Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World

Joseph Massad

One of the more compelling issues to emerge out of the gay movement in the last two decades is the universalization of "gay rights." This project has appropriated the prevailing U.S. discourse on human rights in order to launch itself on an international scale. Following in the footsteps of 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 -- a situation that led to major schisms from the outset -- the gay movement has adopted a similar missionary role. Organizations dominated by white Western males (the International Lesbian and Gay Association [ILGA] and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission [IGLHRC]) sprang up to defend the rights of "gays and lesbians" all over the world and to advocate on their behalf. ILGA, which was founded in 1978 at the height of the Carter administration's human rights campaign against the Soviet Union and Third World enemies, asserts that one of its aims is to "create a platform for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people internationally, in their quest for recognition, equality and liberation, in particular through the world and regional conferences." As for IGLHRC, which was founded in 1991, its mission is to "protect and advance the human rights of all people and communities subject to discrimination or abuse on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status." It is these missionary tasks, the discourse that produces them, and the organizations that represent them that constitute what I call the Gay International.

Like the major United States-based human rights groups (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) and many white Western feminist organizations, the Gay International has reserved a special place for the Muslim world in both its discourse and its advocacy. This orientalist impulse, borrowed from predominant representations of the Arab and Muslim worlds in the United States and Europe, continues to guide all branches of the human rights community. As a relative latecomer to this assimilationist project, the Gay International has had to catch up quickly. To do so, supporters of the Gay International's missionary tasks have produced two kinds of literature on the Muslim world: an academic literature of historical, literary and anthropological accounts, written mostly by white male European or American gay scholars, which purport to describe and explain "homosexuality" in the past and present of the Arab and Muslim worlds; and journalistic accounts of the lives of so-called gays and (much less so) lesbians in the contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds. The former seeks to unravel the mystery of Islam to a Western audience, while the latter aims to inform white gay sex-tourists about the region. The larger mission, as I describe below, is to liberate Arab and Muslim "gays and lesbians" from the oppression under which they allegedly live by transforming them from practitioners of same-sex contact into subjects who identify as homosexual and gay. The following remarks may be taken as typical. Lisa Power, co-secretary general of ILGA, states that "most Islamic cultures don't take kindly to organized homosexuality, even though male homoeroticism is deep within their cultural roots! ... most people are too nervous to organize, even in countries with a high level of homosexuality." Robert Bray, public information director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and an officer of ILGA, understands that "cultural differences make the definition and the shading of homosexuality different among peoples....But I see the real question as one of sexual freedom; and sexual freedom transcends cultures." Describing his adventures in Morocco and southern Spain, Bray states that "at least one guy expressed a longing to just be gay and not have to live within the prescribed sexual behaviors, and he said that there were others like him." Seemingly convinced by this one conversation, Bray declares: "I believe this longing is universal."

In contradistinction to the liberatory claims made by the Gay International in relation to what it posits as an always already homosexualized population, I argue that it is the discourse of the Gay International that both produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology. I show how this discourse assumes prediscursively that homosexuals, gays, and lesbians are universal categories that exist everywhere in the world, and based on this prediscursive axiom, the Gay International sets itself the mission of defending them by demanding that their rights as "homosexuals" be granted where they are denied and be respected where they are violated. In doing so, however, the Gay International produces an effect that is less than liberatory.

The Gay International, through its most well-known organization, ILGA, launched a new and aggressive universalization campaign in 1994 coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. After ILGA achieved official NGO status at the United Nations in 1993 (which it later lost), its international activities intensified, including efforts to stop "the mass execution of homosexuals in Iran," an unsubstantiated propagandistic claim that was also bandied about by an official of the U.S. State Department. Part of the commemorations of Stonewall was ILGA's convening of its sixteenth annual World Conference, 23 June to 4 July 1994 in New York. Whereas ILGA boasted delegates from Western Europe, East Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and the United States, it "was working hard to bring activists from Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean." The commemorations included the "International March on the United Nations to Affirm the Human Rights of Lesbian and Gay People," which called for, among other things, the proclamation of an "International Year of the Lesbian and Gay People (possibly 1999)," and the application of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, drag and transgender people." This aggressive campaign at the UN has continued throughout the 1990s and into the present....

The complete essay appears in Public Culture 14.2

Joseph Massad teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. He is the author of Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (2001) and numerous articles on Palestinian and Israeli society and politics.

(c)2002 by Duke University Press. All excerpts appear in Public Culture, Volume 14, Number 2 (Spring 2002). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that Duke University Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and Duke University Press.