THE INITIAL IDEA begins with a spark, a curiosity. Sometimes it comes from deep inside, from a secret longing for strange lands I read about as a child in the art and archeology books my parents had stacked in collapsing piles in our living room. An intense introvert, I voraciously analyzed them while the other children played in the sun, going over the mystical images and reports, hoping one day to visit.
Now with wars raging in the desert sands, my reading is often of a more journalistic, urgent nature. Sometimes the desire to travel and report comes from reading a well-written article relating stories of distant lands in peril, such as some of the investigative work by Doug Ireland. Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, I might come across a story so homophobic and xenophobic, and projecting the arrogance of an occupying force—such as a 2002 article by the British publication The Scotsman on “gay” farmers in Afghanistan trying to seduce British troops— that the issue calls out for thorough, direct, unbiased investigation.
I have become known for my work on gays and the Islamic world, doing what I do by heading directly into Muslim countries. Many pundits, gay or straight, who write on these countries have yet to ever step foot in one. Moreover, much of my research is done in war zones, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Israel.* What began all of my work in this area is what changed the United States—September 11, 2001. Many people have asked me, in effect, What’s gay got to do with it? My answer is that, from the very beginning, homosexuality and Islam have been mixed up together, as they continue to be in the world we now live in. Mohammed Atta, one of the Saudi men who flew planes into the Twin Towers on that fateful day, may well have been homosexual. Various reports at the time called him insecure in his masculinity, steering one phallic symbol, a speeding jet, into another such symbol, all to prove his bravery to a disapproving father.
It only went on from there. The Taliban were notorious for hating women and they also were famous for toppling walls upon suspected sodomites. Still, with Kandahar, reputed to be South Asia’s “gay” capital, as their headquarters, it was hard for them not to partake of man-on-man action. Perhaps the most famous images of the U.S. occupation of Iraq are the terror porn photographs taken at Abu Ghraib. What are we to make of the homosexual undercurrents in these images and of the U.S. soldiers who staged them? Did the soldiers believe that the subjugation of men through homosexual acts would be of special significance because of the homophobia of Islam? Or, more likely, was it just a reflection of their own homophobia?
ONCE I’VE DECIDED to tackle a country and this subject, the problem then becomes how to go about it: it’s all a matter of logistics. I call myself a travel writer, and to be sure I have covered the typical beach destinations where cocktails are something that you drink rather than something that you throw. In such places, though, pampered by public relations specialists, most of the work is pre-done for the writers. In fact, some travel writers do little more than rewrite press releases after visiting some of today’s hot travel spots. But a war zone, “hot” in another sense of the term, takes a different approach. The groundwork for a visit must be laid out months in advance. And like the skills of a diplomat, it requires building trust, balancing the concerns of many sides, and relying on contacts to help, sometimes in secrecy.
Visiting Kandahar was a case in point. I finally reached this city on my second visit to Afghanistan. I had been told more than often enough that the former Taliban capital was a dangerous place for a foreign journalist. And what I intended to investigate, homosexuality, would put me at special risk. Through the mother of an Afghan-American friend, who had been to the city and had several local media contacts, I was able to find a translator. Easy enough, it seemed, but she made me do a dance of balancing her concern for my safety with her own need to save face within Afghan society and thus preserve her own contacts. She knew that the man I would be meeting was not himself gay but would be open to helping me on the topic. He had covered many difficult issues with other journalists and she felt he could look at things objectively. But I could not let him know right away what I had come to Kandahar for. “Meet him, spend time in the city with him, and after two days, once you know each other, bring it up slowly, in a conversation about something else,” she said, telling me it might not be a good idea to let him know that I am gay. As important, I could not let him know that she was aware of my real mission in his city. “You must not let him know that I know of these things, and that I know why you are visiting Kandahar,” she stated. In part because she was a woman, she was not supposed to be privy to things that men might do sexually with one another.
In spite of the fears she put into me, I found it shockingly easy to discuss homosexuality with the people I encountered. Indeed my translator, whom I will simply call Abdul, kept bringing it up everywhere we went! The notion of men having sex with other men was simply part of everyday life in Kandahar, similar to what I had already found was the case in the capital, Kabul. Our first visit to the market brought us to a shop selling small velvet cages meant for keeping quails. Immediately, Abdul told me, “these are a thing of homosexuals. Homosexuals were known for three things, having a quail, a dog, and a boy.” The heat and dust of the city overpowered me, but I had clearly heard what he said.
Everywhere I went, we caused a commotion. Because of my Italian looks, I’m rarely pegged as an American, but I was clearly a foreigner, one of very few who wandered the streets of the city. Crowds gathered hoping to meet me, some of them shouting “Fardeen Khan” and pointing, mentioning a light-skinned Bollywood star they thought I resembled. Later, as we wandered through the city, a burly man with a gun and an intense expression stopped me in the middle of the street, demanding to see my identification. He and Abdul argued for a few moments, leaving me to wonder what was going on. “He is a homosexual,” Abdul later explained. “He wanted to use his power to have sex with you.” There was nothing about the man which would have indicated he was gay, at least according to my own cultural clues.
This went on through the first few days of the trip. Abdul and I wandered into a wedding ceremony one night, and with Islamic gender separation meaning that men and women were hidden from each other, we were surrounded by hundreds of well-dressed, often exceedingly handsome and friendly, young men. One particularly flirtatious man brought up the gay weddings on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall and said that, in spite of appearances, I would not find such a thing in Afghanistan, but he still wondered if I liked to have sex with other men. The next evening, we visited the mosque complex in the city’s center, where young men picnicked in the surrounding gardens. In broken conversations, one man told me of his love of bananas while another man bent over pointing at his behind, mimicking the moaning of anal sex. I was shocked not simply at the openness of the conversations, but at the setting for it: only a few feet behind us was one of the holiest shrines in all of Islam, the silver encrusted Shrine of the Cloak of Mohammed, lovingly restored by the Taliban.
I realized, of course, that it was foolish to dance around with Abdul about why I was in Kandahar in the first place. The very topic I wanted to look at was everywhere. When we returned to my hotel that night, I fired up my laptop, bringing up images of gay pride parades I had taken all over the world. I explained very clearly why I was here. Abdul was fascinated to meet a real Western gay man and upset that I had not told him before I arrived why I was coming. “I would have arranged so many interviews for you,” he said. There was no scarcity of subjects. Homosexuality was part of the fabric of life in the city, so much so that an Afghan proverb explains that birds fly with one wing over Kandahar, using the other to protect their backsides from the sodomy-loving men of the city. I regretted being so coy about my topic. I later came to realize that Afghan-Americans are far more squeamish about homosexuality than those who have remained in the homeland.
IN JULY OF 2007, I visited Iraq for a month, with Baghdad the strategic highlight of my trip. This was the fabled city where Gilgamesh fell in love with Enkidu somewhere along the reedy Tigris. Long a center of Islamic learning, Baghdad glittered while Europe languished in the Dark Ages. Later, Europeans would be beguiled by the tales from The Thousand and One Nights—with Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba, and all the rest—stories and legends from all over the Orient that were brought together in this eternal city. As a child, I would hear the name of the city again and again, as the pined-for hometown of Jeannie from the 1960’s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. Baghdad, ironically enough, was Jeannie’s safe refuge when life in the United States with her military master became too much for her.
The direct groundwork for this trip was laid out months ahead of time, though I had come close to visiting a few times earlier in the war. I live on a street in New York renamed for a soldier who died at the war’s beginning, Sergeant Riayan Tejeda. Knowing I had been to Afghanistan, his parents had asked me about photographing the place where their son died. At the time, in 2004, I was talking with the military about it, and it seemed it might be possible. But then the war escalated, making it more dangerous to visit.
Opportunity knocked again in February 2007. My friend John Ferguson of American Voices, an organization that brings American music and Broadway shows to war zones and to developing countries, made a trip to Baghdad. He and I knew each other from our work in Afghanistan. He was working with the U.S. Embassy on a large concert to be held in Erbil, Kurdistan, the safer, northern region in Iraq. He asked if I wanted to come along, write travel articles, maybe help with photography. I would be paying my own way, but coming with him and his group meant a certain amount of safety and increased contacts. John was also gay and had many gay contacts within the country, making the concert the perfect jumping-off point for further exploring Iraq. Of course, Kurdistan—prosperous, industrious, and seemingly safe from the fighting to the south—was one thing, while Baghdad was another. I was never sure until close to departure time where I would end up.
Finding contacts for interviews, advice, and ideas would entail months of preparatory work, with e-mails and calls made at all hours corresponding to time zones in Baghdad, Erbil, London, and other parts of the U.S. My conversations encompassed journalists working in Iraq, both gay and straight; gay rights activists such as Ali Hili, a gay Iraqi living in exile in London; members of the military of gay, straight, and unknown sexual orientation; and numerous other contacts from around the world, who in turn put me in touch with their contacts. Sometimes much of the information I received seemed counterintuitive or contradictory. Where Baghdad was concerned, the possibility of danger was always present. Some contacts were concerned for my safety, others for those with whom I would interact. Many freelance journalists I knew who had been to Iraq never dared to step foot in the country again after 2005, when the war escalated and journalists were no longer considered mere observers, off limits in the conflict.
I also spent a lot of time on gay websites, some of which are better known for sexual encounters. Among them was www.gaydar.co.uk, which had an enormous number of Iraqis on-line, many of whom even used their photos with their profiles. I also was able to register on a variety of gay military sites whose names I will not mention in order to protect gay men still serving under the current “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. I made it clear on all of these sites who I was and why I was there. I didn’t always use the word “journalist,” which scares some people, but sometimes called myself a “writer and photographer.” The important thing was to reassure people that I would protect their identity, whether gay Iraqis, gay members of the military, contractors, or government employees. U.S. members of the military were difficult to engage, but soldiers from other countries would sometimes e-mail me back. I was surprised by how many people would respond to my inquiries. War zones can be boring, and a gay journalist popping in for a chat might have been a breath of fresh air for some soldiers. Most would not talk on the record.
Ultimately, in order to interview gay Iraqis, I would need a translator. Ali Hili of the gay Iraqi group Iraqi LGBT agreed to help me with setting up interviews, but finding a translator would be my responsibility. The interviews could not be done in the Green Zone, which is not safe for many local Baghdadis to visit. Even if I could trust my translator, how could I trust the drivers who would transport me? As a foreign journalist, I was a valuable prize to kidnap, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars if I wasn’t killed to begin with. If I could trust the drivers, especially by using a European or American security company, how would I not know that a translator wouldn’t later turn in the gay people I was interviewing to the insurgents and death squads who were targeting gay men?
In the end, I found a gay translator, a friend of my friend John, whom I’ll call Rahim. Even the preliminary meeting, which took place in the Al Rashid hotel in the Green Zone, was a delight. Rahim was young, tall, and handsome, and he regaled me with stories of gay life in Baghdad before and after the occupation. He recounted terrifying stories of possible entrapment on-line by insurgents who cruised and posted naked photos of themselves to lure gay men to their deaths. Our conversations were clearly being monitored, almost comically so in the hotel lobby, with people looking up at us, or following us as we moved around, as in a gay Get Smart episode. The lobby was full of sheiks and other men in ceremonial garb planning deals and entertaining their families all around us.
Baghdad was an amazing place, in spite of the war. I was there with a specific purpose in mind, but, even so, the wonders of a new and distant land bristling with the energy of a war were all around me. I learned that, for gay men, the occupation was a mixed bag. The violence against gays certainly worsened after the U.S. invaded, provoking a religious insurgency that targeted gay men for persecution along with other components of a more secular, metropolitan culture. At the same time, the occupation brought with it the Internet, giving Iraqi gays and lesbians a way to connect with each other, albeit it under various levels of danger, that was not possible before. Along with that came contact with the broader outside gay world. Yet some gay men, if they are clearly feminine-acting, take a huge risk simply by leaving the house. Signals that appear gay, such as long hair or stylish Western clothes, can mark someone as a target, but they also confuse the specific reason why someone might be killed or kidnapped. My own experience at the confusing checkpoints, swarming with guns, made clear the dangers for anyone in Baghdad, whether gay or straight. The important thing for me as a writer was to be able to get the information I needed, come out alive, protect my sources, and convey the story to an audience back home.
I hope to return to Baghdad, to Kurdistan, to Afghanistan, and to most of the Muslim countries I have visited to date, whether they’re in conflict or not. There is something special about them, and even the worst places, I have sometimes found, can be the best places to meet people of unusual character and empathy. War zones, of course, have always had a special pull for writers. They heighten one’s observation skills if only because a failure to observe one’s surroundings can lead to injury or death. Importantly, I also learned that the concept of gay and homosexual takes on broader meanings in the non-Western world. People do not universally label themselves by their sexual acts in the way that we do; sexuality is more fluid than that. These travels have made me rethink what it means to be gay here at home, and what it means to be around other men where anything can happen.
* The largest project so far was my recent anthology Gay Travels in the Muslim World (Haworth, 2007). the book, which includes works by eighteen contributors, was in the “out in the World” series on gay and lesbian travel literature which I edited. With the sale of Haworth to Taylor & Francis, the imprint has disappeared, but my book continues to be published. In addition, a number of periodicals, such as Out Traveler, Gay City News, Genre, Frontiers and PlanetOut have delved into the lives of gay men (or, rather, men who have sex with men) in the Middle east and in other Muslim countries.
Michael Luongo, editor of gay travels in the Muslim World, is a freelance journalist and photographer who has visited over eighty countries (see www.michaelluongo.com).
