How was 2006 for the gays?
It was good for me; was it good for you? 2006 has been a bipolar year for global gay rights, with soaring highs punctuated by numbing lows. It was the year gay marriage got applauded at a Tory Party conference, finally stopped losing elections in America, and came even to the tip of Africa. But it was also the year the Grand Ayatollah of Iraq issued a fatwa calling for gays to be killed in “the worst, most severe way possible” – and the religions of the world united in that global font of superstition, Jerusalem, to stop gay people from throwing a party.
So let’s begin there, with our greatest achievement and saddest moment of 2006, all tied into one. We, the gays of the world, managed to pull off a trick all the Messiahs, peacemakers and Nobel prizes have been unable to confect for a thousand years: we united all the communities of the Middle East. This summer, the Jews, Muslims and Christians who spend most of the year trying to ethnically cleanse each other organised a joint press conference to declare – yes, we hate each other, but we hate the gays more.
The trigger was the announcement of a long-delayed Gay Pride rally in Jerusalem. Last time gays met in Jerusalem, three of them were stabbed by religious fanatics. This time, incredibly, the Israeli government – which has long boasted of being the only liberal democracy in the region – caved in to the fanatics and banned the march. It was confined in the end to a sealed-off stadium, a tiny pocket of gay freedom in a homo-cidal region.
But compared to the treatment of gay people elsewhere in the region, this was Paradise. In Iran – under the tightening Islamist regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – the hounding and slaughter of gay people intensified. While there were no stark photographs like the 2005 hangings of gay teenage boys in a public square, an investigation by gay rights group Outrage! found that the Iranian secret police have shifted to staging secret hanging in prison, where the rope is knotted carefully to ensure slow strangulation of gays.
Next door, in a collapsing Iraq, gay people are being increasingly hunted down by Talibanist death-squads committed to “morally purifying” their little patch of Mesopotamia. Outrage! again documented a few of the thousands of cases. Here’s one: “Nyaz is a 28-year old dentist who lives in Baghdad. She is terrified that her lesbian relationship will be discovered, and that both she and her partner will be killed. They have stopped seeing each other. It is too dangerous. To make matters worse, Nyaz is being forced by the fundamentalist Mahdi militia to marry an older, senior Mullah with close ties the Mahdi leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. If she does not agree to the marriage, or tries to run away, Nyaz and her family will be targeted for ‘honour killing' by Sadr's men.”
Or how about Karzan, a 23 year old arts student in Baghdad, whose father received a message saying that if he did not hand over his “depraved” gay son for execution, the family would be killed one by one? How about Wathiq, a 29-year old gay architect who was kidnapped, whose family stumped up an £11,000 ransom – and who was still found beheaded and mutilated a few days later?
Across the world, gay people were still the victims of this perverse determination to cling to the moral visions of pre-modern nomads who lived millennia ago, set out in “Holy Books”. Even in Britain, one of the most irreligious countries in the world where just 7 percent of the population attend a religious service every week, superstition was used to attack gays. The Gay Police Association (GPA) announced there has been a 75 percent increase in homophobic hate crimes by religious fanatics here since the September 11th massacres.
And yet the public faces of religion still dare to sanctimoniously claim that it is consensusal gay sex that is the real immorality. In the year in which it was revealed in even greater detail how Pope Benedict covered up the mass rape of children in his Church, he reiterated his view that homosexuality is an “intrinsic evil”. He has helped fuel a resurgent Catholic nationalism in some parts of Eastern Europe, not least in Poland where Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz has declared that if a homosexual "tries to infect others with their homosexuality, then the state must intervene in this violation of freedom."
Even the supposedly liberal Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, refused to condemn his Nigerian colleague, Archbishop Akinola, who acted as national cheerleader for a new set of savagely anti-gay laws. Thanks to him, gay sexual health education will now stop entirely in a country with epidemic AIDS.
But for every Dark Ages prohibition like this, there were shimmering points of light in other parts of the world. Gay marriage of some sort is now standard in Western Europe, and – surprise, surprise! – conservative predictions that it would cause the institution of marriage to crumble have proved to be preposterous. Indeed, most of the people getting married are lesbians, and the evidence suggests their relationships last longer than their heterosexual siblings’ – suggesting that gay marriage actually strengthens the institution.
Under David Cameron, even the British Tory Party – a generation on from the horrors of Section 28 – lauds gay marriage, and their crumbling conference audience applauds on cue. While there’s every reason to be suspicious of many of Cameron’s rebranding exercises, this shift seems genuine, with an attempt to recruit gay candidates across the board. Britain, along with the rest of Western Europe, seems to be entering an era of post-gay politics, when all parties agree to a plush package of gay rights.
And the argument is being won in the US faster than anybody could have imagined. Just two years ago, referenda to force a ban on gay marriage into individual states’ constitutions were being won with 65 percent majorities. This year, the margin of support was down to the low fifties, and for the first time one of these bans was actually rejected by the American people – and in the largely Republican state of Arizona too. With the Democrat victory in both houses of Congress, any-gay rhetoric ceased being the “wedge issue” that Karl Rove has salivated over for so long. Most states and Presidential candidates are now settling on a “civil partnership” compromise that is marriage in all but name. The homophobic fringe in American politics is demoralised; in August, Midge Decter, one of the leading intellectual enemies of gay rights, told me “we are losing this fight.”
But perhaps the most incredible advance for gay marriage has been in South Africa. This is a country next door to Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe denounces gays as “worse than dogs” and designates them for torture and semi-starvation. Yet the South African Supreme Court has declared gay marriage to be a legal right in the post-Apartheid constitution. Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, the Home Affairs Minister, said, “Men and women of homosexual and lesbian orientation joined the ranks of the democratic forces in the struggle for liberation. Same -sex unions should be afforded similar space as heterosexual marriages in the sunshine of democracy.”
If we can win there – in a continent that has been slaying gays since the white colonialist first arrived – we have no right to be pessmisitic about any part of the world. We shall overcome, the anti-Apartheid protestors sang in Soweto. That tune should echo today, from the gay-bashings on Clapham Common to the darkest torture chamber in Teheran.
POSTSCRIPT: You can donate money to the underground gay rights movement in Iraq, to save gay lives from Islamist militias. Cheques should be made payable to “OutRage!” with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT” to PO Box 17816, London SW14 8WT.
