Jul 29, 2007Quickie Link: Rsky Gay Life in Saudi Arabia
By vanrozenheim
(Saudi Arabia) - There's no gay movement, nor parades nor bars, and chatrooms for hooking up convey a certain reserve. As more Saudis go abroad for school or work and then return, they carry back some alien cultural pollen - in some cases a dusting of gay identity. The kingdom's homosexual life can't so readily, as in Cairo or Beirut, be attributed to a decadent Westernized elite. Traditional sharia - the body of Islamic law - grounds the kingdom's legal code, and the death penalty that it provides for sodomy is periodically imposed - indeed, as recently as last February. That case seems to have involved a man convicted of sex with a youth and other crimes. In January 2002, three men were executed in the city of Abha who, according to the interior ministry, "committed acts of sodomy, married each other, seduced young men, and attacked those who rebuked them."
