Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

My husband and I wed in England in 2007 in a ceremony then called civil partnership, but offering all the benefits afforded to married people in Great Britain. This gave John UK immigration rights. I wanted to be sure that he had someplace to go, too. A marriage in Massachusetts (the only US state that had legalized it at that time) would have been called marriage, but would have granted us no legal protection. Though liberal society in the coastal United States was more accepting of gay people than was its British equivalent, the law advanced more rapidly in the UK, reflecting the relative absence of religion from British politics. Two years later, we married, that elusive word marriage finally in hand, in Connecticut, where the law now afforded us a new wave of rights to go with it.

Progress on gay rights has hardly been universal. The United Nations Security Council had its first session on LGBT issues in August 2015 to address abuses committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh). This terrorist group has posted videos of the executions of homosexuals, mostly in Syria and Iraq. In June 2015, ISIL posted photos of a gay man in northern Iraq being dangled, then dropped from a high building in front of a crowd of onlookers. In Iran, homosexual acts are punishable by death; Makwan Moloudzadeh, accused of having committed sodomy when he was thirteen, was executed there at the age of twenty-one even after his alleged victims had withdrawn their accusations. In Egypt, a raid on a bathhouse was staged for television; twenty-six people were imprisoned. In another episode, several Egyptian men were jailed merely for having attended a gay wedding. In Saudi Arabia, gay people are subject to capital punishment; two men found to have had sex there in 2007 were sentenced to seven thousand lashes each and are permanently disabled as a result.

Russia’s law against “gay propaganda” has led to gay men and lesbians being beaten in the streets; many have fled the country. In Kyrgyzstan, police entrap gay men on Internet dating sites and subject them to blackmail and extortion; those found guilty of “propagating nontraditional sexual relations” are subject to a year’s imprisonment. In late 2013, India’s highest court upheld the colonial-era criminalization of homosexual behavior. And twenty-seven African countries have passed antisodomy laws. In Nigeria, gay people can legally be stoned to death, and extrajudicial lynchings of gay people have become common. A Cameroonian was sentenced to three years in jail in 2011 for sending an affectionate text message to another man. Cameroon incarcerates more people for homosexual acts than does any other country, often “proving” the sexuality of purportedly gay men by having court-ordered medical “exams” to check the elasticity of their anus, despite the fact that such procedures are illegal under international law and have no basis in science. The president of Zimbabwe refers to gay people as “filth” and has threatened to behead them. Uganda made homosexual acts a capital offense in 2014, though that law was eventually overturned.

Hasan Agili, a student whom I met in Libya, wrote to me after he had left the country. A friend had borrowed his laptop, called up his search history, then outed him at his medical school. He was bullied so mercilessly that he abandoned his studies and moved to another city. But the threats continued unabated. “I watched public videos of friends beheaded for being homosexual,” he wrote to me. “It’s just done for me there. I can’t go back. I am known and I would be hunted. I can’t even tell my family what happened or why I left.” He is now in hiding in a neighboring country where homosexual acts are illegal, without papers that would allow him to get a legitimate job, in continual fear of being found out, harassed, and deported to a country where his life would be under threat.