There are various causes that make the lives of men and women who are conscious of their being gay and lesbian difficult.
* Material Conditions
The Middle East has yet to be thoroughly proletarianized and urbanized, and many people in the Middle East work in agriculture and live in rural areas. Historically, homo/bi/hetero sexual identities arose first among those who lived in cities, especially the bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie, bohemian artists, and so on, in the West. It took some time before the working class began to adopt such identities, and even today in cities in the West, lower-strata working-class people, especially of color, are less likely to adopt them than white folks who are economically better off. In other words, there do not exist material conditions (proletarianization, urbanization, an increasing number of people who live in nuclear families or as singles, etc.) that would generalize the adoption of homo/bi/hetero identities in the Middle East, so that makes the lives of a tiny minority who have already done so rather lonely, for the rest of society really don't understand them at all.
* Government: Laws and Practice
Here, we need to take a close look at what each country's government does in regulating sexual behaviors. In doing so, it is important to look at laws but not to assume that laws on the books are necessarily being enforced.
* Family, Clan, Etc.
In the Middle East, families, clans, and other kinship groups, quite often patriarchal, shape the lives of individuals much more powerfully than they do here, both for better and worse. For better, because they can be networks of economic and social support; worse, they can limit or even negate individuals' sexual and other choices. These facts of family life are tied up with the material conditions mentioned above.
If we seek to change the lives of others, especially for better, in faraway places, we have to first have a good grasp of all of the above, think clearly about what can or cannot be changed easily, and so on, and then decide what makes sense for us to do. E.g., as individual activists or activist organizations, we can't change the material conditions, family structures, etc. of other countries, but we may consider taking some actions with regard to what governments do.
> But how do you define things that are "clearly the case."
I don't think we can make a generalization about that. We need to look at things case by case, evaluating credibility of sources, whether sources agree with or contradict one another, and so on, in the same way we would look at any other things.
> > At the same time, we can't have any illusion that our speaking up here
> makes any difference whatsoever over there. The only people who can
> >change things in Syria fundamentally, for better or worse, are
> organized social forces in Syria or those who are running the multinational
> empire.
>
> But by speaking up we put on notice whoever does or wants to run things
> that this is an issue that we will not allow to be ignored.
If they pay attention, yes. If they don't, no. It seems to me that they don't, more often than not.
> > It would be a different thing if we were running the US government, but
> > that is not the case today.
>
> But isn;t that the goal we are working toward?
Yes, but leftists (including myself) haven't even begun to take a first step toward creating the kind of conditions that might eventually allow leftists to take power and run the US government, making it an instrument of positive rather than negative social change in the rest of the world (not just occasionally here in the US). -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>