The piles of rubbish in the streets of Naples are not the only things that smell bad in Italy. In few other places in Europe, are gay people worse off legally. The country is unable to provide its gay citizens with the basic rights offered by other predominantly Catholic countries, such as Spain or France. In both those countries, gay marriage or partnership is an established fact, while in Italy there is not even a nation-wide anti-discrimination law. Even in conservative Croatia, just across the Adriatic, such a law has been on the books since 2003, along with legal recognition of same-sex couples.
Romano Prodi’s departing government never delivered on a gay partnership bill (called the DICO), strongly opposed by Italian family groups and Pope Benedict XVI. The Catholic Church, with its enormous influence on Italian politics, should be pleased with the recent elections. Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition, and its mix of traditional politics, populism and the post-fascism of the National Alliance, guarantees that laws protecting even the most basic rights of gay people in Italy are a dream of the future, unless Brussels intervenes. Berlusconi, known for his gay jokes, doesn’t seem to care much about the votes of gay Italians, reassuring his electorate: ‘Don’t be afraid, gays are all on the other side’ (they vote for the left).
The few privileges accorded to gay Italians are likely, in fact, to be curtailed. Gianni Alemanno, elected mayor of Rome in April, is strongly opposed to gay pride parades. Like Berlusconi, he is also for strong-handed tactics against immigrants. Measures sending illegal migrants to jail are being drafted, as Italy steps up its 'security'. Not even European citizens are respected, with Roma (or ‘gypsy’) camps torched in Southern Italy. Tolerance and acceptance of difference, sexual or national, is at an all-time low, as sexual minorities and immigrants are accused of destroying the fabric of a national community based on family and religious values.
The leading French gay magazine, Têtu, in its 2008 summer travel issue, writes with concern about the deterioration of hope. Asking ‘Are you José Luis or Silvio?’, it compares the enlightenment of Spanish policies compared to Italian ones. The former country recently returned Zapatero’s Socialists, and their policy of protecting gay ‘families’, to power. And while Spanish tourist agencies are encouraging gay holidaymakers to spend their euros in Seville or Valencia this summer, Têtu’s editorial is encouraging its readers to boycott Italy as if it were a country with China’s human rights record.
I am an Italian citizen, and was offered a job in Rome this spring. I said no, largely because I cannot move there with my husband to whom I am legally wed in Canada. There is a reason why cities like Brussels or Berlin are filled with gay Italian ex-patriots who have decided (not inexplicably) to leave a sunny and beautiful country behind for grey Northern climes. And as Italy falls into a spiral of corruption, religious intolerance and corporate politics, one starts to question the old stereotype of brava gente that has made us love this place despite all its problems. Povero paese. Europe, stay vigilant.
-Joseph Pearson
Wednesday 21 May 2008
Monday 19 May 2008
Gay Rights and The Clash of Civilizations
(from a talk given to students at the United World College of the Adriatic, a peace project in Duino, Italy, in April 2008, by Joseph Pearson)
A perceived clash of values, or civilizations, is favorite rhetoric among politicians in an era where threats to domestic and international security are increasingly perceived to be related to non-state actors (terrorism) often sponsored by States (or rogue states) located in the Middle East and Central Asia. Speaking of great entities called “West” and “East” provides an ideological, theological backdrop to rhetoric of invasion, surveillance and security. The “West” generally comes to mean industrialized countries in Europe and North America, the “East” can actually refer to countries stemming from as far West as Morocco to the Pacific Ocean. For the sake of this talk, I will be making comparisons between Europe and North America and the Arabic and Persian speaking lands of Africa and Asia.
There are a number of perceived, and actual, differences of values between West and East. The ones which regularly make their way into the press are differences in the rights accorded to women, the freedoms which are accorded to journalists, differences in judicial practice and rule of law. And certainly one of the greatest perceived differences between so-called Western societies and so-called Eastern ones is the question of homosexuality.
While in countries like Spain, the Netherlands, Canada, nearly every civil protection and privilege –from non-discrimination, to adoption to marriage- has been equalized between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples, in the Middle East, homosexuality is still illegal in almost every country. In Iran, or Saudi Arabia, sex between men is punishable by death –the most famous execution in Iran was in 2005 of two teenagers, aged 18 and 16. I will focus here on gay male sexuality, because it is the one which is normally criminalized in the region, as a touchstone for further discussion I hope about the human rights governing, for example, women, gender, lesbianism and the transgendered.
These striking differences in the application of the law are often the focus of mass media attention instead of the dynamics for rights recognition that lie under the surface of Middle Eastern societies. And the acceptance of stereotypes of “West” and “East” often takes precedence over a more subtle understanding of how gay people live, have lived, and will continue to live in the region. I hope in this talk to get away from some of the crass and dangerous stereotypes about Middle Eastern society, the focus on terrorist training camps, stonings, Islamic insurgents and Al-Qaida. This vision is a little like speaking of America simply as a country of cross-burnings and the KKK. While more conservative than most of Europe, the Middle East is a region which is in fact highly diverse and with its own history of secularism and tolerance.
Today, I wish simply to ask just a couple of discussion questions, providing some background information for each question, from there I hope we can discuss these various arguments and ask some hard questions about the limits of tolerance.
The Question of Universals
At the centre of the debate of rights recognition is the notion of universals. Take the following statement: "To live openly and freely as a homosexual, with the equality to marry, adopt children and be protected from violence, is a human right, no matter where you live in the world".
This statement relies on a universal notion of human rights. Where would that universal come from? From religion? Well, many religions come down rather hard on homosexuality –be it ‘Western’ (Catholic, Baptists, much of the Anglican Church is torn over the issue) or ‘Eastern’ (Islam gets singled out for being anti-gay, when in fact Christian texts are arguably much more explicitly gay than the Koran). So if the universal does not come from religion, where does it come from?
Secular societies often pride themselves on moral codes coming from the law or social norms, but aren’t these limited to the societies to which they pertain. France’s protections for gay rights, for example, extend to the territory of France: not internationally and not all humans. And then there is the question of power: where international treaties govern human rights, there is often the criticism that these rights have been defined according to the values of the culture that wields power: western cultures defined the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it was the victorious allied powers that did so without real input from Africa or the Middle East. And it is worth noting that sexual orientation in those days, as you could imagine, was not included in the charter –notions of rights evolving faster than institutions. The Council of Europe, on the other hand, requires all the nations which are members decriminalize homosexuality. And while this explains why homosexuality is legalised in the Caucasus but not in much of Central Asia, because the Caucasus are considered “European” for the sake of membership, the Council of Europe does not include the Middle East. And even if it did, the argument could be made that countries sign these documents because they trade their cultural values for political and economic support.
And so one is left with one of the great controversies of international relations in our time: on one hand many of us recognize that human rights are not universal, we do not believe that there is a metaphysical justification for them, nor do we think that the social norms of one culture should be shared by all, or that countries should impose their legal codes on one another… so then we are left with the great pride of many left-wing intellectuals, cultural relativism. Can we be culturally relative and advance human rights?
Indeed, this rhetoric of tolerating all cultures, all practices, of seeing one’s own culture as an abstraction in the face of others, comes into trouble when one needs a justification against female circumcision or the execution of homosexuals in another part of the world. And often, we find that despite all our espoused values of relativism, in an act of hypocrisy turn to the universals that we originally eschewed, by invoking the name of human rights, without really knowing where they come from and according to which values they should be defined. Or do we really need a universal principle in order to invoke the word ‘rights’, and see them simply as a pragmatic tool to advance politically the kind of world in which we want to live? And then when Westerners do advance their ideological agendas politically in the East, they must face the accusation that this project is imperialist. Who really has the right to speak about the Middle East if not the people of the region? Westerners exert control by telling the Middle East what it is, and how its populations should live.
"There are no gay people in the Middle East"
Now, if one then finds a justification to fight for the rights of gay people in a region where they are largely lacking (and I will provide one in a moment), one needs to face a criticism which might sound banal but is in fact at the centre of academic debate: "There are no gay people in the Middle East". And therefore, there are no rights to fight for. This is not simply a point of view of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but also that of a distinguished professor of Middle Eastern Intellectual History at Columbia University, Joseph Massad.
The argument has three main parts:
1. Homosexuality is socially constructed.
2. Homosexuality is a social construction particular to "Western" societies.
3. This identity is imported to the Middle East by human rights activists, which Massad calls the "Gay International". In his own words: “The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating.”
Notice: 1. Homosexuality is not universal, therefore not a biological fact 2. Homosexuality is "created" by human rights advocates who then want to defend the people they create.
But note: Biological research in fact reveals that multiple genes, not a single gene, and environmental factors in the womb, and not primarily social conditioning, points increasingly to a biological explanation for homosexuality. The social science model tends to ignore biology, a fear of biological explanations stemming from fear of fascism’s use of pseudo-biological explanations for political ends. Also, there is the notion among gay rights advocates that a biological explanation is dangerous because it reduces choice, and links approval of homosexuality with biology.
One might say: nature or nurture, really who cares? This not an ethical choice. But then again, the question nature or nuture is important to the debate on the Middle East where a biological explanation in fact defeats Massad’s view that homosexuality is discursive, that social trends in the West could "create" homosexuals in the Middle East. If we follow at biological approach, there are gay people in the Middle East.
And so where are we left?
So let's propose the following:
-There are gay people in the Middle East
-Human rights are not universal in character
- ... and I would add: Individuals decide on what rights they wish to promote, what societies in which they would like to live
But can someone in the “West” really decide for the “East” how their societies should be organized?
I think they can, because these categories, at least to my mind, don't make a lot of sense. On this theme, I will put some ideas forward for your consideration:
1. Is there really such a thing as East and West? Doesn’t Tunisia (EAST) have more in common with Italy (WEST) than with Saudi Arabia? It’s certainly closer geographically. Aren’t most Arab countries in the Mediterranean basin have more in common culturally with their European neighbours along the sea, rather than those in the Gulf? What makes the Muslim successor states of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, areas in the Balkans, European and those in the Levant part of this “East”. Why can’t a Mediterranean European judge and understand the person who lives across the sea? And is it not simply a failure in imagination to say that people of different nations can’t understand each other, and use that as a basis for political action in the shared interest?
2. While the “West” may be more gay tolerant than the “East”, this is certainly not always the case. There is a lot of diversity in the Middle East, and also in Europe. For example, there is legal diversity in the Middle East: In Jordan, there is no law criminalizing homosexuality. Neither in Turkey. In Egypt there is also no law, but homosexuality is often prosecuted under laws governing public decency. In Lebanon, there is a law, but while on the books it has not been evoked in many years. In Saudi Arabia, executions are in fact seldomly applied. We should also remember then that until recently much of Europe also criminalized homosexuality. Austria only legalized homosexuality in 1971. Britain in 1967, and in fact in many European countries gay men were entrapped and sent to prison. In the United States, in some States the crime of sodomy could send you to jail, in some states the books allowed life imprisonment, until 2003. Countries like Italy or the United States still do not extend most rights to gay people, despite decriminalization. We certainly have a short memory if we think that Europe has a great history of tolerance for homosexuality in comparison to the Middle East. In fact, it is simply an example of how quickly things can change. No one I think would have thought, ten years ago, that a Mediterranean society like Spain would now have marriage for same-sex couples. And so why not Morocco just across the straights? The executions in Saudi Arabia and Iran are products of religious regimes, and we know that most countries in the Middle East and Central Asia while often contain religious populations, are secular, and are often in fact quite hostile to religious insurgence: think of Syria and Egypt, or the ex-Soviet Central Asian republics.
3. There is a difference between the public face of homosexuality in many cultures and its private face. I will give an anecdote of a Lebanese friend, who comes from a largely secular Sunni muslim family, whose Mother discovered his homosexuality. Her greatest worry was what her community would think, and how the discovery would shame the family. Of less important were the sexual acts which he desired. She told him “to get married” and then “do what he wanted”. This is anecdotal, but certainly there has been plenty of anthropological study of collectivist societies. The segregation of the sexes in the Middle East creates different layers of private and public, and certainly many women in the Middle East would be quite surprised by what goes on between men in many of the public hammams through the region. In May 2007, the Atlantic Monthly made an investigation into the city of Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia, ‘s flourishing gay life. There may be public adherence to Wahhabism, strong private property laws actually give men a sense of safety in their homes from the religious authorities. In one interview, Yasser, a Saudi man, told the Atlantic Monthly journalist that it is in fact “It’s a lot easier to be gay than straight here,” he had said. “If you go out with a girl, people will start to ask her questions, and you can get into trouble with the religious police. But if I have a date upstairs and my family is downstairs, they won’t even come up.” Of course, there is also the well-documented perception of the passive partner in anal sex, compared to the active partner. In most Middle Eastern societies, and often in the eyes of the law, there is a strict differentiation between the passive partner who is perceived as “homosexual”, because he has taken the woman’s role, while the active partner has simple exerted a form of masculinity. Underlying these perceptions of roles is a certain misogyny, one might argue, because it is the perceived woman’s role in sex which is perceived as dishonorable.
4 Finally, it is important to note that there are numerous chatrooms for Arab and Persian men, the internet has destroyed former isolation in places where access to the internet is less strictly controlled. And certainly cities like Beirut have much better gay scenes than many Western cities, attracting not simply the Maronite Christian population, but also members of its Sunni and Shia populations –an example of how sex can be a great cultural leveler. The Arab World’s most influential gay rights organization is based in Beirut, and is called Helem. Based in Lebanon, it was forced to register in Canada in 2004 to avoid legal problems, but it operates parties, discussions, lectures, film screenings, in Lebanon. Helem is a grassroots organization, but one that depends on the support of gay expatriot Lebanese in cities like Paris and Montreal. Similarily, the Iranian Queer Organisation, registered in Toronto, tries to organize asylum for gays fleeing persecution, and works with a network of largely clandestine gay rights activists in Tehran. The fact that both organizations need to be registered abroad bringing up the question of whether gay rights organizations organizing in the region need the humanitarian intervention of Western actors.
Now, I’m going to stop in a moment, because I know that the information I’ve already presented is more than sufficient, I suspect, to generate a little discussion. I would qualify the usual debate about gay rights in the Middle East by looking at commonalities, rather than differences, between particular cases between so-called “East” and “West”, challenging these monolithic categories. And I would argue that there are plenty of gay people in the Middle East, they are organizing politically, at a grass-roots level, and that there is a political opportunity for those in the West to help their movement to live without oppression. I do not see this as an imposition of a Western model of human rights, but rather as a political act that needs no universal justification, to help those like-minded actors in the region to live as they wish, fighting a fight that was won not very long ago in the West, but to great success. By framing the Middle East as a place of intolerance and religious fundamentalism, we are in fact doing the region, and its sexual minorities, no great service. We are arguing a stereotype that many would be all too willing to accept, and one that plays into the hands, in the west, of right-wingers who would profit from the fear of an objectified other.
And I would like to open discussion with the idea that these are issues worth speaking about honestly. I also think that the rhetoric of tolerance is also dangerous, because it prevents real discussions from occurring. I don’t want speakers here to feel cornered by the necessity to be tolerant, and therefore let their views remain hidden and therefore unchallenged. It’s easy to live the ideals of a United World College (a peace project bringing students from over 100 countries together, many from the Middle East) non-conflictually, and be comforted by the artifice of consensus, when I suspect deeper there are differences of opinion and the possibility of intelligent debate.
-Dr Joseph PEARSON
A perceived clash of values, or civilizations, is favorite rhetoric among politicians in an era where threats to domestic and international security are increasingly perceived to be related to non-state actors (terrorism) often sponsored by States (or rogue states) located in the Middle East and Central Asia. Speaking of great entities called “West” and “East” provides an ideological, theological backdrop to rhetoric of invasion, surveillance and security. The “West” generally comes to mean industrialized countries in Europe and North America, the “East” can actually refer to countries stemming from as far West as Morocco to the Pacific Ocean. For the sake of this talk, I will be making comparisons between Europe and North America and the Arabic and Persian speaking lands of Africa and Asia.
There are a number of perceived, and actual, differences of values between West and East. The ones which regularly make their way into the press are differences in the rights accorded to women, the freedoms which are accorded to journalists, differences in judicial practice and rule of law. And certainly one of the greatest perceived differences between so-called Western societies and so-called Eastern ones is the question of homosexuality.
While in countries like Spain, the Netherlands, Canada, nearly every civil protection and privilege –from non-discrimination, to adoption to marriage- has been equalized between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples, in the Middle East, homosexuality is still illegal in almost every country. In Iran, or Saudi Arabia, sex between men is punishable by death –the most famous execution in Iran was in 2005 of two teenagers, aged 18 and 16. I will focus here on gay male sexuality, because it is the one which is normally criminalized in the region, as a touchstone for further discussion I hope about the human rights governing, for example, women, gender, lesbianism and the transgendered.
These striking differences in the application of the law are often the focus of mass media attention instead of the dynamics for rights recognition that lie under the surface of Middle Eastern societies. And the acceptance of stereotypes of “West” and “East” often takes precedence over a more subtle understanding of how gay people live, have lived, and will continue to live in the region. I hope in this talk to get away from some of the crass and dangerous stereotypes about Middle Eastern society, the focus on terrorist training camps, stonings, Islamic insurgents and Al-Qaida. This vision is a little like speaking of America simply as a country of cross-burnings and the KKK. While more conservative than most of Europe, the Middle East is a region which is in fact highly diverse and with its own history of secularism and tolerance.
Today, I wish simply to ask just a couple of discussion questions, providing some background information for each question, from there I hope we can discuss these various arguments and ask some hard questions about the limits of tolerance.
The Question of Universals
At the centre of the debate of rights recognition is the notion of universals. Take the following statement: "To live openly and freely as a homosexual, with the equality to marry, adopt children and be protected from violence, is a human right, no matter where you live in the world".
This statement relies on a universal notion of human rights. Where would that universal come from? From religion? Well, many religions come down rather hard on homosexuality –be it ‘Western’ (Catholic, Baptists, much of the Anglican Church is torn over the issue) or ‘Eastern’ (Islam gets singled out for being anti-gay, when in fact Christian texts are arguably much more explicitly gay than the Koran). So if the universal does not come from religion, where does it come from?
Secular societies often pride themselves on moral codes coming from the law or social norms, but aren’t these limited to the societies to which they pertain. France’s protections for gay rights, for example, extend to the territory of France: not internationally and not all humans. And then there is the question of power: where international treaties govern human rights, there is often the criticism that these rights have been defined according to the values of the culture that wields power: western cultures defined the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it was the victorious allied powers that did so without real input from Africa or the Middle East. And it is worth noting that sexual orientation in those days, as you could imagine, was not included in the charter –notions of rights evolving faster than institutions. The Council of Europe, on the other hand, requires all the nations which are members decriminalize homosexuality. And while this explains why homosexuality is legalised in the Caucasus but not in much of Central Asia, because the Caucasus are considered “European” for the sake of membership, the Council of Europe does not include the Middle East. And even if it did, the argument could be made that countries sign these documents because they trade their cultural values for political and economic support.
And so one is left with one of the great controversies of international relations in our time: on one hand many of us recognize that human rights are not universal, we do not believe that there is a metaphysical justification for them, nor do we think that the social norms of one culture should be shared by all, or that countries should impose their legal codes on one another… so then we are left with the great pride of many left-wing intellectuals, cultural relativism. Can we be culturally relative and advance human rights?
Indeed, this rhetoric of tolerating all cultures, all practices, of seeing one’s own culture as an abstraction in the face of others, comes into trouble when one needs a justification against female circumcision or the execution of homosexuals in another part of the world. And often, we find that despite all our espoused values of relativism, in an act of hypocrisy turn to the universals that we originally eschewed, by invoking the name of human rights, without really knowing where they come from and according to which values they should be defined. Or do we really need a universal principle in order to invoke the word ‘rights’, and see them simply as a pragmatic tool to advance politically the kind of world in which we want to live? And then when Westerners do advance their ideological agendas politically in the East, they must face the accusation that this project is imperialist. Who really has the right to speak about the Middle East if not the people of the region? Westerners exert control by telling the Middle East what it is, and how its populations should live.
"There are no gay people in the Middle East"
Now, if one then finds a justification to fight for the rights of gay people in a region where they are largely lacking (and I will provide one in a moment), one needs to face a criticism which might sound banal but is in fact at the centre of academic debate: "There are no gay people in the Middle East". And therefore, there are no rights to fight for. This is not simply a point of view of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but also that of a distinguished professor of Middle Eastern Intellectual History at Columbia University, Joseph Massad.
The argument has three main parts:
1. Homosexuality is socially constructed.
2. Homosexuality is a social construction particular to "Western" societies.
3. This identity is imported to the Middle East by human rights activists, which Massad calls the "Gay International". In his own words: “The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating.”
Notice: 1. Homosexuality is not universal, therefore not a biological fact 2. Homosexuality is "created" by human rights advocates who then want to defend the people they create.
But note: Biological research in fact reveals that multiple genes, not a single gene, and environmental factors in the womb, and not primarily social conditioning, points increasingly to a biological explanation for homosexuality. The social science model tends to ignore biology, a fear of biological explanations stemming from fear of fascism’s use of pseudo-biological explanations for political ends. Also, there is the notion among gay rights advocates that a biological explanation is dangerous because it reduces choice, and links approval of homosexuality with biology.
One might say: nature or nurture, really who cares? This not an ethical choice. But then again, the question nature or nuture is important to the debate on the Middle East where a biological explanation in fact defeats Massad’s view that homosexuality is discursive, that social trends in the West could "create" homosexuals in the Middle East. If we follow at biological approach, there are gay people in the Middle East.
And so where are we left?
So let's propose the following:
-There are gay people in the Middle East
-Human rights are not universal in character
- ... and I would add: Individuals decide on what rights they wish to promote, what societies in which they would like to live
But can someone in the “West” really decide for the “East” how their societies should be organized?
I think they can, because these categories, at least to my mind, don't make a lot of sense. On this theme, I will put some ideas forward for your consideration:
1. Is there really such a thing as East and West? Doesn’t Tunisia (EAST) have more in common with Italy (WEST) than with Saudi Arabia? It’s certainly closer geographically. Aren’t most Arab countries in the Mediterranean basin have more in common culturally with their European neighbours along the sea, rather than those in the Gulf? What makes the Muslim successor states of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, areas in the Balkans, European and those in the Levant part of this “East”. Why can’t a Mediterranean European judge and understand the person who lives across the sea? And is it not simply a failure in imagination to say that people of different nations can’t understand each other, and use that as a basis for political action in the shared interest?
2. While the “West” may be more gay tolerant than the “East”, this is certainly not always the case. There is a lot of diversity in the Middle East, and also in Europe. For example, there is legal diversity in the Middle East: In Jordan, there is no law criminalizing homosexuality. Neither in Turkey. In Egypt there is also no law, but homosexuality is often prosecuted under laws governing public decency. In Lebanon, there is a law, but while on the books it has not been evoked in many years. In Saudi Arabia, executions are in fact seldomly applied. We should also remember then that until recently much of Europe also criminalized homosexuality. Austria only legalized homosexuality in 1971. Britain in 1967, and in fact in many European countries gay men were entrapped and sent to prison. In the United States, in some States the crime of sodomy could send you to jail, in some states the books allowed life imprisonment, until 2003. Countries like Italy or the United States still do not extend most rights to gay people, despite decriminalization. We certainly have a short memory if we think that Europe has a great history of tolerance for homosexuality in comparison to the Middle East. In fact, it is simply an example of how quickly things can change. No one I think would have thought, ten years ago, that a Mediterranean society like Spain would now have marriage for same-sex couples. And so why not Morocco just across the straights? The executions in Saudi Arabia and Iran are products of religious regimes, and we know that most countries in the Middle East and Central Asia while often contain religious populations, are secular, and are often in fact quite hostile to religious insurgence: think of Syria and Egypt, or the ex-Soviet Central Asian republics.
3. There is a difference between the public face of homosexuality in many cultures and its private face. I will give an anecdote of a Lebanese friend, who comes from a largely secular Sunni muslim family, whose Mother discovered his homosexuality. Her greatest worry was what her community would think, and how the discovery would shame the family. Of less important were the sexual acts which he desired. She told him “to get married” and then “do what he wanted”. This is anecdotal, but certainly there has been plenty of anthropological study of collectivist societies. The segregation of the sexes in the Middle East creates different layers of private and public, and certainly many women in the Middle East would be quite surprised by what goes on between men in many of the public hammams through the region. In May 2007, the Atlantic Monthly made an investigation into the city of Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia, ‘s flourishing gay life. There may be public adherence to Wahhabism, strong private property laws actually give men a sense of safety in their homes from the religious authorities. In one interview, Yasser, a Saudi man, told the Atlantic Monthly journalist that it is in fact “It’s a lot easier to be gay than straight here,” he had said. “If you go out with a girl, people will start to ask her questions, and you can get into trouble with the religious police. But if I have a date upstairs and my family is downstairs, they won’t even come up.” Of course, there is also the well-documented perception of the passive partner in anal sex, compared to the active partner. In most Middle Eastern societies, and often in the eyes of the law, there is a strict differentiation between the passive partner who is perceived as “homosexual”, because he has taken the woman’s role, while the active partner has simple exerted a form of masculinity. Underlying these perceptions of roles is a certain misogyny, one might argue, because it is the perceived woman’s role in sex which is perceived as dishonorable.
4 Finally, it is important to note that there are numerous chatrooms for Arab and Persian men, the internet has destroyed former isolation in places where access to the internet is less strictly controlled. And certainly cities like Beirut have much better gay scenes than many Western cities, attracting not simply the Maronite Christian population, but also members of its Sunni and Shia populations –an example of how sex can be a great cultural leveler. The Arab World’s most influential gay rights organization is based in Beirut, and is called Helem. Based in Lebanon, it was forced to register in Canada in 2004 to avoid legal problems, but it operates parties, discussions, lectures, film screenings, in Lebanon. Helem is a grassroots organization, but one that depends on the support of gay expatriot Lebanese in cities like Paris and Montreal. Similarily, the Iranian Queer Organisation, registered in Toronto, tries to organize asylum for gays fleeing persecution, and works with a network of largely clandestine gay rights activists in Tehran. The fact that both organizations need to be registered abroad bringing up the question of whether gay rights organizations organizing in the region need the humanitarian intervention of Western actors.
Now, I’m going to stop in a moment, because I know that the information I’ve already presented is more than sufficient, I suspect, to generate a little discussion. I would qualify the usual debate about gay rights in the Middle East by looking at commonalities, rather than differences, between particular cases between so-called “East” and “West”, challenging these monolithic categories. And I would argue that there are plenty of gay people in the Middle East, they are organizing politically, at a grass-roots level, and that there is a political opportunity for those in the West to help their movement to live without oppression. I do not see this as an imposition of a Western model of human rights, but rather as a political act that needs no universal justification, to help those like-minded actors in the region to live as they wish, fighting a fight that was won not very long ago in the West, but to great success. By framing the Middle East as a place of intolerance and religious fundamentalism, we are in fact doing the region, and its sexual minorities, no great service. We are arguing a stereotype that many would be all too willing to accept, and one that plays into the hands, in the west, of right-wingers who would profit from the fear of an objectified other.
And I would like to open discussion with the idea that these are issues worth speaking about honestly. I also think that the rhetoric of tolerance is also dangerous, because it prevents real discussions from occurring. I don’t want speakers here to feel cornered by the necessity to be tolerant, and therefore let their views remain hidden and therefore unchallenged. It’s easy to live the ideals of a United World College (a peace project bringing students from over 100 countries together, many from the Middle East) non-conflictually, and be comforted by the artifice of consensus, when I suspect deeper there are differences of opinion and the possibility of intelligent debate.
-Dr Joseph PEARSON
Saturday 27 October 2007
Our Gay Partnership Equality Rankings 2007-8
Gay partnership is in trouble around the world. Our survey of the world's 30 largest economies shows that only a handful of countries extend equal rights to gay couples when recognising partnerships.
Of the countries listed here, only 1/3 provide protection which can be considered even close to equal marriage. Countries like Austria, Ireland and Japan don't provide any such protections.
The best places to register your partnership are: Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa and Spain. The list of the worst places is just too long.
Then again, there are a few myth-busters here. The fact that an African country and a traditionally Catholic Mediterranean society (Spain) provide marriage rights to gay couples makes one want to reconfigure expectations. Gay rights can happen anywhere, they are not simply the domain of Western European societies:
A Marriage rights equal across the country
A- Civil partnership with rights equivalent to marriage
B+ Civil partnership almost equivalent to marriage
B Civil partnership not equivalent to marriage
C Marriage/partnerships available in parts of country, but not country-wide.
D Bills being considered for law and/or limited local recognition of partnerships
F No marriage or civil partnerships
A=4 grade points B=3 grade points C=2 grade points D=1 grade point F=0 grade point
Grading is an imperfect exercise, especially in countries where many of these issues are the jurisdiction of provincial/state governments and not federal governments. That said, we have judged countries based on the reality of the extent to which individuals are protected. More specific details are available under each country listing, where we have also included other information about gay rights in each country:
AUSTRALIA: In 2004, Australia passed the Marriage Legislation Amendment Bill which limits marriage to being between a man and a woman. In the Australian Capital Territory, there has been efforts to pass a civil-union bill. In some states, such as Tasmania and Victoria, there are relationship declaration programmes. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Australia and http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/
AUSTRIA: No partnership legislation.
BELGIUM: Marriage, since 2003. See: http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/issues/marriage_and_partnership/same_sex_marriage_and_partnership_country_by_country
BRAZIL: Since 2004, there have been gay civil unions in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, but not nation-wide. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3534959.stm
CANADA: Nation-wide same-sex marriage. See: http://www.samesexmarriage.ca/legal/
CHINA: No recognition of partnerships.
DENMARK: Registered partnership since 1989. See: http://www.france.qrd.org/texts/partnership/dk/denmark-act.html
FRANCE: PACS civil partnership since 1999 (joint taxation and welfare benefits only after 3 years). See: http://www.france.qrd.org/texts/partnership/fr/explanation.html
GERMANY: Life Partnerships Act since 2000. See: http://bundesrecht.juris.de/bundesrecht/lpartg/gesamt.pdf and http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/issues/marriage_and_partnership/same_sex_marriage_and_partnership_country_by_country
GREECE: No recognition of partnerships. See: http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/issues/marriage_and_partnership/same_sex_marriage_and_partnership_country_by_country
INDIA: There is no recognition for gay partnerships. Gay sex is illegal. See: http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/india/india.htm
INDONESIA: There is no recognition of partnerships. While gay sex is not banned nationally, transfer of powers to local governments has made gay sex illegal in certain areas. See: http://365gay.com/Newscon06/10/100306indonesia.htm
IRELAND: No recognition of partnerships, although bill presented in 2005. See: ttp://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/bills28/bills/2004/5404/b5404s.pdf
ITALY: The government hopes (2007) to push through a bill on same-sex unions, but faces considerable opposition. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6345729.stm
JAPAN: There is no recognition of same-sex partnerships.
S KOREA: No partnership legislation (?). Gay sex is not illegal. See: http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/south_korea/south_korea.htm
MEXICO: Gay unions were approved in Mexico City, but not nationwide, in 2006. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6134730.stm
NETHERLANDS: Marriage since 2001. See: http://athena.leidenuniv.nl/rechten/meijers/index.php3?m=10&c=69
NORWAY: Comprehensive partnership law since 1993. See: www.dep.no/bfd/engelsk/publ/handbooks/004071-120027/index-dok000-b-n-a.html
POLAND: No recognition for same-sex partnerships.
RUSSIA: No recognition for same-sex partnerships.
SAUDI ARABIA: Homosexuality is punishable by death.
S AFRICA: Gay marriage since 2006. See: http://www.constitutionalcourt.org.za/site/gaylesb.htm
SPAIN: Marriage since 2005. See: http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/guide/country_by_country/spain/spanish_same_sex_marriage_law
SWEDEN: Registered partnerships since 1994. See: http://www.france.qrd.org/texts/partnership/se/sweden-act.html
SWITZ.: Registered partnership since 2004. See: http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/issues/marriage_and_partnership/same_sex_marriage_and_partnership_country_by_country
TAIWAN: There is no recognition of same-sex partnerships. Although since 2003, a bill has been pending in the legislature. See: http://english.www.gov.tw/TaiwanHeadlines/index.jsp?categid=10&recordid=89379
TURKEY: No legal recognition of partnerships.
UK: Civil Partnerships Act since 2005. See: http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2004/20040033.htm
USA: Marriage and civil unions in some (mostly N Eastern) states (e.g. Vermont (2000), Connecticut (2005), New Hampshire (2007) and Massachusetts (Marriage: 2004)). Such unions are not available in most US states, nor federally. In 1996, the 'Defence of Marriage Act' passed. See: http://www.lectlaw.com/files/leg23.htm
Of the countries listed here, only 1/3 provide protection which can be considered even close to equal marriage. Countries like Austria, Ireland and Japan don't provide any such protections.
The best places to register your partnership are: Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa and Spain. The list of the worst places is just too long.
Then again, there are a few myth-busters here. The fact that an African country and a traditionally Catholic Mediterranean society (Spain) provide marriage rights to gay couples makes one want to reconfigure expectations. Gay rights can happen anywhere, they are not simply the domain of Western European societies:
- BELGIUM---------A
- CANADA----------A
- NETHERLANDS--A
- S AFRICA----------A
- SPAIN--------------A
- DENMARK--------A-
- NORWAY----------A-
- SWEDEN----------A-
- UK------------------A-
- GERMANY--------B+
- SWITZ.-------------B+
- FRANCE-----------B
- BRAZIL------------C
- MEXICO-----------C
- USA----------------C
- AUSTRALIA------D
- ITALY--------------D
- TAIWAN-----------D
- AUSTRIA----------F
- CHINA-------------F
- GREECE-----------F
- INDIA--------------F
- INDONESIA-------F
- IRELAND----------F
- JAPAN-------------F
- POLAND-----------F
- RUSSIA------------F
- S KOREA----------F? (if you have more details let us know!)
- TURKEY-----------F
- SAUDI ARABIA---F
- AVERAGE (1.778 GPA) = C-
A Marriage rights equal across the country
A- Civil partnership with rights equivalent to marriage
B+ Civil partnership almost equivalent to marriage
B Civil partnership not equivalent to marriage
C Marriage/partnerships available in parts of country, but not country-wide.
D Bills being considered for law and/or limited local recognition of partnerships
F No marriage or civil partnerships
A=4 grade points B=3 grade points C=2 grade points D=1 grade point F=0 grade point
Grading is an imperfect exercise, especially in countries where many of these issues are the jurisdiction of provincial/state governments and not federal governments. That said, we have judged countries based on the reality of the extent to which individuals are protected. More specific details are available under each country listing, where we have also included other information about gay rights in each country:
AUSTRALIA: In 2004, Australia passed the Marriage Legislation Amendment Bill which limits marriage to being between a man and a woman. In the Australian Capital Territory, there has been efforts to pass a civil-union bill. In some states, such as Tasmania and Victoria, there are relationship declaration programmes. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Australia and http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/
AUSTRIA: No partnership legislation.
BELGIUM: Marriage, since 2003. See: http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/issues/marriage_and_partnership/same_sex_marriage_and_partnership_country_by_country
BRAZIL: Since 2004, there have been gay civil unions in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, but not nation-wide. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3534959.stm
CANADA: Nation-wide same-sex marriage. See: http://www.samesexmarriage.ca/legal/
CHINA: No recognition of partnerships.
DENMARK: Registered partnership since 1989. See: http://www.france.qrd.org/texts/partnership/dk/denmark-act.html
FRANCE: PACS civil partnership since 1999 (joint taxation and welfare benefits only after 3 years). See: http://www.france.qrd.org/texts/partnership/fr/explanation.html
GERMANY: Life Partnerships Act since 2000. See: http://bundesrecht.juris.de/bundesrecht/lpartg/gesamt.pdf and http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/issues/marriage_and_partnership/same_sex_marriage_and_partnership_country_by_country
GREECE: No recognition of partnerships. See: http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/issues/marriage_and_partnership/same_sex_marriage_and_partnership_country_by_country
INDIA: There is no recognition for gay partnerships. Gay sex is illegal. See: http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/india/india.htm
INDONESIA: There is no recognition of partnerships. While gay sex is not banned nationally, transfer of powers to local governments has made gay sex illegal in certain areas. See: http://365gay.com/Newscon06/10/100306indonesia.htm
IRELAND: No recognition of partnerships, although bill presented in 2005. See: ttp://www.oireachtas.ie/documents/bills28/bills/2004/5404/b5404s.pdf
ITALY: The government hopes (2007) to push through a bill on same-sex unions, but faces considerable opposition. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6345729.stm
JAPAN: There is no recognition of same-sex partnerships.
S KOREA: No partnership legislation (?). Gay sex is not illegal. See: http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/south_korea/south_korea.htm
MEXICO: Gay unions were approved in Mexico City, but not nationwide, in 2006. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6134730.stm
NETHERLANDS: Marriage since 2001. See: http://athena.leidenuniv.nl/rechten/meijers/index.php3?m=10&c=69
NORWAY: Comprehensive partnership law since 1993. See: www.dep.no/bfd/engelsk/publ/handbooks/004071-120027/index-dok000-b-n-a.html
POLAND: No recognition for same-sex partnerships.
RUSSIA: No recognition for same-sex partnerships.
SAUDI ARABIA: Homosexuality is punishable by death.
S AFRICA: Gay marriage since 2006. See: http://www.constitutionalcourt.org.za/site/gaylesb.htm
SPAIN: Marriage since 2005. See: http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/guide/country_by_country/spain/spanish_same_sex_marriage_law
SWEDEN: Registered partnerships since 1994. See: http://www.france.qrd.org/texts/partnership/se/sweden-act.html
SWITZ.: Registered partnership since 2004. See: http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/issues/marriage_and_partnership/same_sex_marriage_and_partnership_country_by_country
TAIWAN: There is no recognition of same-sex partnerships. Although since 2003, a bill has been pending in the legislature. See: http://english.www.gov.tw/TaiwanHeadlines/index.jsp?categid=10&recordid=89379
TURKEY: No legal recognition of partnerships.
UK: Civil Partnerships Act since 2005. See: http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2004/20040033.htm
USA: Marriage and civil unions in some (mostly N Eastern) states (e.g. Vermont (2000), Connecticut (2005), New Hampshire (2007) and Massachusetts (Marriage: 2004)). Such unions are not available in most US states, nor federally. In 1996, the 'Defence of Marriage Act' passed. See: http://www.lectlaw.com/files/leg23.htm
Power Inversion: A Gay Rights Blog
Welcome to Power Inversion. We'll keep you up to date on issues of gay rights around the world, with incisive commentary.
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