Haven’t seen much if any mention of this, other than at Cursor.org: The Scotsman ran a story late last week about how there’s an “alarming new threat” in the the war on terrorism: gay Afghan farmers! Apparently British marines involved in the recent “Operation Condor” mission were propositioned by “swarms” of men wearing make-up.
[…] “We were pretty shocked,” Marine Fletcher said. “We discovered from the Afghan soldiers we had with us that a lot of men in this country have the same philosophy as ancient Greeks: ‘a woman for babies, a man for pleasure’.”
It’s a weird story, and sounds like something you’d find over at The Onion. I could have done without the “heavens to betsy” shocked tone. I mean really, considering how poorly the British presence in Afghanistan has gone, I think those boys should loosen up and get their toenails painted. And I can’t resist the thought that perhaps those “gay farmers” were merely attempting to give a little back in kind for what the “coalition” has done to Afghanistan.
Am I the only one who finds the Scotsman’s interpretation implausible? I know that men in many Middle Eastern cultures kiss, hold hands and caress one another without overt sexual connotations. I have seen photos of Afghan men (Taliban soldiers, in fact), wearing traditional kohl or eyeliner without any implication of cross-dressing. I’m doubtful that same-sex dancing or even (gasp) toenail polish necessarily proves homosexuality in an Afghan context. Were the British marines imposing their own sexual stereotypes on the scene? Were their Afghan Army interpreters pulling their legs? I’d have to hear more to believe this story.
That puts an interesting light on a claim Jeffrey Goldberg published in the New Yorker last year, and repeated in a Fresh Air interview. He says that when he visited a radical Muslim madrasa in Pakistan in 2000, the young male students propositioned him and his photographer for sex. He ascribes this to the prison-like atmosphere (“when you take 2800 young men and keep them entirely away from women…”) and the students’ exaggerated ideas of American licentiousness (“they expected that in the anything-goes American climate, I’d be ready to have sex [with them]”). But was he, too, misinterpreting signals from his interviewees?
Maybe only the students and the Afghan farmers know for sure. A Google search for gay Afghanistan turns up an astonishing 85,000 hits. Among them is this thoughtful piece about an “indigenous and hidden homosexual tradition” in Afghanistan. But nothing in the article seems to correspond to a rural gay scene with cross-dressing and gay discos, as evoked by the Scotsman article.
Prentiss,
your comments hit the nail exactly on the head of why this article struck me as something that might’ve been lifted from The Onion. Certainly whomever wrote it was not in Afghanistan and relied solely on the marines’ interpretation (and likely exaggeration) of whatever they experienced.