LGBT Book & Video Blog

Gay Travels in the Muslim World

Edited by Michael T. Luongo

$19.95; Harrington Park Press; 200 pages

REVIEW BY YASMIN NAIR

Michale Luongo's anthology of gay travel writing attempts to go beyond the recognizable Western symbols and tropes of “gayness”: rainbow flags, Pride parades and stories about coming out. A number of the authors point out that it's the West that fuses gay identity and gay sex; men in many Muslim cultures are unafraid of holding hands in public without being particularly gay. Luongo writes, after trying to discern between gay romance and everyday gestures in Kabul, “I wonder if I was seeing a society that simply took any form of love, including affection between men, as a wonderful thing.”

Authors honestly foreground the entanglement of race and desire, the exoticizing that comes with that and what happens when the very presence of ( mostly ) white gay men in tourist traps also makes them part of the commercial structure. Encounters aren't always peaceful. In Martin Foreman's “A Market and a Mosque,” the author writes about Sylhet, Bangladesh—a small city that appears, on the surface, to be reaping the benefits of global migration. The influx of money from immigrants sending money back to Sylhet has resulted in a new boom economy of sorts, especially for young men who trade sex for money. Foreman thinks he has a special connection to the place: “ … since most of the Bangladeshis in the UK [ Foreman's native country ] live in my home borough of Tower Hamlets, I feel a kind of affinity with the place. Whether or not Sylhet feels an affinity with me is a different matter.”

 BOOK REVIEW Gay Travels in the Muslim World
Windy City Times, IL