Prisoners of Sex - New York Times
The New York Times has an article on an Arab crackdown on homosexual activity. Primarily dealing with Egypt, although Morocco is mentioned, the article argues that denunciation of homosexuality is perceived as an easy way to attack Western values. For the trope of the West imposing homosexuality on the Arab world, the author cites Mohammed Choukri:
There is a searing scene in the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri’s 1973 novel “For Bread Alone” in which a desperate young man, having recently moved from the country to the city in colonial Morocco, sells himself to an elderly Spaniard. The scene is explicit (they have oral sex in a car), and the novel, which has been banned or caused controversy in many Arab countries, serves as a stunning condemnation of the power disparities engendered by colonialism. Symbolism like Choukri’s is common in Arabic literature and cinema, providing for what the British writer Brian Whitaker has referred to as a “reverse Orientalism,” in which sex, and specifically homosexual sex, is presented as a foreign incursion, a tool of colonial domination.
The efforts of human rights organizations to condemn torture have damped down active persecution at the moment, but the article argues that militant Islam has given rise to a resurgence of anti-homosexual feeling that could result in renewed violent repression at any moment.
Matthew Shepard, of course, might remind us that such attitudes are not unique to the Arab world.