For Samir*, a 34-year-old gay man living in Saudi Arabia, each day is a denial. He lives in Mecca, the holiest city according to Islam, and is acutely aware of the stigma that surrounds his gay lifestyle.
“I’m a Muslim. I know it’s forbidden, but I can’t help it,” he tells …

Learning about ‘alternative’ sexualities through time is often a murky business, beset with the prejudices and right-leaning morals of almost every culture in history. And when you’re looking as far back as ancient Egypt, the task becomes infinitely harder. This makes the Petrie Museum’s latest endeavour all the more impressive, …

The tens of millions of Arabic-speaking users of Microsoft’s popular Bing search engine have a problem. When it comes to searching for gay rights in Egypt, breast-feeding information in Algeria or sex advice in Jordan, they are out of luck. Bing is censoring search results in the Arab-speaking world, according …

Few years ago men in Moroccan big cities, mainly touristic, started discovering their sexuality identifying themselves as homosexual. Indeed it is the discovery of ‘woman in man’s body’. Then Homosexual communities and networks started to emerge in modern cities benefiting from the creation of virtual network by means of the …

Tuesday night at IGLHRC’s event at New York’s Gay Center the three people who seemed least shocked by the news of the impending executions of up to 128 Iraqis, some of whom are gay were the three excellent Arab panelists from lgbt rights groups. George Azzi [at the microphone] from …

BAGHDAD – Days before a deployment to Iraq last year, the 26-year-old soldier’s sergeant told his troops that they would get to know one another pretty well over the next few months.
“I’m in trouble,’’ the specialist remembered thinking. He feared comrades would find out he is gay. Worse, he said, …

BERLIN: Immigration has provoked plenty of European film. American cinema is rife with migration stories too but, where America’s founding myths are premised on in-migration, European countries have historically been depicted as sources of emigration rather than hosts to immigrants.
Such portrayals defy Europe’s geo-political location near – and its historical …

JERUSALEM (Feb. 2) – When Eli Kaplan had his initial psychological assessment when being inducted into the Israeli military eight years ago, he wasn’t asked about his sexual orientation, but he told the interviewer anyway that he was openly gay. In Israel, it wasn’t a problem then nor is it …

Jay Paul Deratany’s ‘Haram Iran’ not only illuminates the blatant barbarism and cruelty still prevalent in 21st century Iran, but also serves as a subtextual warning . . .
‘Haram Iran’,  written by Chicago attorney and human rights advocate Jay Paul Deratany, made its debut in the Chicago theater district in …