Gay Wedding in Cairo

Check out this blog, which describes the (probably false-) reporting on a gay wedding that supposedly occurred at one of the Hilton hotels in Cairo in August (incidentally: kind of a hole).

Then check out THIS article by an Egyptian journalist about the wedding. Seeing the way this article is written is much, much more important than discovering whether or not two Kuwaiti men got married in Cairo (I suspect they did not).*

It's past 6AM and I need to finally go to sleep, but I feel like this article brilliantly (I should say more accurately: "effectively") demonstrates a lot of the things that make it extremely difficult to live here, and I'm not talking just about homophobia. Look for the immensely problematic language -- the insistence, for example, upon putting "males" in quotes (the obvious implication being that gay men who have sex with men are not sex male), the need to call emphatically upon imagery of the "eternal" Nile, "simple" Egyptian "workers," and Cairo's Islamic character (it's walls INDEED vibrating with the call to prayer)...you don't need me to walk you through it -- the article is an obvious mess. The thing is: I can handle offensive beliefs, but what I cannot handle is erroneous logic...there is no platform for discussion, here, because this most fundamental tool for discussion (logical reasoning) is so severely lacking (note that I'm not trying to make some statement about the "oriental mind" or something, but rather point out the ways in which people allow themselves to so lazily employ terms and arguments that wouldn’t stand up to even the most simple logical interrogation).

*In addition to the ridiculous implications related to Cairo, Islam, homosexuality, and women, you should also note the distinctly anti-Gulfi tone of the article. I think this was just a chance to slam two of the favourite punching-bags of the Middle East: gays and the decadence of the Gulfis (both concepts being often inter-linked, and both, of course, very much related to piety).

VC