Gay Old Time in Sharia Land

http://www.nypost.com/seven/07072007/gossip/pagesix/gay_old_time_in_sharia_land_pagesix_.htm

July 7, 2007 -- THE ayatollahs may not slap him with a fatwah as they did Salman Rushdie, but fundamentalist clerics are bound to be enraged at Michael Luongo over "Gay Travels in the Muslim World" (Harrington Park Press), his book celebrating homosexuality in the Middle East. Luongo who compiled chapters by 17 writers covering Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Bangladesh, Turkey and Saudi Arabia had the foreword written by Afdhere Jama, the founder of Huriyah, "the world's first magazine for queer Muslims," who, he claims, number 150 million.

"There is something intoxicatingly beautiful about an Arab man who paints his eyes with kohl," Jama states in the book.

Luongo writes about his quest to find some man-on-man action in Afghanistan. "I was painfully curious what a gay party would be like in Kabul, but at the same time, I wondered if I were being led into a trap. I wanted a scoop, but I didn't want to be a gay Daniel Pearl," he writes.

Ushered into a "special room for men," Luongo said he found they "were not men who sip cosmos and discuss 'Queer Eye,' there was no doubt about their masculinity."

He then has fantasies of being "passed around as a party favor at an Afghan orgy" before spending the night "caressing and holding hands" with a Muslim man who would now and then say, 'I wish you were a girl,' which I found oddly disconcerting, and made me wonder if all we were doing was displacement for affections he could not express otherwise."

The author adds: "The truth about many young Afghan men is that although they've lived through hardship, treat guns like fashion accessories, and murdered for their country to free it from the Taliban, strict Islamic rule means that they have never seen a woman naked."

He wonders whether strict Muslim laws restricting interaction between men and women make gay sex more prevalent there than in the West. "Is it that they were opportunistic, being with one another if they could not have a woman?" he wonders.

"My time in Kabul was perhaps the most oddly romantic time I had ever had with other men from being wooed with flowers to stories of wartime bravery."

Luongo told Page Six he's ready to take the heat. "In August and September I will have some events for the book - likely fatwah-inducing, a la Salman Rushdie," he said.

If this interests you, check out the author's website