"We don't have Martians in Iran"

Hello fellow Kabobs and Kabobettes,

At the gracious invitation of huggable Will and mesmerizing Maytha, I am the latest piece of lahma to be skewered and added to the already delicious roster. The name's Mehammed Mack, see, Mack Daddy to May, which gets translated into Arablish as Abu Mack. All the salacious details of my biography are to be added soon...

As a first post, I wanted to address a lingering issue still simmering long after Ahmadinejad left Columbia, my university...

After all the sardonic laughter, there's a certain sense in which President Ahmadinejad just may be right. Perhaps for all the wrong reasons, but nevertheless, right. And I say this as someone who supports and participates in a sexually diverse conception of the Middle East.

What might not exist is the category of the "homosexual": that figure who self-identifies as exclusively gay, establishes a public culture based on that identity, and was born in special Victorian conditions of the late 19th century (described by Michel Foucault in his must-read THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY).

This is to be differentiated from the more free-form practitioner of individual sexual acts that we've all heard the Kalam-el-nas about: the covertly bisexual arab male who, while married, dabbles in casual sex with other men, or, dare we say it, boys, usually in a very role-differentiated manner. We have also heard of the strictly passive male-- on the outside indistinguishable from the most virile shabab-- who may exclusively prefer contact with men but would never claim a gay identity as such.

These are two 'common' personality types that have often been mentioned in anecdotes we share, books we've read (The Yacoubian Building), and 'shady' uncles or cousins we might have; they complicate the correlation many want to make between homosexuals here and 'homosexuals' there. But even writing these last sentences is problematic to me, because they still attempt to tell that strip-tease story about unlocking the Gordian knot and unveiling, through a haze of genie smoke, the secret truth of Oriental sex.

I have a professor here at Columbia, you may have heard of him before :) who has thoroughly dissected these thorny issues in a recently released book: DESIRING ARABS, by Joseph Massad. If you want to talk about sex in the Arab World, it's a great primer for all issues you should be sensitive to when making any kind of claim. In class discussion, he frequently used the following philosophical dialogue scheme to highlight the 'absurdity' of searching for homosexuals in the Middle East, as certain human rights groups are wont to do. Here it is, very loosely: "1) Martians don't exist on Earth although they do on Mars 2) Why aren't there Martians on Earth?"

Make of that what you will.

But I want to end on a sweeter, more compromising note...

As you can see in the picture here, even if in Ahmadinejad's mind homosexuals (like the Holocaust) possibly don't exist, something else definitely does. A level of affection between males that you'd never see in our most-unMediterranean society, an affection that holds hands, kisses, and embraces to the very limits of 'decency', because both men know it won't be consummated sexually, and are therefore comfortable around one another. It's a kind of affection scholars like Malek Chebel would call "homo-sensualité", that often gets confused with rampant homosexuality, in the observer's eyes. There was once a great American feminist who said (someone remind me of her name), that the only outlet here in America, for men to show each other affection is violence: boxing, football, and sometimes just plain fighting (i.e, Fight Club).

PS: Now that we're on the subject of homos-- and this is something I discussed with May-- isn't there something a little bit homo-erotic about the name "KABOBfest", that is, if we are to think about it like a "sausagefest"? For those who don't know, that means a lame party (if you're straight that is) where men outnumber women. As far as imagery goes, should we visualize a group of circumcised zobs roasting in their own sweat or something? Oops I didn't say that...