This is why novels like Guapa are important. The recent uprisings in the Middle East have increased awareness of individual rights, but have not led to a conversation about LGBT rights for fear of alienating more conservative members of society. Hamid Sinno, the lead singer of the alternative rock band Mashrou’ Leila, one of the most popular in the region, is openly gay.īut gay Muslims suffer a double ostracization – homophobia by their own co-religionists and those outside the Muslim community, and the Islamophobia raging amidst the rise of right-wing sentiment in the West in general. The judiciary in Lebanon has banned advertisements by psychiatrists claiming to “treat” homosexuality, reasoning that being gay is not an illness. Saudi Arabia and Iran still proscribe the death penalty for homosexuality. “Thou shalt not kill” is apparently more negotiable the more fundamentalist you are. It’s ironic that the more outwardly devout you are, the more horrible your track record, given the Qur’an itself declares that taking one life is equivalent to killing all of mankind. ISIS, the terrorist group rampaging across the region, employs a particularly gruesome punishment – it literally throws gay people off of tall buildings, sending them to plummet to their deaths. Lawat, a formal translation of the act of homosexual intercourse, is a reference to the people of the Prophet Lot, Sodom and Gomorrah. In the patriarchal, hyper-masculine societies we live in, even the language is biased, the words for top and bottom, khawal and ‘ilq, are themselves casual insults. Homophobia is part of casual street culture in the region, there is no doubt about that.
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