A little-discussed dilemma of the LGBTQ experience is foreign travel. For many opposite-sex couples, exploring the world together is one of their great bonding experiences, teeming with adventure and generating a lifetime of soppy memories. For LGBTQ couples, this experience is rather more fraught. There are, after all, 69 countries where homosexuality is prohibited altogether, 11 of which can enforce the death penalty for same-sex attraction.
In many other countries – take your pick: Indonesia, Russia, Madagascar – being gay may be legal, but that doesn’t preclude widespread discrimination and stigma. Booking a shared hotel room for you and your partner, or worries about public behaviour outing you as a romantic item, may deter you from most countries’ borders. As for traveling solo to somewhere like Egypt – now hosting COP27 – you’d do so likely knowing that authorities there have used dating apps to entrap and persecute LGBTQ people.
But rather the point of our not being colonialists is that we do not impose our mores on Johnny Foreigner. Isn’t it?
Johnny F gets to be Johnny F without the imposition of our laws and rules? Or is the statement that they must agree with the rules we say they must, but not with some others? As in, you know, when they were colonies?
I think if it were put to a vote many people would be in favour of importing Saudi and Qatari punishments for the likes of Owen Jones (albeit arguably on political rather than Sexual orientation grounds currently) but once the revolt starts against Big Trans it seems certain The other letters could well be next. And Jones will still be caring on about ‘Islamophobia’ oblivious to the elephant in the room.
69 ?
Wahey !
Sorry, I’ll get my coat.
’There are, after all, 69 countries where homosexuality is prohibited altogether, 11 of which can enforce the death penalty for same-sex attraction.’
Don’t go there then. Brighton’s lovely this time of year.
the death penalty for same-sex attraction
Attraction?
authorities there have used dating apps to entrap and persecute LGBTQ people
That’s only going to give Owen the hump if he goes there looking for some lucious local encounters among the camel-fanciers.
authorities there have used dating apps to entrap and persecute LGBTQ people.
Maybe don’t ‘date’ people in public toilets then.
The story I saw was some gay guy answered a Grindr type ad, went to a hotel room where half a dozen Qatari coppers were waiting. They duffed him over, raped him and then deported him.
Tsk, entrapment, bad form…
” We Must Respect Their Culture!”
Until it affects me…
So Qatar’s a nasty Muslim dump?* Don’t go then. Or emigrate and devote your life to repealing anti-LGBT laws. Either way, I don’t give a fuck.
*they run an excellent airline though
“As for traveling solo to somewhere like Egypt – now hosting COP27 – you’d do so likely knowing that authorities there have used dating apps to entrap and persecute LGBTQ people.”
Pork like an Egyptian.
It seems that any suggestion that teh gayers should, perhaps, restrain themselves on occasion is equivalent to calling for their extermination.
(See also: Monkeypox, AIDS)
It is so bizarre that it is the Left that so miss Empire and the enforcement of our rules on heathens in hot countries. But not so much when you realise the Left are just knee-jerk authoritarians.
Pork like an Egyptian. – applause Sam Vara.
The article from this ageing twink just drips with racism.
One can but hope Jones gets to try bungee jumping without the rope in some foreign land.
“For many opposite-sex couples, exploring the world together is one of their great bonding experiences, teeming with adventure and generating a lifetime of soppy memories. For LGBTQ couples, this experience is rather more fraught.”
Maybe, Owen, but there are many places in the world where being a tourist in public with a woman – no matter how modestly dressed – will lead to men propositioning her, staring, catcalling, frotting against her like your Auntie’s desperate labrador, and challenging you for her favours. I’ve even heard of a white guy with a black girlfriend in a predominantly black area of London who was routinely ignored by black men who tried to chat her up.
Kakistan is kakistan.
Plenty of other places in the world to go mate. Come to Australia, at my pub we’ll call you a poof then buy you a beer And if you want political discussion, well, you haven’t heard anything until you’ve heard a bunch of drunk Aussies debate the issues of the day. They’ll argue you under the table.
– Come to Australia, at my pub we’ll call you a poof then buy you a beer
Crikey Bruce, that’s rules one, three, five and seven broken right there. It’s no wonder you’re in such a shit state of affairs.
Rule 1
https://youtu.be/L220PFMkunI
Mr Worstall said: “Johnny F gets to be Johnny F without the imposition of our laws and rules? Or is the statement that they must agree with the rules we say they must, but not with some others? As in, you know, when they were colonies? ”
It’s odd isn’t it that here is a representative of the political Left (or what passes for it these days) that took an active and major part in calling for decolonisation whining that the countries that have now been decolonised don’t think the way that Western leftists do.
When you visit a place you have to bear in mind that it is not ‘home’ and the rules are different. For example I’m a non-Orthodox Jewish type and would never ever dream of insisting that my wife wears a wig and a hat and dresses with arms, chest and legs covered like an Amish woman. However when in Israel on our Honeymoon she chose to dress for the Western Wall (where we’d gone to pray for a baby and to thank the Eternal One for our marriage) in a manner that would not offend or perturb the ‘black hat’ Jews who have a lot of influence in that part of Jerusalem.
When you travel you can’t expect everything to be the same as it is where you come from. Every culture and every nation is different and it’s easy to cause offence and possibly worse and stuff that is considered as normal, such as putting your hand or similar bags in a supermarket trolley, is a faux pas as I found in parts of Germany.
If Owen Jones thinks that he can swan around and act as he would in North London in some countries then he’s very mistaken.
As the meme goes, “What’s Timmy gonna do”*
https://www.reddit.com/r/HolUp/comments/qby4e5/timmy_did_what/
* – Not referring to our host in this instance.
Prior to decriminalisation and particularly in Victorian and Edwardian times, wasn’t it commonplace for British homos to go abroad on holiday or to live because other Countries were more relaxed about it, even some Muslim Countries?
Sure, as late as the 1950’s and early 1960’s folks like Joe Orton, his partner Kenneth Halliwell and Kenneth Williams went to Morocco cruising for sex with young boys and labelled the place the ‘Costa del Sodomy’.
I doubt the Moroccan tourist board will be mentioning that in their brochures.
My unscientific impression, having worked in several Arab and Muslim countries, is that the proportion of homosexuals is higher than in the West. Perhaps it’s a forbidden fruit thing, but only partly because it applies even in places that are quite relaxed about sex.
So Owen just needs to be discreet. (I know, that’s asking a lot from him.)
Philip. I once had some dealings with a group of LGB Muslims and they told me that there is a gay subculture in Islamic nations, even in places like Saudi. Also some of them said that in some Islamic countries there are gays who are not so much ‘out’ but discreetly known about and they end up doing some vital and respectful work such as laying out the dead etc. Such people might be barely tolerated but the are to a certain extent tolerated because they do communally important work like this.
In that town in Iraq where those poor military police were murdered, a lot of the male population were busted when the army raided a mass gay orgy in an old factory.
I do not understand. When these people come over here we’re told that all cultures are equal, none better than others – except our own, which is the worst – and we should accept the shootings and rape as part of the cultural vibrancy.
At the same time these same people are decrying the stuff these immigrants do in their countries of origin – over there it’s bad to do, but here it’s fine?
philip:
My unscientific impression, having worked in several Arab and Muslim countries, is that the proportion of homosexuals is higher than in the West.
Maybe it’s because Muslim men are allowed to have up to four wives? The top-tier men literally get the girls, resulting in a large population of men ‘left-over’ who will never have a girlfriend or get married. So, as in prison or the Navy, needs must…
jgh: 150 years ago, they’d have been out in India civilizing the natives. They can moan all they like about imperialism today, but different times mean different mores. The desire for moral one-upmanship and peer-status never changes though, and the easy road to it in the 19th Century was bringing news of the great white Queen across the water to the savages.
Oh, sure, they all like to think they’d have been Marx, or at least Dickens (perhaps in wee Owen’s case, Wilde), but they don’t have the stones. Those guys were outliers who, for good or ill, kicked away the crabs trying to pull them back into the bucket. But, as I said, the easy road…
Ottokring,
The version I heard, while in MND(SE) HQ in 2005 – that had happened, with dates, the year before – was that Majar Al-Kabir in Maysan Province was a hotspot for trouble (and was indeed where the six RMP were killed, while a multiple of paratroops also had to shoot their way out of becoming a ‘Black Hawk Down’ siege situation) and efforts were being made to investigate the more militant troublemakers.
Some discreet surveillance noticed that, every Thursday night, numbers of menfolk converged on an old warehouse outside town, so an operation was set up to observe, confirm, and if necessary do a smash’n’grab rounding up the Bad Guys.
So, a discreet perimeter was set up well out of sight, Broadsword helicopter surveillance was covering the area to ensure nobody wandered across the vehicles of tooled-up troops ready to encircle and detain, and SF close-target recce went forward all sneaky-like to get observation inside the building.
And as you can guess… instead of firebrand preachers urging mass murder, bomb-makers teaching how to make IEDs, or other insurgent wrongness… it was Man-Love Thursday in there.
In our case we just backed out and left them to it, but I’d expect that local LEOs/Army would have crashed the place: if only for the lucrative “money or sex, or I arrest you and shame you” opportunities (and since it was eighteen years ago, they probably did since then).
But then it was in similar vein to the Australian OP in al-Muthanna province that was compromised… when their position had been so well-camouflaged that a goatherder initially didn’t notice it, and was cheerfully enjoying one of his goat’s favours until he heard the Australians unable to contain their laughter…
Sam: Read up on the Jamaica Morant Bay Rebellion. Dickens was one of the British committee calling for the blackfellas to be firmly told where their place was.
“putting your hand or similar bags in a supermarket trolley, is a faux pas as I found in parts of Germany”
Well, well; every day’s a schoolday.
Is this for “hygiene” reasons, or just because there’s a rule against it?
In some of those parts of the world public displays of affection are not allowed regardless of the sex of the 2 people involved
Thank you Jason
Especially the last paragraph 🙂
BniC
Yeah General Franco didn’t approve of such things !
Yes, thank you Jason.
I’d never heard of that one about the Aussies in al-Muthanna.
Don’t go there then. Brighton’s lovely this time of year.
False.
Brighton is never lovely.
Suggesting Owen be discrete would be going against the grain. It would be anathema to him. He’s the sort of chap who isn’t happy unless he’s screaming his views and opinions from the roof tops.
Trouble is, in some places, screaming them from the roof tops is followed, in short order, by a rapid descent groundwards.
” teeming with adventure and generating a lifetime of soppy memories.”
If you want to go that way….
Adventure aplenty.
Soppy memories….
Maybe as an eulogy….
Then again.. The Gay and Great are fully welcome to do a Tour of the World.
Saves us expenditure on Lions, while re-enforcing the merits of Darwinism.
Now if only we could dis-enfranchise them from the Darwin Awards by pointing out the Rules for Qualification…
As a white Jew, there are parts of Brooklyn I can’t even go to, lol. Join the club, assholes!
Could certain contributors look up “discreet” and “discrete” in a dictionary?
Go to San Fransisco. It’s been the Gay Mecca for half a century. Tolerance out the whazoo. No one will judge you.
And then you can spend a relaxing two weeks stepping in shit and dodging crazies.
Peter MacFarlane said: “Is this for “hygiene” reasons, or just because there’s a rule against it?”
I’ve absolutely no idea. All I know is that when my ex-GF and myself were walking around a German supermarket near the Dutch border we were constantly ‘tutted’ at and pointed at by Germans who gestured at the bag resting in the child seat of the trolley. We only found out what the problem was when we found an English speaking German who told us about the bag issue. This was quite a few years ago now and things might have changed as the Germans have a whole lot more to worry about these days what with their self inflicted energy security disaster and their less than peaceful Mohammedan imports. The Germans in this town didn’t seem too bothered about the nutters chucking fireworks around in the street outside though. Mind you the Germans are very well,’German’ and have different ways of thinking to others and very different rules and regs.