Mostafa Bakry has a knack for reinventing himself. He is an old-school Arab nationalist, newspaper editor and parliamentarian, and has managed to keep himself in the middle of the Egyptian political scene for almost two decades. He rails against decadence, against corruption — anything that can get the otherwise sleepy Egyptian public excited. This past July, he took on the issue of homosexuality, introducing a motion in Parliament calling for censorship of several scenes in a popular new film, “The Yacoubian Building,” and denouncing the racier parts of the movie as “spreading obscenity and debauchery.” One of the central characters in the story — a mosaic of downtown Cairo life complete with political intrigue, love triangles, the specter of extremism and more — is an affluent, dashing, Francophone newspaper editor who happens to be gay. He has an affair with a simple soldier from the countryside, and thus begins a tale of lust that ends in murder.
“It is a travesty,” Bakry told me not long ago when we met in the downtown Cairo office of his newspaper, Al Osboa (“The Week”). Shelves around his desk were stuffed with plaques, honorary degrees and dozens of gilt replicas of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock. He fingered fancy prayer beads as he expounded in the way one would to an adoring crowd. “The American agenda is promoting the rights of homosexuals,” he said in Arabic. “I am not against freedom of expression, but this abnormal phenomenon should not be presented as natural. Even if it has roots here, it is rejected by society. And by Islam.”
In the end, 112 parliamentarians from across the political spectrum signed onto Bakry’s motion. The gesture, however, had little effect. By the beginning of September, the film was still doing well at the box office, and no censorship was in sight. But it didn’t matter. The parliamentarian had made his point; he had raised the flag of morality, religion and public virtue.
The politics of homosexuality is changing fast in the Arab world. For many years, corners of the region have been known for their rich gay subcultures — even serving as secure havens for Westerners who faced prejudice in their own countries. In some visions, this is a part of the world in which men could act out their homosexual fantasies. These countries hardly had gay-liberation moments, much less movements. Rather, homosexuality tended to be an unremarkable aspect of daily life, articulated in different ways in each country, city and village in the region.
But sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular are increasingly becoming concerns of the modern Arab state. Politicians, the police, government officials and much of the press are making homosexuality an “issue”: a way to display nationalist bona fides in the face of an encroaching Western sensibility; to reject a creeping globalization that brings with it what is perceived as the worst of the international market culture; to flash religious credentials and placate growing Islamist power. In recent years, there have been arrests, crackdowns and episodes of torture. In Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, as in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates — even in famously open and cosmopolitan Lebanon — the policing of homosexuality has become part of what sometimes seems like a general moral panic.
