The Road to Baghdad
Richard Burnett
rburnett@hour.ca
 |  Luongo in front of the Hands of Victory in Baghdad photo: Courtesy Michael Luongo |
"I'd never been there before, so when I flew to Kurdistan in the north where a friend of mine with American Voices was giving a concert, I decided to go," says my friend and colleague, NYC-based travel writer Michael Luongo. "And with gay men being attacked across Iraq [by Shiite militias], I wanted to go there to interview people directly."
What Michael found he didn't like.
"Logistically it's impossible to meet anyone in Baghdad," he explains. "I was primarily in the green zone - the international zone - where I stayed in a military press compound. I did interviews at a particular hotel whose name I cannot reveal because it would put it at risk, especially if [terrorists] found out I was doing gay interviews there."
Michael continues, "People will not meet you after work because they cannot go home in the dark - they are worried someone may kill them if they leave the green zone after 4 p.m. And you cannot speak English in the red zone - the unofficial term for everything not in the green zone - because that marks you as wealthy or working for the Americans and you can be killed or kidnapped."
If you're gay, it's worse.
"If you clearly look gay or act gay you risk being killed. What can be code for gay - long hair or stylish Western clothes - can mark you for death."
Luongo has written about gay life in the Muslim world extensively before, notably in his just-published new book Gay Travels in the Muslim World (Harrington Park Press).
In July, none other than the New York Post's Page Six led off with an item about Michael's new book.
"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, his book celebrating homosexuality in the Middle East," Page Six leads off. "Luongo compiled chapters by 17 writers covering Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Bangladesh, Turkey and Saudi Arabia [and] 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."
As Jama writes in the book, "There is something intoxicatingly beautiful about an Arab man who paints his eyes with kohl."
Michael, meanwhile, laughs. "I'm a Page Six celebrity!"
But the laughs were short-lived. He didn't want to become a target while travelling through Iraq, though, he adds, "I didn't feel like I had to suppress anything [with my physical self] because most people wouldn't think I'm gay anyway."
Luongo worked with U.K.-based gay Iraqi human rights activist Ali Hili, who has documented the anti-gay killing campaign of the homophobic Mahdi Army - the militia of firebrand fundamentalist Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is fighting to establish an Islamist dictatorship in Iraq.
"I used some of Ali's contacts to set up interviews," says Michael, "but many gay people there have fled to the north of the country. That's [also] common among Iraqis who have money. The building boom in Kurdistan is being fuelled by people fleeing the south."
At the end of the day, of course, it isn't just gay Iraqis who are suffering.
"One guy I met lived through a car bombing that killed 50 people on their way to work one morning and the expression on everybody's face was, 'What did we do to deserve this?'"
Michael continues, "I'm against this war but my view is we're there now and what do we do? We have to be adults about the situation we're in now. I think the country should be split up, but Turkey would never accept a separate Kurdistan. My impression speaking with Iraqis is if [American and British troops] leave it will get even worse, like when the Russians left Afghanistan. That's when there was real bloodshed."
No comments:
Post a Comment