Tag: jordan gay rights

Deadly Stigma: HIV Infections in Middle East on the Rise

Despite a historically low prevalence of HIV infections, countries in the Middle East and North Africa are facing a rising number of HIV/AIDS cases at a time when the rates of new infections drop across the globe as part of a concerted effort to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030. Such a dynamic is on… Read more »

Everything you need to know about being gay in Muslim countries

The official fiction, Brian Whitaker explains, is that gay people don’t exist in the Middle East. They do – and for many of them, the attitudes of family and society are a much bigger problem than the fear of being persecuted When the US supreme court ruled in favour of same-sex marriage last year, the… Read more »

What Does The Koran Say About Being Gay?

In the wake of the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that took the lives of 49 people, there has been much speculation around gunman Omar Mateen’s motives for the attack. The rationale for the crime, first considered to be a straight man’s act of homophobic violence, became self-loathing when it came to… Read more »

The Myth of the Queer Arab Life

For most people in the West life in the Arab world for gay people is hard to fathom. It is, like many other parts of life in this region, complicated. One of my favorite television shows growing up was a Ramadan special featuring an Egyptian performer called Sherihan. One year she had a Ramadan special… Read more »

Online activists spur change in Middle East, China, world

Online LGBT activism and community-building are the focus of this week’s video in the “Quorum” series of 11 discussions of international LGBTI issues. Moderator for the latest discussion is Andre Banks, executive director of AllOut.org, the U.S.-based advocacy organization that has enlisted 2 million people worldwide to take action online for LGBTI rights. Panelists /… Read more »

Jordanian society anti-gay despite decriminalizing same-sex relations

Amman: Although Jordan is one of the few Arab states to have decriminalized same-sex relations, anti-gay discrimination and harassment remain common in the conservative desert kingdom. “Culturally speaking, this type of sexual behavior is not accepted in the very conservative society in Jordan,” Musa Shteiwi, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University… Read more »