Although the advent of colonialism and Western capital in the Arab world has transformed most aspects of daily life, efforts to impose a European heterosexual regime on Arab men have succeeded among only the upper classes and the increasingly Westernized middle classes. It is among members of these wealthier segments of society that the Gay International has found native informants.

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While the premodern West attacked the Muslim world’s alleged sexual licentiousness, the modern West attacks its alleged repression of sexual freedoms. Representations of the Arab world in the discourse of the Gay International, which includes the popular publication Spartacus, an “International Gay Guide,” range from the horrific to the splendid, the latter on account of the availability of Arab men willing to engage in insertive anal intercourse with Western (read white) gay men. In the context of an Arab anticolonial nationalism or the more recent Islamism seeking Western technological modernization while preserving its version of cultural or religious authenticity, the Gay International is correctly perceived as part of Western encroachment on Arab and Muslim cultures.

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More recently, the Egyptian authorities have begun to crack down on Cairo locations where Westernized Egyptian gay-identified men and their European and American tourist cohorts congregate. On 11 May 2001, the police raided a discotheque housed in a boat on the Nile in the upper-class neighborhood of Zamalik and arrested fifty-five people. Women and foreign (i.e., mostly European and American) men who were detained were released on the spot, and three Egyptian men found to be the sons of prominent people were released shortly afterward. The arrested men — all Egyptian — were reportedly roughed up and insulted by the police. They were later subjected to so-called medical (read rectal) exams to verify their “deviance.”

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This is important in that the police do not seek to, and cannot if they were so inclined, arrest men practicing same-sex contact but rather are pursuing those among them who identify as “gay” on a personal level and who seek to use this identity as a group identification through social and public activities. The campaign of the Gay International misses this important distinction. The point being that it is not same-sex sexual practices that are being repressed by the Egyptian police but rather the sociopolitical identification of these practices with the Western identity of gayness and the publicness that these gay-identified men seek.