As a researcher and advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, I am often asked: “What is it like to be gay in the Middle East?”

It is a question that cannot be answered. It assumes a uniform “gay experience” across the region, that does not align with reality. Sexual orientation and gender identity are only one aspect of experience. Social position and economic status also determine “what it is like.” Individual experiences of LGBT people are varied and distinctive and cannot be generalized to an entire country, let alone a region.

A better question would be: How do governments in the MENA region use anti-LGBT rhetoric to advance their political agendas? The answer to that question reveals the state-sponsored homophobia that negatively impacts the lives of LGBT people in the region.

Pride Month is an opportunity for people around the globe celebrate the visibility and hard-earned victories of LGBT people and movements since the Stonewall uprising in 1969. It is a good time to unshroud government strategies that inhibit equal rights in the MENA region, where anti-LGBT discrimination and violence are rampant.

Where there is oppression, there is resistance, whether channeled through public campaigns calling for legal reform or within the safety of an underground LGBT-friendly café. But despite LGBT organizations’ and activists’ defiant resilience in advancing the rights of sexual and gender minorities in the face of state-sponsored repression, the climate around LGBT rights in the MENA region remains bleak as ever.

The chokehold of the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed once again how LGBT people, who already face healthcare discrimination and economic marginalization, are scapegoated in crises. Beyond pandemics and natural disasters, governments in the region absurdly claim that the achievement of LGBT rights will lead to a weakening of their social fabric, if not an eternal curse for which queer and transgender people would be held responsible.

In the Name of “Public Morality”

Most countries in the region have laws that criminalize same-sex relations. Even in the countries that don’t – such as Bahrain, Egypt, and Jordan – spurious “morality laws,” debauchery and prostitution laws are used to target LGBT people, often without a legal basis and contrary to international law.

In Egypt, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government has since 2014 waged a campaign of arrests and prosecution against hundreds of people for their perceived or actual sexual orientation and gender identity, under the guise of “protecting public morality.” In 2019, a Cairo-based LGBT rights organization documented 92 arrests for alleged same-sex conduct under Egypt’s “debauchery” law. Read more via Raseef/HRW