Nothing at all about supporting Lebanese gay men and lesbians under fire during the Israeli invasion at <http://www.petertatchell.net/>, <http://mpetrelis.blogspot.com/>, <http://www.ilga.org/>, and so on.
The only items that criticize Tel Aviv-Washington's Lebanon war came from Al Fatiha, a gay Muslim org: e.g., <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/al-fatiha-news/message/1209>.
With the exception of Doug Ireland <http://direland.typepad.com/>, who covered the Jerusalem WorldPride boycott led by ASWAT, QUIT!, etc., the orgs and activists big on saving gay men (and presumably also lesbians, though they seldom rise to anyone's attention) from their governments in the Middle East do not appear interested in saving them -- and their straight brothers and sisters -- from the Tel Aviv-Washington axis.
The majors, like <http://www.hrc.org/> and <http://www.thetaskforce.org/>, tend to be indifferent to both the problem of homophobia (due to the clash of the dominant and emergent ideologies concerning sex/gender/sexuality*) in the rest of the world and the destruction of GLBT lives, as well as straight lives, by the empire.
* The more society gets proletarianized and urbanized, the more individuals adopt the Western sense of homo/bio/hetero sexual identities; and the more individuals adopt such identities, the more the older way of life, with its particular arrangement of sex/gender/sexuality, gets disrupted. To employ Raymond Williams' terms, it's a conflict between the still dominant ideology rooted in the past and the emergent ideology rooted in the penetration of global capitalism. This happened earlier in the West: recall, for instance, the trial of Oscar Wilde.
<blockquote>Power and Sexuality in the Middle East
Bruce Dunne
Sexual relations in Middle Eastern societies have historically articulated social hierarchies, that is, dominant and subordinate social positions: adult men on top; women, boys and slaves below. The distinction made by modern Western "sexuality" between sexual and gender identity, that is, between kinds of sexual predilections [and] degrees of masculinity and femininity, has, until recently, had little resonance in the Middle East. Both dominant/subordinate and heterosexual/homosexual categorizations are structures of power. They position social actors as powerful or powerless, "normal" or "deviant." The contemporary concept of "queerness" resists all such categorizing in favor of recognizing more complex realities of multiple and shifting positions of sexuality, identity and power.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sexual relations, whether heterosexual or homosexual, continue to be understood as relations of power linked to rigid gender roles. In Turkey, Egypt and the Maghrib, men who are "active" in sexual relations with other men are not considered homosexual; the sexual domination of other men may even confer a status of hyper-masculinity.17 The anthropologist Malek Chebel, describing the Maghrib as marked by an "exaggerated machismo," claims that most men who engage in homosexual acts are functional bisexuals; they use other men as substitutes for women-and have great contempt for them. He adds that most Maghribis would consider far worse than participation in homosexual acts the presence of love, affection or equality among participants.18 Equality in sexual relations, whether heterosexual or homosexual, threatens the "hyper-masculine" order.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Violence directed against male homosexuals appears to be on the rise. Effeminate male dancers known as khawals were popular public performers in 19th-century Egypt; today that term is an insult, equivalent to "faggot."21 The 19th-century khawals may not have enjoyed respect as "men," but there is little evidence that they were subjected to violence. Hostility to homosexual practices has been part of the political and cultural legacy of European colonialism. Today, global culture's images of diverse sexualities and human sexual rights have encouraged the formation of small "gay" subcultures in large cosmopolitan cities such as Cairo, Beirut and Istanbul and a degree of political activism, particularly in Turkey. Although homosexuality is not a crime in Turkey, Turkish gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites and transsexuals have been harassed and assaulted by police and sometimes "outed" to families and employers. Turkish gay activists have specifically been targeted. Effeminate male prostitutes in contemporary Morocco are described as a marginal group, ostracized and rejected by their families, living in fear of police and gay-bashers (casseurs de pédés). For some, as for Turkish transsexuals, prostitution serves as one of the few ways in which they can live their sexuality.22 Many homosexuals in Middle Eastern countries have sought asylum in the West as refugees from official persecution.23
FULL TEXT: <http://www.merip.org/mer/mer206/bruce.htm></blockquote>
IMHO, neither the bourgeois Western notion of homo/bi/hetero nor the globally prevalent dichotomy of active/passive is ideal, and neither is superior to the other in the total pleasure yield: according to the homo/bi/hetero model, men who have sex with other men are a minority (maybe just one in ten) called homosexual or bisexual, and the majority don't do any such thing, nor can they easily admit to being "bicurious" without getting fag-baited in most contexts, but there is equality between tops and bottoms within gay culture; according to the active/passive model, all men are presumed to be capable of desiring to have sex with other men, but there is no equality between tops and bottoms, and bottoms can get stigmatized.
I hope that the rest of the world will manage to proletarianize, urbanize, and modernize themselves and enjoy sex in freedom and equality without adopting homo/bi/hetero identities. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>