"The Homosexual Lobby"

Okay, stop me if you've heard this one: A prominent academic publishes a controversial paper claiming that a powerful lobby is attempting to undermine the Muslim world. The paper generates so much commentary that he later expands it into a shoddy book with conspiratorial undertones.

Meet Joseph Massad, associate professor of modern Arab politics at Columbia University,a protégé of the late Edward Said, and the gay community's very own version of Walt & Mearsheimer.

In 2002, Massad wrote a paper titled "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World" which sought to marshal a case against gay rights from a nationalist and secular standpoint. The central thesis of his 25-page polemic was that promotion of gay rights in the Middle East is a conspiracy led by Western orientalists and colonialists that "produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist."

Massad has expanded his argument into a book, Desiring Arabs, published by the University of Chicago Press. Brain Whitaker, the Middle East editor of the Guardian who now edits the newspaper's "Comment is Free" section, offers this first-rate critique in Gay City News:

Massad talks of a "missionary" campaign orchestrated by what he calls the "Gay International." Its inspiration, he writes, came partly from "the white Western women's movement, which had sought to universalize its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women's movements in the non-Western world," but he also links its origins to the Carter administration's use of human rights to "campaign against the Soviet Union and Third World enemies."

Massad writes, "Like the major US- and European-based human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) and following the line taken up by white Western women's organizations and publications, the Gay International was to reserve a special place for the Muslim countries in its discourse as well as its advocacy. The orientalist impulse... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community."

Oddly, since this is central to his argument, Massad offers no evidence to substantiate his claim. There are plenty of reasons other than an "orientalist impulse" why gay rights activists might justifiably pay attention to Muslim countries. Punishments for same-sex acts, for instance, tend to be heavier there, on paper, if not always in practice and the only countries in the world where the death penalty can still be applied for sodomy justify it on the basis of Islamic law. Concern about such repression is not the same as reserving "a special place" for them in the discourse.

A look at the activities of the main human rights organizations involved in global LGBT work suggests they do not, in fact, focus excessively or unfairly on Muslim countries.

Human Rights Watch, for instance, has more than 140 press releases on the LGBT section of its Web site, dating back to 1994. Among these, the country most targeted by the organization's "orientalists" is actually the United States....The five people named in Human Rights Watch's most recent homophobia "hall of shame" also range across the world --Pope Benedict XVI, President George W. Bush, Roman Giertych, the Polish minister of education, Bienvenido Abante, a member of the Philippines parliament, and the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.


Perhaps the biggest flaw in Massad's argument is that his preoccupation with "orientalism," "social Darwinism," gay "missionaries," their "native informants," and the "imposition" of "Western modes" blinds him to more obvious developments on the ground in Islamic nations. The last decade has brought growing awareness of gay rights in many parts of the world, much of it involving local activists.

According to Scott Long, who heads the LGBT desk at Human Rights Watch, gay activism is growing in both Latin America and Africa.

"It's still relative, but 10 years ago, outside South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, there were no groups anywhere in Africa," he said. "Now, most Anglophone countries and an increasing number of West African countries have at least small organizations that are trying to do something.

Among the more obvious factors is the growth of international communications -- satellite television, foreign travel, and the Internet....The Internet, in particular, is making a huge impact in many parts of the world. In countries where public discussion of homosexuality is still taboo, it is often the most accessible source of information and provides comfort for many whose sexuality has made them feel lonely and isolated.

"If it wasn't for the Internet I wouldn't have come to accept my sexuality," said one young Egyptian who is now a gay rights activist.

Kudos to Whitaker for debunking this drivel. It's a shame that he seems repeatedly incapable of subjecting claims of an all-powerful Israel Lobby to a similar level of scrutiny.