N.Y. Editor's Gay Travels in the Muslim World

‘In the United Arab Emirates, men greet each other with nose rubbing,’ says editor Michael Luongo, who snapped the image of this Dubai billboard for clothing. ‘It’s not a gay thing at all but the perfect example of different intimacy boundaries among Arab men vs. Western men.’Writer/editor Michael Luongo is all too familiar with the cultural prejudices he confronts in his new book, “Gay Travels in the Muslim World.” For a long time he held them himself.

N.Y. Editor’s Gay Travels in Muslim World

By Erline Andrews
Friday, August 17, 2007

“I was raised in an America that taught me to hate Muslims,” he writes in the preface of “Gay Travels,” a compilation of essays from Muslim and non-Muslim contributors edited by Luongo and put out last month by Harrington Parks Press as part of its Out in the World series. “When I was in grade school I was shown pictures of dead Israeli babies, blown up by terrorists, and told, ‘This is what Muslims do.’... It should not be a surprise then that I grew up afraid of anything tinged with the hint of being Muslim or Middle Eastern—the people especially.”

Luongo, a freelance journalist whose involvement in tourism and travel began in academia, overcame his fears to become an authority on the Middle East. He calls Afghanistan one of his favorite places to visit. He’s written about the country for the New York Times and Bloomberg News and has just returned from a month-long assignment in Iraq.

“Gay Travels in the Muslim World” takes the reader from the New Jersey suburb where Luongo grew up to Los Angeles, across the world to Bangladesh, and many places in between, showing Muslim men as thwarted dreamers, as conflicted sons, brothers and husbands and, yes, as participants in gay sexual liaisons. But, as Luongo told the New York Blade in an interview following his standing-room-only event at The LGBT Center, he wants “Gay Travels” to reach an audience far beyond that of pleasure-seekers.

Tell us about the process of putting together “Gay Travels in the Muslim World.” Did you have particular authors in mind when you started, particular issues, particular countries? How did these change as the project progressed?

I’d been getting a lot of feedback from people that they wanted such a book. With 9/11, with war in Afghanistan, with the war in Iraq, I felt that it was necessary, and there was so much gay material in the media any way. We started the process for this book in 2004. There were select people I did have in mind. As I published more on all of this, people started contacting me. I always wanted Richard Ammon, who runs GlobalGayz.com, to do a story. I don’t agree with his story—he writes about a friend who was murdered in Morocco—which really recommends people not travel so much within this part of the world. But I felt it was very important to be included. You know what I was hoping for, but did not get? Stories out of Detroit. The largest Muslim community in the United States is in Detroit. What I did wind up getting was an L.A. story. There’s a huge Muslim community in Los Angeles.

You’ve spoken about the wide spectrum of homosexual behavior and attitudes to homosexuality that you found in your travels to the Middle East. Can you elaborate?

I’ve always stressed that “to do” is not necessarily “to be” in the Muslim world. The Muslim world is also so broad—it’s the suburbs of Detroit, it’s Malaysia. I facetiously used Condoleezza Rice’s definition of the Greater Middle East: everything from Morocco to Indonesia. What surprised me most was that, because male intimacy is normal, you can find that sex between men is not necessarily frowned on in most Muslim countries. The gay identity is the problem.

Is a gay rights movement active in these countries?

You have it in Turkey. You have it in Iran. You had it in Iraq—but now that’s in exile. In Afghanistan you just don’t have it. In Jordan there are gay activists. Egypt certainly does have gay activists. I want to make this very clear: When I say the problem is “to be” and not “to do,” I’m not saying people shouldn’t have gay rights in these countries. I’m saying that that’s where the conflict arises. So the prejudice is not against the behavior but against the identity.

In addition to Frommer’s travel guides and serious fiction, you’ve edited erotic travel collections, such as “Between the Palms.” A recent Page Six item in the New York Post highlighted that aspect of “Gay Travels in the Muslim World.” Do you think that’s the main interest in this book, that people expect it to be erotic or titillating?

The book is not a piece of erotica. The audience is gay men, but I actually really wanted a far broader audience than gay men, a mainstream audience. I dug through the rubble of the Twin Towers, and I’m a travel writer and photographer, and I have no skills other than to go to other places, to experience then write about them, photograph them and allow people who would never visit those places to understand them. So that’s the thing that I wanted people to get out of it. There are people in war zones, and we need a better understanding of those people.

Why do people still find the idea of the Middle East or Middle Eastern men so tantalizing, so romantic, after all that’s happened there?

I think that it’s both men and women. I think even the idea of a veiled woman is quite alluring. It really brings out the eyes and it makes sexuality more intense because it’s so hidden; it’s not in your face in the way that it is in the West. It’s the same idea that men in the Middle East are unattainable. For many men, the notion that there’s a danger in having sex there is somewhat alluring. Then there’s the whole historical aspect: The Middle East was at one time far more liberal on homosexuality than the West was. In the Victorian period, you had a huge amount of literature about this. I think that still holds a very strong appeal.

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Gay Travels in the Muslim World by Michael Luongo can purchased through our webstore! Portion of all proceeds are donated to Al-Fatiha Foundation.