual relations model has increasingly transcended its own cultural and historical roots [in the US] to become universalised as the paradigm of sexual identity.[55]
Deploying the ‘coming out’ narrative in Egypt — an entirely different social and cultural sphere from the US — had significantly different and negative consequences. By ‘coming out’ with a gay identity, it seems that I participated in constructing a new group for all to see — one that instantaneously became a ‘minority’. This group came under intense scrutiny by the Government. However, instead of embracing this new minority by providing them with support and empathy, the Egyptian Government has sought to marginalise and oppress them, through both its words (eg by referring to them as khawal) and its actions (eg torture and violence).
In a sense it seems that by using the approaches of the gay rights movement in the US, I inadvertently participated in producing a new identity that was then deployed by the Egyptian Government — deployed, however, to ensure its survival and in pursuance of its own interests. Instead of leading to greater acceptance of gays, the term khawal became prevalent, evolving from a term used to designate someone as feminine or weak to an all-purpose derogatory term for ‘gay’. For Egyptians, it seemed that ‘gay’ suddenly became an identity. This was particularly evident during the second public campaign against gays, in which the Egyptian Government rounded up 62 allegedly gay men and brought them before the ESSC. The policemen stood outside ridiculing them and shouting at them, saying: ‘Look at these faggots! The country’s become full of faggots!’[56] Their statements seemed to imply something more permanent about these men — that they embodied a fixed and rigid identity which triggers contempt and disgust. In fact, at the Appeals Court in July 2003, Judge Mo’azer El-Marsafy scolded the defendants, saying: ‘We are so disgusted with you, we can’t even look at you. What you did is a major sin, but unfortunately the case has procedural errors and the court had to acquit all of you.’[57]
By relying on the discourse of gay identity, the State reinforced the public’s perception that there is a class of people who are truly ‘gay’ — and all that was needed was to identify them and then announce their existence. By invoking identity, it implied that regardless of whether gays ‘came out’, they existed, and they were somewhere — the only issue was finding them. The problem with this discourse was that it provided the State with the ability to use gay identity in ways that support and further its power. This is exactly what happened. Instead of embracing this new group known as ‘gays’ through a process of positive recognition, the State ‘recognised’ them in a negative sense — by declaring them ‘demonic’, among many other epithets. Consider the statement of one of the judges of the ESSC, Judge Hassan al-Sayas:
The issue of the case and the crimes it includes repeat what happened in the time of the Sodomites and the wrath that fell upon them. They created an unprecedented obscenity among human beings by having sexual intercourse with human and demon males, and ignoring the women God created.[58]
In a sense, armed with the language of gay identity, Judge Hassan el-Sayas could now identify this class and properly punish them. In fact, one can also detect how the perception of being gay as a fixed identity makes it possible for people to describe gays as ‘demons’ — a claim that is aided by the essentialising language of gay identity, and which would be less powerful if being gay were seen as a more fluid concept.[59] Instead of producing a group that have claims or ‘rights’— identity-based protections — it produced a class of people who are potentially ‘locatable’; a class whose new definition could be deployed against them.
While gay rights seem to be premised on liberating sexual minorities, identity approaches have the paradoxical effect of placing Egyptian gays in greater danger. The persecution of gay men takes place at a time when Egypt has been plagued with significant economic difficulties — in particular, economic recession.[60] As a result, there are dire levels of unemployment, particularly among youths, in addition to deficiencies of social services. This has led to widespread despair, which fundamentalist groups are using to their advantage by attempting to respond to the unmet needs. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan-al-Musleemeen) has successfully shown itself to be a group genuinely concerned about social issues by providing emergency relief, assistance with finding employment, and health care services.[61] As a result, the Muslim Brotherhood has managed to win 17 seats in Egypt’s National Legislative Assembly, despite being a party that is legally banned from participating in elections.[62] The Muslim Brotherhood’s dedication to providing social and economic services has promoted Islam and the possibility of an Islamic state for Egyptians as a remedy to their despair.
Rather than addressing the legitimate needs of Egyptian society, and in fear of the ever-increasing popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Mubarak Government has tried to divert attention from its failure to address the economic woes of the country. It has done this by capturing allegedly gay men as a means to appease supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and other religious groups. The idea behind the campaign is to shore up the Government’s ‘Islamic credentials’, demonstrating that it remains dedicated to preserving Islam and limiting secularism. Perceiving the Muslim Brotherhood’s message to return to Islam as a solution to Egypt’s woes, in the midst of their suffering, many Egyptians are turning to Islam. By attacking gays, the Government’s apparent goal is to pursue an initiative that would be universally supported, in particular attracting the support of those who have come to agree with the increasingly popular Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, as predicted by the Mubarak Government, public support increased after the launch of the attack on gay men, since the regime was seen as promoting Islamic values — the very values that the Muslim Brotherhood espouses. Many state actors engaged — perhaps one can even say revelled — in religious discourse. Consider the Prosecutor-General of Egypt who, in relation to the Cairo 52 case, stated: ‘We are dedicated to protecting society against perversion, from a religious, social and cultural point of view.’[63] Later, explaining how he saw the defendants in the Cairo 52 case, he stated: ‘[These defendants] submitted [themselves] to vice, until they bec[a]me its servants with no conscience, [and] have hurried towards all that God has prohibited, ridding themselves of all morals.’[64]
The actual importer of gay identity has, paradoxically, been the Egyptian State, and not gay rights activists. Altogether, this chain of events fuelled scepticism in me about the viability of pursuing an open form of activism.
Not only did local gay rights activists like myself play into the hands of the Egyptian Government, but so did some foreign governments that expressed concern about the persecution of gays. For example, in France, President Jacques Chirac raised concerns about the treatment of gays in Egypt;[65] the European Parliament condemned the attacks on these men, demanding their release from custody and the ‘halt of all prosecutions of citizens on grounds of homosexuality’;[66] and in the US, a group of Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Congress asking to ‘withhold any support for a US–Egypt Free Trade Agreement’ due to Egypt’s persecution of gays.[67] These actions supported the impression among Egyptians that gay identity and gay rights were a product of the West, in turn producing a metonymic relationship between gays and the so-called Western world. The condemnations from the West entrenched the image of these gay men as Western.[68] If the West considered them to be of importance while virtually the entire country sided with the Government, then gay is Western, and these gays were Western.[69] Altogether, this worsened the situation for gay men, as it inspired fears of colonial corruption and filth that had to be eradicated. After the attacks of 2001, the attitude in Cairo was one of despair: ‘[n]ow there are those who are by nature attracted to men? What have we become? Have we forgotten all our values?’
The state-owned media explained that these men were engaging in same-sex sexual acts as part of their perception of their identity. They called themselves ‘gay’, the Government excitedly explained in interviews on various media throughout Egypt. What once was considered by most Egyptians to be
‘non-existent’ became real: gays were not only in the US and Europe — there were Egyptian men who were gay. This only furthered the media’s interrogation of how such decadence had infiltrated Egypt. Many in Egypt were struck that gay men existed. While there is recorded historical evidence that men throughout the history of the Middle East — including Egypt — have engaged in same-sex sexual conduct without persecution, the idea of ‘gay’ as an identity, fixed and integral to one’s self-definition, became part of popular discourse:[70] ‘What? This is who they are? They say they are gay?’ In effect, the identity discourse is what seems to fuel the rhetoric of condemnation and disbelief. The identity discourse tags the person by essentialising his same-sex sexual conduct, not only making it clear to all that he has engaged in such conduct, but even worse, that he desires to engage in such conduct as the sole or primary source of his sexual pleasure.
The perception that gay identity has been exported from Western countries and that Egyptians have become contaminated by their ‘masters’ did not bode well for me during my own activism. The perceived association of the West with gays in Egypt entrenched the idea that my peers and I embodied America and Europe — not its positive aspects, but its negative ones. We were corruption, we were the war on terrorism, we were deception, we were the vagaries of capitalism, we were decadence manifest, and we were hegemony. In other words, it allowed Egyptians suffering under the policies of the Egyptian Government to displace their anxieties onto gay men. Sonia Katyal points out that this has become a worldwide phenomenon:[71]
Suddenly, the emergence of a public, collective, gay identity in some parts of the world has become deeply fraught with accusations of cultural inauthenticity and Western decadence. The clash of these different forces, I argue, has produced a global — and cultural — crisis of sexual identity … the simultaneity of such developments — the globalising of gay rights discourse, and its attendant backlash — is striking … for its temporal coincidence … [72]
Western governments’ condemnations only further entrenched the perceptions that homosexuality was a Western colonial product — something sinful and worthy of containment; worthy of eradication. And this only strengthened the hand of the Government, rather than weakening it, raising its overall popularity. By deploying identity discourse, it consolidated the fears of Egyptians, in turn diverting their attention from the Government’s social and economic failures. Egyptians, who were once unconcerned, disinterested, or simply ignorant, began to see ‘gay people’ among their own population — a people who, if gay, deserve condemnation.
While the idea of ‘coming out the closet’ derives from the gay liberation movement, it can be suggested that it is related to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which was influenced by renowned activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr’s ideas can be traced to Mahatma Ghandi and his non-violent struggle known as satyagraha.[73] Ghandi’s activism, like that of Martin Luther King Jr and others such as Nelson Mandela, can be characterised as ‘open’. They are based on persuading others openly by awakening their conscience so that those that are the subject of satyagraha can recognise their wrongs and move toward the good.[74] For Ghandi, this openness is plagued by difficulty, but eventually succeeds. As he says, in the way that only Ghandi can, in reference to those that he is trying to persuade — in this case, the British Empire — ‘First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.’
My experience of activism in Egypt unfortunately followed a different course: ‘First they hear you. Then they pursue you. Then they harm you. Then you lose.’ There was no final triumph, or moment of winning, as Ghandi suggests. In a sense, engaging in activism by declaring one’s grievance and seeking to persuade those who oppress us seems to have been a total failure. The Egyptian Government cunningly deployed gay identity to cultivate fear and anxiety about the exportation of homosexuality from the West. Our ‘coming out of the closet’ and declaring ourselves gay — by advocating that it was fine to be gay, or that it was reconcilable with being a Muslim — only fuelled the fears of Egyptians, in turn supporting the Egyptian Government’s campaign against gays. Furthermore, adopting the language of gay rights put pressure on other human rights activists working in the areas of women’s rights, political rights and civil liberties. It seemed to increase scepticism about human rights and, perhaps in some sections of Egypt, weakened human rights as a legitimate system worthy to be included in the Egyptian political structure. If rights included gay rights, many Egyptians ask, then what are rights worth?
After much exhaustive deliberation and painful contemplation following my imprisonment, I struggled with what I must have done wrong. As previously mentioned, it seems that deploying identity as a means to advocate extending protections to gay men and women backfired. In particular, open activism has proved to be problematic. My contemplation about my activism and the current persecution of gays in Egypt leads me to say that ‘coming out of the closet’ does not seem feasible in a context wherein persecution, imprisonment and torture of the type perpetrated by Mubarak’s authoritarian Government persist. As a result, I consider the alternative possibility of ‘returning to the closet’. Whilst some may see this as a difficult suggestion, it is one that I believe would create possibilities for gay rights strategising in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East.
As explained above, the idea of the closet as something that a gay person must ‘come out of’ is a central element of the post-Stonewall paradigm of gay rights activism. In this narrative, the closet is implicitly constructed as a small place before a large world. It is also a place that is inhabited by a single person rather than groups or collectivities, as part of a psychological struggle in which ‘closeted’ persons discover their sexualities. It is a location from which persons typically come out or are pried out, such as in cases when the police force ‘open the closet doors’. Moreover, the closet is a location that has clearly delineated boundaries. In a sense, the closet seems to be implicitly made out of some sort of solid material, such as wood, steel or a substance that is hard to change. It is a small place where the closeted person is trapped — locked in — until he or she comes out into the world.
Conversely, the closet may also be conceptualised as a location that provides a protective space — a space in which one may be free from the direct oppression of a dictatorial regime such as the Egyptian State. While the Stonewall model perceives the closet to be problematic as it does not allow for self-expression, the prospect of being violently attacked is surely much more problematic. The prospect of losing one’s life or being tortured outweighs the minimal expression benefits that ‘coming out of the closet’ brings, particularly considering that currently in Egypt there are officers standing outside the closet doors, waiting — waiting to apprehend, imprison and torture you. As Leo Bersani states in his book, Homos, ‘I can’t be oppressed if I can’t be found’.[75]
While the closet is often perceived as a location inhabited by a single individual, we can reconceptualise the closet as a location that is inhabited by many self-identified gay people and their allies.[76] The closet would instead consist of a location in which LBGTQ groups can meet one another by creating safe spaces in which to learn about one another without ‘coming out’ to the wider public; without being in visible locations within the reach of the state’s apparatus of violence. As Bersani states, ‘[u]nidentifiability is an act of defiance’.[77]
Allowing the closet to include increasing numbers of people — LBGTQ persons and allies — means that the closet is expanding, rather than being fixed with definable contours and borders. The closet becomes ‘elastic’— a protean structure moving with flexibility and dynamism. Unlike the traditional narrative of the closet as a location from which a person can only ‘exit’, this closet is expanding and bringing people into it. The hope is that, over time, the closet will expand to include the entirety of society. The idea is — to the extent possible — to create safe spaces that protect LBGTQ members from persecution by leaving them unidentifiable, while simultaneously exploring ways to allow for self-expression and community.[78]
At lectures and presentations on this topic, I have heard concerns about the idea that LBGTQ groups should return to the closet. One gender studies expert has pointed out that for many gay rights activists, particularly in the US, gays who stay in the closet are typically ‘dismissed as “unliberated,” … [and seen as] fail[ing] to develop into individual political subjects.’[79] Instead, those remaining in the closet are cast aside, seen as ‘“prepolitical,” and “closeted,” in stark contrast to the “liberated,” “out,” politicized, “modern” gay identity’.[80] I caution against making such general assumptions, as the situation in Egypt is starkly different from that of the US. While homophobia exists in the US as in many parts of the world, there are spaces in which LBGTQ people can interact with relatively little fear. Egypt is a distinct context, deserving distinct consideration. Recalling Márquez’s enjoinment at the opening of the article that ‘the ravages of time are not the same for all’,[81] I would argue that LBGTQ groups returning to the closet in Egypt can lead to gay liberation — a hidden gay rights movement taking into account the specific challenges of the country.
Taken together, activism from the closet occurs by publicly hiding — covering — one’s gay identity outside of the collective closet, but still actively engaging in activism — hidden activism. This act of hiding one’s gay identity outside of the closet is inspired by Machiavelli’s The Prince, in which he cautions rulers to hide their less-than-positive traits while promoting their virtues. Machiavelli states that
I know that everyone will confess that it would be a very laudable thing to find in a prince all of the … qualities that are held good. But because he cannot have them, nor wholly observe them, since human conditions do not permit it, it is necessary for him to be so prudent as to know how to avoid [that is, to hide] the infamy of those vices that would take his state from him.[82]
Although Machiavelli’s statement relates to advising rulers, the same logic can be applied to LBGTQ people in the closet. In the same way that Machiavelli advises rulers to hide particular traits, being in the closet implies hiding one’s gay identity from the public outside the closet, with the aim of expanding the closet through privacy rights.[83]
This approach implies silence about being gay. Ferguson discusses the politics of silence, pointing out that while it is not typically considered the case, silence contains the potential to be subversive:
Silence can be used against others, but not merely in resistant ways. To see such usage as merely wresting a tool from an oppressive system, as a self-contained opposite, is to miss that silence’s power extends beyond resistance. Silence, both as withdrawal and as pointed avoidance, can be used to manipulate, control, and harm others just as easily as to protect the self.[84]
If we draw on Foucault’s idea of power as ‘effects’,[85] then the closet can potentially become a locus of power. It can be a place in which it affects, influences, and as Ferguson points out, allows for protection and control.[86] This potentially includes approaches that have incidental impact on increasing safe spaces for gays, as well as ways to construct new identities that would ultimately become more open to gay rights in some future time.[87]
In addition to facilitating the discovery of other LBGTQ people and the collective formation of a community within its protective space, the closet is also potentially a safe locus from which one can strategise on behalf of gay rights.[88] I refer to this as ‘activism from the closet’. This occurs by strategising from within the closet, hidden from state actors that are intent on violently attacking gays. I also refer to this strategy as ‘closeted’ or ‘hidden’ rights activism. The hope is that such a strategy would allow for the growth and development of gays without attracting the attention of the state or organisations such as mosques, state actors, and other fundamentalist networks that deploy verbal and physical violence against gay men and women.
In other words, rather than open activism, the study explores the possibility of hidden, strategic engagement with gay rights activism from the closet. These more hidden approaches do not consist of engaging in active, open demonstrations, but instead seek to use language to persuade, or at the very least, to produce ambivalence about aggressively pursuing gays among the Egyptian public. Such an approach requires that one does not explicitly enunciate ‘gay rights’ and ‘gay identity’ as part of gay rights activism, rather, that one should approach activism in more subtle ways, by persuading others on issues that appear to have very little explicit connection with gay rights or gay identity.
Of course, this is not to deny the problems that activism from the closet potentially produces. This includes the problem that privacy rights are typically enjoyed more easily by higher socio-economic classes. There is also the problem of ensuring that LBGTQ groups can meet and coordinate without being caught. And there is the problem of ensuring that this article and other related presentations that I have made do not produce a belief by Middle Eastern governments that activism from the closet is occurring, fuelling paranoia and a stronger will to pursue gays by seeking them in the deepest recesses of the closet, even at the expense of harming many heterosexuals in the process.
One example of ‘activism from the closet’ consists of LBGTQ allies engaging in activism to generally further privacy rights of all Egyptians (rights which are strongly protected in Islamic law and which are supported by Islamic fundamentalists). Such an approach would divert attention away from gays, while in the meantime producing a culture that values privacy and thereby indirectly benefiting gay men. The hope is that by using Islam-based arguments to support the need to protect privacy, Islamic groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood would be encouraged to support privacy rights, and ideally to engage in activism about privacy issues, thereby extending further legitimacy to those rights. For example, by relying on Islamic sources including the Qur’an, or on the sayings and practices of sunnah dealing with privacy, the hope is that LBGTQ groups would be able to trigger a national discussion, or at least to stimulate the concern of Islamic fundamentalists regarding this issue. This might in turn send signals to the Egyptian State to be more cautious, perhaps opening more private spaces free from state interference. This would be especially effective if Islamic organisations and parties become convinced that the issue of privacy is a concern.
An example of how LBGTQ groups can further the goals of increasing privacy is by relying on sources such as the following from the Qur’an:
O you who have attained to faith! Do not enter houses other than your own unless you have obtained permission and greeted their inmates. This is [enjoined upon you] for your own good, so that you might bear [your mutual rights] in mind. Hence, [even] if you find no one within [the house], do not enter it until you are given leave; and if you are told, ‘turn back,’ then turn back. This will be most conducive to your purity; and God has full knowledge of all you do.[89]
In fact, Prophet Muhammad’s notion of privacy extends to shameful and sinful acts. In one story, Omar Ibn Al Khattab, the third Islamic Caliphate, overheard a group of people chatting inside their home, and it soon became obvious to him that they were drinking alcohol. As the Caliphate, he had the right to extend punishment if he so wished, but he argued that his personal testimony had to be disregarded because it was obtained in breach of their privacy rights. Omar Ibn Al Khattab accepted that reasoning and refrained from punishing these wine drinkers.[90]
Accordingly, privacy rights should be at the forefront of a hidden activism strategy in Egypt. If applied, they would incidentally result in positive consequences for gays by preserving their bodily integrity, protecting them from violence, and allowing for the potential expansion of ‘the closet’. Most of all, it would allow LBGTQ groups within the closet to sustain their closeted gay rights activism. The goal, then, is not necessarily to persuade state actors or fundamentalists to embrace gay rights, but rather, at the very least, to produce ways to effect ambivalence on certain issues by constructing identities from which little attraction or benefit in actively perpetrating violence against gay men can be derived.
A concern with this approach, however, is that it requires LBGTQ groups to meet in private homes, which implies that more privileged LBGTQ members of society who are financially advantaged would have greater access to this opportunity than less privileged members. Financially wealthier individuals would be able to purchase property specifically for the purpose of meeting LBGTQ groups, permitting them to explore their sexuality in privacy. However, those with fewer means would likely have to resort to the use of their own property, sometimes homes that are small and open, which would allow others to see inside and thereby restrict their privacy. In other cases, some individuals experiencing poverty do not possess a home or a safe location from which to explore their sexuality and meet other LBGTQ members. However, this need not necessarily lead to exclusion if more privileged LBGTQ members use their property to allow less privileged members opportunities to access safe spaces from which to explore and express their sexuality, as well as to meet other LBGTQ people.
It is possible to engage in activism from the closet with the intention to change perceptions about gays without explicit references to gay identity and gay rights. Although this is a subject for another article, it is possible to use ideas within Egyptian culture to promote some changes, or at least to produce ambivalence about attacking gays. Other ideas include considering the possibility of carrying out activism to instil the tension — the ambivalence — between ‘church and state’, in turn producing at least some scepticism about attacking gays when they ‘come out of the closet’. Such an activist strategy would be effective, as many members of the Egyptian media believe in such a divide. This strategy would promote the idea that religion should be relegated to the private sphere, and that the State should not invoke religion as a basis of its policies. This could lead to increased scepticism of state persecution of gays, since even those who might have religious concerns about homosexuality would see the matter as existing beyond the reach of the State. Another possibility is for LBGTQ groups and their allies to expand the role of and interest in the sciences, using ‘science’ and ‘nature’ scripts including genetics and biology for younger generations to connect homosexuality with physiological explanations rather than religious ones. Of course, such a tactic has its potential downfalls, but could at least begin to produce scepticism among the younger generation regarding the persecution of gays — which will have downstream effects when that generation governs the nation some decades from now.
Another hidden activist approach would be for LBGTQ groups and their allies in Egypt to divert public attention away from the persecution of gays by engaging in open activism on issues such as economic revitalisation, democracy, rule of law, and human rights more generally. One method likely to be effective in protecting gays from attacks is to form alliances with Islamic fundamentalist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, to produce a party that addresses secular concerns, as well as attempting to change their perceptions about how they should govern in the event they gain further power. Perhaps one of the most effective strategies would be to bring attention to Egypt’s economic woes and to demonstrate that the Government has failed to address the basic needs of the Egyptian public. The Muslim Brotherhood would likely join in the criticism of the State, using the opportunity to promote its own efforts to address the social and economic needs of Egyptians. Such a strategy would draw more attention to the conflict between the Egyptian State and the Muslim Brotherhood, which could in turn deflect attention away from the persecution of LBGTQ people. The fundamental problem with this approach, however, is that it could strengthen the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps the more appropriate approach is to let the Mubarak Government and the Muslim Brotherhood oppose one another directly. This could see the creation of coalition parties that are more secular, appealing to wider constituencies in Egypt, including religious fundamentalists, as they are premised on establishing a more democratic, human rights-based system of governance.
There can also be more indirect hidden activism, as many powerful states that have greater concern for human rights protection are in a position to exert influence over Egypt. For example, the US could secretly pressure the Mubarak Government to terminate its attacks on gays, or risk a reduction or loss of foreign aid.[91] Of course, the US can put pressure on the Mubarak Government to terminate its attacks on gays without having to resort to using foreign aid as an incentive. Historically, US pressure has indeed been effective in influencing the domestic policies of the Egyptian Government.[92] Such an approach should, however, remain hidden such that the US is not seen as protecting a minority group, thereby exacerbating what seems to be a metonymic relationship between gays and the so-called ‘West’ in the minds of the Egyptian public, in turn protecting gays from possible violence. If this were carried out, the US would be helping to insulate the closet from the State, firming the closet’s foundation and assisting in its continued survival and eventual expansion. Based on this metaphor, the US and other countries would ‘enter’ into the closet with Egyptian LBGTQ groups, joining them in engaging in activism from the closet. The US could further assist through adopting policies supporting democratisation and human rights initiatives in Egypt. In particular, to ensure the continued expansion of the closet, the US should emphasise the establishment of liberties, as well as the extension of privacy rights, and the right to be free from torture. Making generalised or universal statements in which human rights would apply to all Egyptians would be far more effective than more specific declarations about gay rights. This would mitigate the perception that the so-called ‘West’ is singularly interested in the condition and plight of gays.
The idea of pursuing activism from the closet, from a position in which the primary intent of the activism is hidden, is what gives this approach its power. This power derives from the fact that gay rights activism from the closet is not explicitly brought to the foreground through the language of gay rights and gay identity. In relation to this point, Foucault states the following about power in his History of Sexuality:
Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms. … For it, secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation. Not only because power imposes secrecy on those whom it dominates, but because it is perhaps just as indispensable to the latter: would they accept it if they did not see it as a mere limit placed on their desire, leaving a measure of freedom … is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptability.[93]
By hiding the intention to further gay rights behind a discourse of other rights such as privacy, or by socialising younger generations through the use of ‘nature’ scripts and other educational methods, the closet becomes a powerful resource — an institution — for the gradual furtherance of gay rights in the short and the long term. The closet, fluid, protean and hidden, becomes a safe locus for collective strategising — a place from which LBGTQ groups can engage in activism.
The purpose of this article is to provide a basic framework for contemplating a research agenda for ‘closeted’ rights activism. Many examples await further discovery, and they should be crafted with sensitive attention to the changing contexts in Egypt. Activism from the closet as a strategic approach is not meant to be indefinite, and is a temporary strategy in the sense that gay rights and gay identity will, hopefully, one day become part of Egyptian culture and the cultures of the Middle East. However, I would suggest that in some ways the strategy can also be seen as permanent, as the metaphor of the closet is one that expands and includes more and more people, as opposed to the Stonewall variant of ‘coming out of the closet’, in which an individual must face the challenge of ‘exit’ on his or her own. The protean, ever-expanding closet that allows internal flows of LBGTQ groups and allies could be sustained. A continuous dilation of the closet that includes all of Egypt might also be the end result, making gay identity and gay rights part of the language and thinking of individuals in the closet.
But taken together, and in the face of a dictatorial regime that sees the preservation of its power as paramount, LBGTQ groups in Egypt will be in a better position by returning to the closet. They should do so not in surrender or in defeat, but as a form of soft vindictiveness to hide their gay identities strategically, only to produce them within the closet — unconfined, ever‑expanding to allow others to learn to accept gay rights and gay identity — the approach known as activism from the closet.
[*] DEC, BSc, BCL, LLB (McGill); LLM (Osgoode Hall); International Law and Human Rights Assistant Professor, United Nations University for Peace; Visiting Scholar, Harvard Law School (2003–04); hmenyawi@upeace.org. Special thanks to my students at the United Nations University for Peace, who have quite attentively taken interest in my projects related to gay rights activism in the Middle East. I would also like to acknowledge insightful conversations with Ben Francisco Maulbeck and Juan Amaya Castro. I wish to also thank participants and colleagues during my lectures at the University of Melbourne Law School, Yale Law School and University of London Birkbeck School of Law. Thanks are due to the many students at Yale Law School and Yale College for their enthusiasm and curiosity about the topic of this article.
[1] Gabriel García Márquez, ‘The Solitude of Latin America’ (Speech delivered at the Nobel Lecture, Oslo, Norway, 8 December 1982).
[2] Human Rights Watch interview with Amgad (not his real name) in Human Rights Watch, In a Time of Torture: The Assault on Justice in Egypt’s Crackdown on Homosexual Conduct, HRW Index No 1564322963 (1 March 2004) 81 (‘Human Rights Watch Report’).
[3] A defendant in the Queen Boat trial. Human Rights Watch interview with Murad (not his real name), ibid 36.
[4] A defendant in the Queen Boat trial. Human Rights Watch interview with Ziyad (not his real name), ibid iv.
[5] Ibid 7.
[6] Ibid 22.
[7] Ibid 22–3.
[8] The article will subsequently refer to this case and those arrested as ‘the Cairo 52’ since ‘Queen Boat 52’ inaccurately implies that all 52 men were on the Queen Boat.
[9] Human Rights Watch Report, above n 2, 41.
[10] Ibid 22. There has been confusion as to the exact manner in which the crime of ‘habitual debauchery’ is to be interpreted. There is debate about whether the crime of debauchery can only be perpetrated by men and not by women, whether debauchery requires that sex be remunerated (as it is an anti-prostitution law) and whether all parties involved in a sexual encounter can be charged with ‘debauchery’, or only those persons who have committed particular types of acts in the given sexual encounter: ibid 14–15, 133–5.
[11] Ibid 25, 36–7, 41.
[12] Many of the men on the Queen Boat who were arrested were charged under art 9(c) of Law 10 of 1961, entitled the ‘Law on the Combating of Prostitution’. Originally legislated in 1951, it was a product of the end of British colonial rule in Egypt: Human Rights Watch Report, above n 2, 13, 131. The legislation was meant to bring an end to the system of brothels and legalised prostitution, which British soldiers had regularly utilised while occupying Egypt: at 132–4.
[13] Human Rights Watch Report, above n 2, 43.
[14] Ibid 46.
[15] See Human Rights Watch, Egypt: Human Rights Background (2001) <http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/mena/egypt-bck-1001.htm> at 22 May 2006.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Hossam Bahgat, ‘Explaining Egypt’s Targeting of Gays’, Middle East Report Online (US), 23 July 2001 <http://www.merip.org/mero/mero072301.html> at 22 May 2006.
[18] International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Egypt: Emergency Court Trials Homosexual Suspects (2001) <http://www.iglhrc.org/site/iglhrc/section.php?id=5&detail=151> at 22 May 2006.
[19] Human Rights Watch Report, above n 2, 7.
[20] In another scandal, the Egyptian Government arrested and detained large numbers of Shi’ites who were accused of being sympathetic with Satan.
[21] Annik Lussier, ‘The Trial that Never Was’, Cairo Times (Cairo, Egypt), 20 March 2003, available at <http://www.gayegypt.com/cairtim20mar.html> at 22 May 2006; International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, above n 18.
[22] It is unclear whether it was possible for non-Egyptian foreigners to be guilty of ‘debauchery’, or whether this is a crime particular to the Egyptian male citizen. Of the men picked up by the police from the Queen Boat nightclub that May evening, at least nine non-Egyptian men (of Arab ethnicity) were inexplicably released after reaching one of Cairo’s police stations, along with some Egyptians whose social and political connections protected them from further harassment, detention and abuse by the police: see Human Rights Watch Report, above n 2, 31, 33. Not all foreigners, however, have subsequently escaped harassment: at 86.
[23] Ibid 10, 23.
[24] Ibid 73–87.
[25] Ibid 74.
[26] Ibid 83.
[27] Ibid 94. Khawal is a derogatory term for ‘gay’ in colloquial Egyptian Arabic.
[28] Ibid 2. See also Amnesty International, Worldwide Appeal, Egypt: Persecution of Men Accused of Being Gay Leads to Torture, Imprisonment (2002) <http://web.amnesty.org/web/wwa.nsf/print/egy-010202-wwa-eng> at 22 May 2006.
[29] Human Rights Watch Report, above n 2, 18, 94.
[30] Ibid 2. For an in-depth discussion of the invasive techniques used, see ibid 107–15.
[31] In an interview with Human Rights Watch, ibid, Wahid (not his real name) stated the following, at 34:
Taha Embaby started calling all of our names. He was a high-ranking officer. Very big and fat and cruel. … He had a tape recorder with him. Everyone was forced to say whether he was passive or active. He said, ‘I just want to know the number of khawalat, or disgusting perverts, in Egypt. I’m doing a [sic] research on this and I need to know in one hour.’ This hour lasted for thirteen months. So one by one we went to the tape recorder and said whether we were active or passive. Those who refused were beaten. I said I was both and I was beaten.
Hossein, another person whose anonymity has been protected, stated the following, at 34:
We went out of the cell to the officer’s desk. We were very happy, hoping we would leave. We found out it was the opposite. The officer shouted at us and humiliated us, and they beat us, and no one went home. It turned out to have been a game. … He told me to say that I was gay. He actually said the [English] word ‘gay.’ He had the tape recorder on. I said, ‘What does “gay” mean?’ He hit me. ‘Just pronounce the word I told you to say.’ So I said the word.
[32] It is worth mentioning that I am not the only Egyptian gay rights activist. There are other self-identified gay activists, such as Sherif Farhat. For details on Sherif Farhat, see ibid 22.
[33] For a more general account of how global discourses of sexual identities can be used strategically by gay rights activists, see Carl Stychin, ‘Same-Sex Sexualities and the Globalization of Human Rights Discourse’ (2004) 49 McGill Law Journal 951.
[34] Holy Qur’an 24:44–5 (an-Nur — Light) (author’s own translation).
[35] Madhavi Sunder, ‘Piercing the Veil’ [2003] YaleLawJl 37; (2003) 112 Yale Law Journal 1399, 1403 (emphasis omitted) (citations omitted).
[36] Interview with Khaled (not his real name) (Toronto, Canada, 23–26 March 2003).
[37] My openly ‘coming out of the closet’ not only attracted the attention of Egyptian authorities, but my willingness to take on a ‘gay identity’ was provocative. Unlike other cases, the authorities were not required to extract a confession. In some ways, one can see this as my playing into the hands of the authorities.
[38] I feel compelled to say that it is generally very difficult for me to discuss the nature of these acts and my despair during the time that they occurred. Although I do discuss torture and some of my experiences in my class on ‘Human Rights’, it remains a challenging issue for me.
[39] See Romer v Evans, [1996] USSC 45; 517 US 620 (1996) where the Supreme Court decided that discrimination against persons for their sexual orientation was unconstitutional. See also Lawrence v Texas, [2003] USSC 4776; 539 US 558 (2003) where the Supreme Court decided that engaging in same-sex sexual relations were intimate and protected by privacy. Most recently in Goodrich v Department of Public Health, 798 NE 2d 941 (Mass, 2003), the Massachusetts State Court determined that not extending marriage to same-sex couples was unconstitutional.
[40] Organisations such as Human Rights Watch, American Muslim organisations, Al-Fatiha and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (‘IGLHRC’) rely on particular notions of activism: see Human Rights Watch, Defending Human Rights Worldwide (2006) <http://www.hrw.org> at 22 May 2006; IGLHRC (2006) <http://www.iglhrc.org> at 22 May 2006. A cursory examination of these organisations’ websites demonstrates the reliance on open activist approaches to advancing gay rights, including protests, demonstrations and condemnations of governments engaged in gay persecution.
[41] See John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (2nd ed, 1998).
[42] George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (1994).
[43] William Eskridge, ‘Privacy Jurisprudence and the Apartheid of the Closet, 1946–1961’ (1997) 24 Florida State University Law Review 703.
[44] D’Emilio, above n 41, 239. There were many protests in the days following the riots, and throughout this article these will be described collectively as ‘Stonewall’. D’Emilio argues that ‘Stonewall … marked a critical divide in the politics and consciousness of homosexuals and lesbians. A small, thinly spread reform effort suddenly grew into a large, grassroots movement for liberation’: at 232. D’Emilio describes the events on 27 June 1969: ‘trash fires blazed, bottles and stones flew through the air, and cries of “Gay Power!” rang in the streets as the police, numbering over 400, did battle with a crowd estimated at more than 2000’: at 239.
[45] D’Emilio states that
[i]n June 1970 between 5000 and 10 000 men and women commemorated the first anniversary of the [Stonewall] riot with a march from Greenwich Village to Central Park. By the second half of the decade, Gay Freedom Day events were occurring in dozens of cities, and total participation exceeded half a million individuals: ibid 237–8.
See also Sonia Katyal, ‘Exporting Identity’ (2002) 14 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 97, who states that ‘[g]ay pride parades have become a global phenomenon; and gay and lesbian activists have made their way around the globe to assist the formation of nascent movements’: at 114.
[46] Stychin, above n 33, 954. See also Dennis Altman, Global Sex (2001); Martin Manalansan, ‘(Re)Locating the Gay Filipino: Resistance, Postcolonialism, and Identity’ (1993) 26(2/3) Journal of Homosexuality 53.
[47] Stychin, above n 33, 954.
[48] Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990) 84−5.
[49] Stychin, above n 33, 954. See also Katyal, above n 45, stating that ‘the predominant gay civil rights movement in the US has displayed a yearning tendency to substitute a discernible sexual orientation and identity for same-sex sexual conduct; and then to attach a categorical imperative to “coming out”’: at 114.
[50] William Eskridge, ‘A Jurisprudence of “Coming Out”: Religion, Homosexuality, and Collisions of Liberty and Equality in American Public Law’ (1997) 106 Yale Law Journal 2411, 2443.
[51] Katyal, above n 45, 98. For discussion about ‘gay exports’, see Frank Browning, A Queer Geography (1998) 24. See also Dennis Altman, ‘On Global Queering’ (1996) 2 Australian Humanities Review <http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-July-1996/altman.html> at 22 May 2006 (describing how formations of gay identity in Jakarta and in other regions of the globe are influenced by Western trends and the marketing of gay culture internationally); Neville Hoad, ‘Between the White Man’s Burden and the White Man’s Disease’ (1999) 5 Gay & Lesbian Quarterly 559, noting that
[t]here is a certain banal truth to allegations of US cultural imperialism particularly in regard to gay male identity in South Africa (and, arguably, in much of the world). Gay culture ... like Coca-Cola, Madonna, and Calvin Klein underwear, has become a potent American export’: at 563.
[52] D’Emilio argues that the events of Stonewall spawned truly open activist approaches in which people publicly declared themselves to be gay, marched on Gay Freedom Day or in Gay Pride and participated in demonstrations when necessary. He states that The Stonewall riot was able to spark a nationwide grassroots ‘liberation’ effort. … The apocalyptic rhetoric and the sense of impending revolution that surrounded the Movement by the end of the decade gave to its newest participants an audacious daring that made the dangers of a public avowal of their sexuality seem insignificant: at 233.
Stonewall’s open approach is still present in gay rights organisations such as Al-Fatiha and IGLHRC.
[53] See D’ Emilio, above n 41, 235. D’Emilio asserts:
From its beginning, gay liberation transformed the meaning of ‘coming out’. Previously coming out had signified the private decision to accept one’s homosexual desires and to acknowledge one’s sexual identity to other gay men and women … [After Stonewall] to come out of the ‘closet’ quintessentially expressed the fusion of the personal and the political that the radicalism of the late 1960s exalted.
While the idea of ‘coming out of the closet’ is not related only to Stonewall, the idea of the closet that I internalised in Egypt was the one that was implicit in the contemporary gay rights discourse and movements tied to those events.
[54] See generally Stychin, above n 33, 954.
[55] Ibid (emphasis in original) (citations omitted). For discussion on the centrality of the ‘coming out’ narrative and its relationship to gay identity, see Mark Blasius, ‘An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence’ in Mark Blasius (ed), Sexual Identities, Queer Politics (2001) 143. Blasius provides a limited exploration of how the ‘sexual’ or sexuality is meaningfully constructed in different cultures. See also Gilbert Herdt, Same Sex, Different Cultures: Exploring Gay and Lesbian Lives (1997). For an excellent study on the globalisation of sexual identities, see generally Altman, above n 46, 75.
[56] See above n 27 and accompanying text. The term ‘faggots’ is translated from the Arabic term khawalat (plural for khawal). The term seems to have become used excessively after the publicised campaign against gays. To demonstrate a sample of the various contexts in which the term khawal is used, see Human Rights Watch Report, above n 2, 6, 11, 16, 20–1, 26–7, 32–4, 38, 42, 45, 51.
[57] ‘Egypt Appeals Court Acquits in Gay Trial’, Associated Press Newsfeed, 20 July 2003.
[58] As quoted in Human Rights Watch Report, above n 2, 98.
[59] See Katyal, above n 45, for a description of some problems with deploying the essentialising language of gay identity in the context of gay rights activism. Katyal argues that essentialising a single ‘gay identity’ can yield negative effects. Thus she argues international gay and lesbian activism should privilege ‘sexual autonomy’ over ‘gay identity’. She suggests the former can open spaces for same-sex sexual conduct without the stigma of ‘gay identity’ that attracts violent backlash. As Katyal explains it, ‘[u]nder this framework, the right to sexual autonomy should be understood as providing legal protection to permit individuals to identify with a particular gender identity or sexual orientation if desired, or none at all’: at 171. As Katyal sees it, the latter framework often require[s] individuals to ‘name’ themselves or ‘come out’ as an implicit prerequisite. … As a result, what some see as gay liberation, others see as a colonizing conflict of identity; where the complexities of desire and experience are forcibly mapped onto a shifting and ultimately unpredictable terrain: at 173–4.
While Katyal’s idea is worthy of consideration, it is potentially problematic in the context of Egypt because it is the Egyptian State that has made every effort to, for example, conflate same-sex sexual conduct with identity. For discussion about activist strategies that do not emphasise gay identity, see also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).
[60] See, eg, United States Agency for International Development, Egypt Budget (2006) <http://www.usaid.gov/policy/budget/cbj2006/ane/eg.html> at 22 May 2006. The Agency puts Egypt’s 2004 unemployment figure at 11 per cent. There are many debates about the unemployment rate, with figures ranging from anywhere between eight per cent and 30 per cent: see Niveen Wahish, ‘The Unemployment Conundrum’, Al-Ahram Weekly Online (Egypt), 24 January 2002 <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/570/ec5.htm> at 22 May 2006.
[61] For example, the Muslim Brotherhood has created organisations in neighbourhoods across the country that assist citizens to obtain food, jobs and healthcare. Such initiatives have only furthered the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood among the Egyptian public: see Albion Monitor, Muslim Brotherhood Wins Over Egyptians with Charity Services (2006) <http://www.albionmonitor.com/0602a/egyptislamistcharity.html> at 22 May 2006.
[62] Amira Howeidy, ‘Egypt’s Brotherhood Takes Centre Stage’, Aljazeera (Qatar), 14 November 2005 <http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/DD81F58B-4247-413D-8A97-57508546AD73.htm> at 22 May 2006.
[63] Human Rights Watch Report, above n 2, 96 (emphasis added).
[64] Ibid 98.
[65] Jon Ben Asher, French President Raises Concerns about Egypt (2002) <http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/egypt/egnews194.htm> at 22 May 2006.
[66] Resolution on Human Rights Violations in Egypt No 2003/0192 [2004] OJ C 64 E/004.
[67] Kevin Spence, ‘House Democrats Urge Sanctions on Egypt for Gay Persecution’, Washington Blade (Washington DC, US), 9 May 2003, available at <http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/egypt/egnews228.htm> at 22 May 2006.
[68] Joshua Hammer, ‘Gay Egypt in the Dock; The Big Crackdown May Reflect Cairo’s Own Insecurities’, Newsweek International (New York, US), 11 February 2002, 22.
[69] This perceived association between the West and gays was particularly acute in an editorial written by Bakry, the Editor in Chief of the independent newspaper Al-Osbou’. According to Al-Ahram Weekly Online, Bakry was of the view that ‘after Iraq and Syria, Egypt would be next in line, referring to the criticisms directed by the European Parliament to sentences passed on homosexuals in the famous “Queen Boat” case in Cairo’. Bakry wrote, ‘I do not find it far-fetched to suppose that armies will one day be positioned, and warships proceed, armed with UN Security Council resolutions, against an Egypt that “persecutes homosexuals”!’: Aziza Sami, ‘By Our Own Hands’, Al-Ahram Weekly Online (Egypt), 24 April 2003 <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/635/sc10.htm> at 22 May 2006.
[70] For a historical survey, see Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe (eds), Islamic Homosexualities (1997).
[71] See Katyal, above n 45, 43.
[72] Ibid 122. See also Martin Manalansan, ‘In the Shadow of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transtitional Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma’ in Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (eds), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (1997) 485, 488.
[73] For discussions on Ghandi’s satyagraha, see Thomas Merton (ed), Ghandi on Non-Violence: Selected Texts from Mohandes K. Ghandi (1965) 4−20; Louis Fischer (ed), The Essential Ghandi: An Anthology (1990) 120−7, 133−41.
[74] See Merton, above n 73, 15. For Ghandi, the satyagrahi (ie, person engaging in satyagraha) must find a way to persuade the person who is oppressing him or her, but not by violently attacking or by pursuing one’s interests at the expense of the oppressor. Ideally, the satyagrahi should try to liberate himself or herself, the oppressed, and the oppressor together. Merton argues that ‘the oppressed must be able to be free within himself, so that he may begin to gain strength to pity his oppressor’: at 15. Erasmus enjoins the oppressed to ‘help [their] enemy by overcoming him with kindness and meekness’ as a means to awaken his conscience on a path toward justice: at 15.
[75] Leo Bersani, Homos (1995) 32.
[76] In this particular case, gays who are in the closet are not meant to be in the closet in the sense of being ‘closeted’, which typically refers to the fact that they are in psychological denial about being gay. Rather, persons in the closet in this case take on a gay identity but do not reveal that identity to those outside the closet.
[78] Conceptualising an elastic closet that expands as more and more people are included does not necessarily imply that there is no risk that those in the closet are in danger of being found by authorities. The idea, then, is to try to develop strategies that reduce, as much as possible, the risk of danger or of being caught. The metaphor of a constantly expanding closet envisions a closet that expands with the inclusion of someone who is gay or an ally that supports gay rights. The expanding closet also connotes the idea of LBGTQ groups successfully finding ways to create relatively safe spaces for themselves.
[79] Katyal, above n 45, 130. See also Manalansan, above n 72, 486−8; Chris Dunton and Mai Palmberg, ‘Human Rights and Homosexuality in Southern Africa’, Current African Issues 19 (1996).
[80] Katyal, above n 45, 130. See also Manalansan, above n 72.
[82] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (Harvey Mansfield trans, 1985 ed) 62 [trans of: Il principe].
[83] Of course, it is important to mention that while Machiavelli advises rulers to hide their actual vices, being gay is not a vice. But for many Egyptians, being gay is perceived as sinful and abhorrent. Hence, for all practical purposes, Machiavelli’s advice remains applicable.
[84] Kennan Ferguson, ‘Silence: A Politics’ (2003) 2 Contemporary Political Theory 49, 57.
[85] See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (Robert Hurley trans, 1980 ed) vol 1, 86 [trans of: Histoire de la sexualité]. For brilliant reflections on this first volume, see Janet Halley, ‘Bowers v Hardwick in the Renaissance’ in Jonathan Goldberg (ed), Queering the Renaissance (1994) 15, 15−39; Janet Halley, ‘Take a Break from Feminism?’ in Karen Knop (ed), Gender and Human Rights (2004) 57. Halley argues that
[f]or the Foucault of Volume One, the task was to imagine power not as the relation of dominance and subordination, but as a highly fragmented and temporally mobile ‘field of force relations’. Power could be micropouvoir: it could achieve vast social and consciousness effects not by dropping down on people from on high, but by being constantly moved about among them; and not only through psychical violence, but also through formations and reformations of the possibilities for organized experience. Discourses. … For the Foucault of Volume One, power was not necessarily bad. It might be pouvoir — the capacity to create effects — rather than puissance — the capacity to dominate or coerce: at 76 (emphasis in original).
[86] Ferguson, above n 84, 57.
[87] When referring to the construction of new identities, I am, for instance, referring to the idea of deploying the value of privacy in Islam to persuade — to construct — fundamentalist actors to protect privacy, thereby incidentally opening up safe spaces for LBGTQ groups. While fundamentalists who fight for privacy, for example, do not become a part of the expanding elastic closet since they do not believe in gay rights (but only in privacy since it is Islamically justified), they are participating in the existence and sustenance of the expanding closet. Hence, these fundamentalist identities produce and reinforce the border between the closet and the world outside the closet.
[88] The use of the term ‘strategy’ in this article is consistent with the description in Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994). Mintzberg describes ‘strategy’ as a plan, a ‘how’, a means of getting from ‘here to there’: at 23.
[89] Holy Qur’an 24:27–8 (an-Nur — Light) (author’s own translation).
[90] Although these few verses and stories do not constitute a definitive legal comment on the value of privacy in Islamic Law, the general public and Muslim groups would require a less complicated yet source-based approach to arguing the importance of privacy.
[91] The term ‘secretly’ refers to one-to-one deliberations outside the media spotlight between members of the US administration and the Mubarak Government.
[92] See, eg, the case of Egyptian academic and activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, whose imprisonment by the Egyptian Government attracted criticism from many states, including the US: Ray Suarez, ‘Clashing with Cairo’, Online NewsHour (US), 16 August 2002 <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/july-dec02/egypt_8-16.html> at 22 May 2006. Ibrahim’s conviction was subsequently quashed and overturned on appeal: Philip Reeker, Deputy Spokesman for the US Department of State (Press Briefing, 15 August 2002) <http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2002/12725.htm> at 22 May 2006. See also David Hardaker (Reporter), ‘Democracy Egyptian-Style’, Foreign Correspondent, Sydney, Australia, 6 September 2005, available at <http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2005/s1450796.htm> at 22 May 2006.
[93] Foucault, above n 85, 86. Foucault argues that ‘the idea of “sex” makes it possible to evade what gives “power” its power; it enables one to conceive power solely as law and taboo’: at 155. In other words, Foucault is suggesting that power over us is tolerable if it is thought to be — if it presents itself as — something other than power, such as law, or taboo. Discourses such as law and taboo construct people to see constraints on their behaviour as justified, and for Foucault, this is ultimately power disguising itself.
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