Queer Sheik
Being openly gay in Saudi Arabia used to be a death
sentence—but times are changing
By John R. Bradley
The New Republic,
July/August 2004
Note from Al-Fatiha: Although this article portrays
Saudi Arabia as being some-what tolerant towards sexual minorities, the
government still officially endorses the death penalty as a punishment for
male-to-male sex. Additionally, the government of Saudi Arabia is very
intolerant towards gender minorities including transgender-identified and
transvestite immigrant domestic workers. Many sexual and gender minorities
have fled Saudi Arabia and sought asylum in other countries due to family
pressures, societal ostracizing, and political dissenting.
If you live in Saudi Arabia or are of Saudi descent,
you can join the Al-Fatiha-SaudiArabia e-list by going to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/al-fatiha-saudiarabia
The glass and marble shopping malls of this cosmopolitan and comparatively
laid-back Saudi city on the Red Sea have long served as a meeting place for
Saudi boys and girls, who slip each other bits of paper with their names and
mobile-phone numbers scribbled on them. After chatting by phone, some boys and
girls meet up again in the family sections of the malls’ many Western-style
restaurants, where mingling of the sexes is allowed.
In recent months, however, Jeddah’s malls have become
meeting places for another group: homosexuals. Gay Saudi men now cruise
certain malls and supermarkets, openly making passes at each other, and one
street in Jeddah is said to have the most traffic accidents in the city
because it is the most popular place for Saudi drivers to pick up gay
Filipinos, who strut their stuff on the sidewalk in tight jeans and cut-off
t-shirts. (Filipinos are one of the larger groups of foreign workers in Saudi
Arabia.) Meanwhile, gay and lesbian discos, gay-friendly coffee shops, and
even gayoriented Internet chat rooms are now flourishing in some Saudi cities;
in the chat rooms, gay and lesbian Saudis discuss the best places to meet
people for one-night stands. “We talk about places that aren’t gay
cruising areas, because they’re now in the minority,” says one young gay
Saudi, only half-jokingly.
Traditionally, self-identified gays and lesbians who
openly displayed their sexual preferences lived in mortal fear in Saudi
Arabia. Homosexuality has long been illegal here, and, in theory, the official
punishment for sodomy is death. In the 1990s, several gay Filipino foreign
workers were deported from the kingdom for committing homosexual acts, and, in
January 2002, the Saudi Interior Ministry reported that three men in the
southern city of Abha had been “beheaded for homosexuality,” although one
Saudi diplomat said the men were executed for raping boys. Periodically, gay
Westerners in the kingdom were fired from Saudi companies where they were
working. One long-term expatriate says employers have told friends of his,
“You have twenty-four hours to leave the kingdom, or we’ll inform the
authorities of your behavior.”
But, in some Saudi cities, the authorities have started
to look the other way. In part, the government has realized that the thousands
of Saudis who have recently returned from the United States because of
stricter visa policies, and who are relatively liberal-minded, are unwilling
to countenance such harsh anti-gay policies. “I don’t feel oppressed at
all,” said one gay man, a 23-year-old returnee from the United States
meeting in one of the coffee shops with a group of gay Saudi friends dressed
in Western clothes and speaking fluent English.
Saudi Arabia’s domestic reform initiative and the
government’s eagerness to shed its international reputation for intolerance
also have contributed to acceptance of gays and lesbians. In recent months,
Crown Prince Abdullah, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, has called for greater
intrasocietal debate and more freedom of _expression in the press.
Consequently, previously taboo subjects are discussed more openly in Saudi
society, and some Saudis have begun to question the harsh tactics of the
fearsome religious police, who enforce public morals. Slightly freer to cover
gay and lesbian issues, the Jeddah-based daily newspaper Okaz recently
reported that lesbianism was “endemic” among schoolgirls, in an article
that revealed salacious details of lesbian sex in school bathrooms. Despite
the Okaz report, Ibrahim bin Abdullah bin Ghaith, head of the religious
police, told reporters he would not send enforcers to investigate schools for
lesbians—perhaps because of pressure from higher officials. Riyadh even
seems to have informed some of its officials to show tolerance when they
comment on homosexuality. Ibrahim bin Abdullah bin Ghaith recently
acknowledged, in unusually tempered language, that there are gay Saudis.
What’s more, the kingdom’s Internet Services Unit, which is responsible
for blocking sites deemed “un-Islamic” or politically sensitive, recently
unblocked access to one website’s homepage for gay Saudi surfers after being
bombarded with critical e-mails from the United States. Saudi Arabia seemed
concerned about the bad publicity blocking the site would bring, said A. S.
Getenio, manager of GayMiddleEast.com, a website devoted to homosexual issues
in the Arab world.
To be sure, Saudi Arabia is still a closed society, but
times seem to have changed a bit. According to several gay Saudis, the number
of gay-themed Saudi websites has exploded in recent months. Some of these
sites are still blocked, but software to avoid the blocks is easily purchased
in local markets. Most sites exist for one reason only: to facilitate
meet-ups. One night, I sat with a 32-year-old gay Saudi, who spent the evening
chatting online with other men. Half an hour after interacting online with a
younger man he liked, the older man sped off in his car for a meet-up in
person. The following day, he told me the younger man had spent the night in
his apartment. Younger gays pair off at school. Ahmed, a university student in
Jeddah, says that no one made fun of him for having a boyfriend at his private
high school. He adds that he now has a “special friend” in college, too.
“We introduce our boys to our friends as ‘al walid hagi’ [the boy who
belongs to me],” he says. “At the beginning of term, we always check out
the new boys to see which are the most ‘helu’ [sweet] and think of ways to
get to know them.”
The Jeddah gay community also frequents malls,
supermarkets, restaurants, and a disco catering to gay men, whose existence is
an open secret. One Jeddah restaurant now features young Filipinos plastered
in makeup and obviously taking hormones, possibly in preparation for a
sex-change operation. At a disco north of Jeddah city, gay men gather each
week to drink beer (which is also officially prohibited), dance together to
Western music, and introduce their partners to friends. Many of the
disco-goers are young returnees from the United States, but there are also
older Saudi businessmen who have lived in the kingdom for years. One evening,
the disco even featured two Saudi drag queens, who made a dramatic entrance
onto the floor. Without an official complaint from the government or from
Saudi citizens, the religious police will not raid the disco.
The upper crust of Saudi society is becoming more open as
well. Carmen bin Laden, the sister-in-law of Osama bin Laden, recently
published a book, in French, titled Inside the Kingdom, which is a look at the
life of the idle Saudi rich. In the book, The New York Times reported this
month, bin Laden tells stories of homosexual affairs among the kingdom’s
wealthy and idle women. And Saudi anthropologist Mai Yamani has shown that
all-female discos catering to rich Saudi women are often covers for lesbian
get-togethers. Saudi princes, meanwhile, have frequented the Jeddah disco,
where they openly interact with club-goers.
Even the cutting edge of foreign gay culture is hitting
Saudi shores and showing the limits of Saudi gays’ freedoms. Last week,
U.S.-based Saudi dissidents reported, the Saudi authorities raided a house in
the city of Medina and arrested dozens of gay men. Apparently, the men had
gathered to witness the wedding of a Saudi man and his Sudanese partner.
John R. Bradley is the author of the forthcoming “Saudi
Arabia Exposed: Princes, Paupers and Puritans in the Wahhabi Kingdom.”
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