After all, it is not so very long ago that western accounts of the Orient invited us to distrust Arabs and Persians precisely for their supposed effeminacy. How long ago, exactly? Well just before the point that gay sex was legalised in the West, if you want to know (in 1967 in the UK). Caricatures of lascivious Arab homosexuals, limp-wristed, heavy-lidded and eye-lashed were a mainstay of Anglo-Saxon pulp fiction. Perhaps the last echo of that stereotype can be seen in the Turkish prison rape in Alan Parker's Midnight Express.
If the Middle East has turned to anti-gay legislation, that suggests that it _is_ adopting western values, just more traditional ones. 'Get with the program guys, we like gays now!' insist today's western propagandists. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060801/00a8b12d/attachment.htm>