Gay Baghdad
The below article is written by Michael Luongo, which if memory serves me is the first time a gay journalist working for gay media has been there to report the scene. My own experience and time in Baghdad doesn’t qualify here because gay life was not the topic I was assigned to cover.
From the Gay City News:
What had only been lines on a map, forbidden and dangerous, were places that had come alive, places that I could now see with my own eyes.
I was in Baghdad in mid-2009 for my second time. The post-surge trip introduced me to places I had only heard of in stories — what then seemed like fables — told to me by Ali Hili, the director of Iraqi LGBT, a London-based human rights group working with gay men in Iraq, and by other gay men I had met in Baghdad two years earlier.
Ali told of walking the reedy banks of the Tigris in Baghdad, a place he said, where gay men laughed, cruised, and picnicked together in the days before the US invasion changed everything. The recent horrors reported out of this city, for gays and ordinary citizens alike, made it hard to believe such a time ever existed.
That is until I was able to see it with my own eyes, in a Baghdad inching, hoping to be post-war. It was a completely different city from the one I discovered in my first visit in 2007, when the insurgent uprising meant that simply being on the street was an invitation to instant death.
This visit would be full of stark contrasts. It was as if there were two different Baghdads — at least. I would interview men from Sadr City, one of the poorest, most dangerous districts, who talked about friends killed by sprays of bullets in drive-by shootings, their gathering places firebombed, their names posted on lists, others raped and disappeared by militia-infested police squadrons at checkpoints.
I would see a hospital where the bodies of gay men had been dumped, their anuses closed shut from a heavy glue used to torture them. I would visit a safe house, chatting with gay men and transgender Iraqis who hid for safety, yet at the same time were welcoming and life-affirming, teaching me gay Arabic slang and joking about sex with gay Saddam-look-alikes.
And I would meet other men from different parts of Baghdad, young, fashionable, masculine, with far less to fear, who did in fact cruise along the colorful banks of the Tigris on Abu Nuwaz Street and spend their evenings at fashionable cafés popular among gays in West Baghdad, flirting with men they met through the website Manjam as they sat back in comfortable seats visible from the street.
I would grow to fall in love with a newly vibrant Baghdad. Not that I didn’t still have much to fear as a visiting gay journalist — from conversations that could be tapped to entrapment, spies, and the bullets of panicked Iraqi soldiers. In the end, there was much that didn’t fully makes sense — for me, for the local gay men, and for anyone living in this ancient cradle of civilization, a place somewhere between war and peace.
This four-part series does not aim to duplicate the work of reporters who, over the past four years, exposed the targeted killings of Iraqi gay men. My goal instead is to draw on my experiences in the spaces where gay men socialize, where they have been killed and where they hide, to demystify what remains an abstraction for Western audiences.
The stories of the men in Baghdad, told from their own spaces, rather than through second-hand accounts or from overseas, humanizes them, makes them more than victims in a war alternately labeled a fight for freedom, a clash of religious ideologies and, by many, a grave mistake by the United States that has thrown occupied Iraq into chaos.
Some of the earliest writing — dating to the spring of 2006 — on the killings of Iraqi gay men was done by Doug Ireland in Gay City News, based on interviews with his overseas contacts. Baghdad-based correspondents for CNN, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and other publications in time followed suit.
I reported on the killings for Gay City News and the Gay Times of London after my 2007 visit to Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, though my movement in the capital was then severely limited. The most recent in-depth piece was the emotive October 2009 New York magazine article by Matt McAllester, also largely based on research conducted outside of Iraq.
(the article is quite lengthy and you can jump to the remainder of it here)
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