Today's Islam: Startling High Rate of Homosexuality

The Filth and the Fury: Muslims feign righteous indignation- rioting over Koran flush story - wallow in depravity
May 29, 2005

MIM: The orgy of righteous indignation being indulged in by Muslims in world wide due to a false report involving a Koran in a toilet, has sent US officials 'bending over backwards' to assure Muslims of how much respect they have for the religion of Islam. Perhaps US officials would not be as quick to defer to Muslim sensibilities, if Muslim hypocrisy about their own religion becomes public knowledge and that many of the Muslims screaming about wanting to martyr themselves for the sake of the Koran are flagrantly violating one of the Islamic laws strictest prohibitions, that of homosexuality. Afghanistan is a case in point.

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"...Such is the Pashtun obsession with sodomy -- locals tell you
that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering
their posterior..."

MIM:Ousting of the Taliban brought Afghanistan gays out of the caves .

Startled marines find Afghan men all made up to see them 5/02

Three similar stories by major newspapers:

2 Shh, It's an Open Secret: Warlords and Pedophilia (New York Times) 2/02

3 Kandahar's Lightly Veiled Homosexual Habits (Los Angeles Times) 4/02

4 Kandahar comes out of the closet (Times of London) 12/02

5 Kandahar: Closely Watched Pashtuns--A Critique of Western Journalists' Reporting Bias about 'Gay Kandahar 4/03

6 Afghanistan has its first official AIDS deaths 6/04

7 Interview with Michael Luongo on his return from ?'gay Afghanistan': on Afghani male intimacy and sex 7/04

8 American arrested in Afghanistan on suspicion of soliciting gay sex 9/04

http://www.globalgayz.com/afghan-news02-04.html




Quote:

Kandahar's Lightly Veiled Homosexual Habits
Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2002
Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053
Fax: 213-237-7679 or 213-237-5319
Email: [email protected]
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-000023881apr03.story

Society: Restrictions on relations with women lead to greater prevalence of liaisons between men, a professor says.

By Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writer

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan?-In his 29 years, Mohammed Daud has seen the faces of perhaps 200 women. A few dozen were family members. The rest were glimpses stolen when he should not have been looking and the women were caught without their face-shrouding burkas.

"How can you fall in love with a girl if you can't see her face?" he asks.

Daud is unmarried and has sex only with men and boys. But he does not consider himself homosexual, at least not in the Western sense. "I like boys, but I like girls better," he says. "It's just that we can't see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful."

Daud, a motorbike repairman who asked that only his two first names and not his family name be used, has a youthful face, a jaunty black mustache and a post-Taliban cleanshaven chin. As he talks, his knee bounces up and down, an involuntary sign of his embarrassment.

"These are hard questions you are asking," he says. "We don't usually talk about such things."

Though rarely acknowledged, the prevalence of sex between Afghan men is an open secret, one most observant visitors quickly surmise. Ironically, it is especially true here in Kandahar, which was the heartland of the puritanical Taliban movement.

It might seem odd to a Westerner that such a sexually repressive society is marked by heightened homosexual activity. But Justin Richardson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, says such thinking is backward?-it is precisely the extreme restrictions on sexual relations with women that lead to greater prevalence of the behavior.

"In some Muslim societies where the prohibition against premarital heterosexual intercourse is extremely high?-higher than that against sex between men?-you will find men having sex with other males not because they find them most attractive of all but because they find them most attractive of the limited options available to them," Richardson says.

In other words, sex between men can be seen as the flip side of the segregation of women. And perhaps because the ethnic Pushtuns who dominate Kandahar are the most religiously conservative of Afghanistan's major ethnic groups, they have, by most accounts, a higher incidence of homosexual relations.

Visitors might think they see the signs. For one thing, Afghan men tend to be more intimate with other men in public than is common in the West. They will kiss, hold hands and drape their arms around each other while drinking tea or talking.

Moreover, there is a strong streak of dandyism among Pushtun males. Many line their eyes with kohl, stain their fingernails with henna or walk about town in clumsy, high-heeled sandals.

The love by men for younger, beautiful males, who are called halekon, is even enshrined in Pushtun literature. A popular poem by Syed Abdul Khaliq Agha, who died last year, notes Kandahar's special reputation.

http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/afghanistan/afnews009.htm