Open secrets
In Pakistan, sex between men is strictly forbidden by law and religion. But even in the most conservative regions, it’s also embedded in the society.
By Miranda Kennedy | July 11, 2004
LAHORE – The first time Aziz, a lean, dark-haired 20-year-old in this bustling cultural capital, had sex with a man, he was a pretty, illiterate boy of 16. A family friend took him to his house, put on a Pakistani-made soft-porn video, and raped him. Now, says Aziz (who gives only his first name), he is “addicted” to sex with men, so he hangs around Lahore’s red-light districts, getting paid a few rupees for sex. At night, he goes home to his parents and prays to Allah to forgive him.
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In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, homosexuality is not only illegal, it is a crime punishable by whipping, imprisonment, or even death. But across all classes and social groups, men have sex with men. In villages throughout the country, young boys are often forcibly “taken” by older men, starting a cycle of abuse and revenge that social activists and observers say is the common pattern of homosexual sex in Pakistan. Often these boys move to the cities and become prostitutes. Most people know it happens – from the police to the wives of the men involved.
In some areas, homosexual sex is even tacitly accepted – though still officially illegal – as long as it doesn’t threaten traditional marriage. In the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), which shares many tribal and cultural links with neighboring Afghanistan, the ethnic Pashtun men who dominate the region are renowned for taking young boys as lovers. No one has been executed for sodomy in Pakistan’s recent history, but across the border in Afghanistan, the Taliban (who are also overwhelmingly Pashtun) executed three men for sodomy in 1998 by bulldozing a brick wall over them, burying two of them alive. (The third survived, which meant, according to Taliban law, that he was innocent, so he was taken to a hospital for treatment.)
Among Pakistan’s urban elite, there is a growing community of men who identify as gay, some of whom even come out to their friends. Men meet on Internet bulletin boards, or at private pool parties with lots of rented boys and heavy security. But they are a tiny, terrified minority, living in cities such as Lahore, Karachi, or Islamabad, where the cultural elite has carved out a niche for itself. In a country where alcohol is forbidden except to Christians, dancing is banned, and the Koran guides many aspects of criminal law, such men rarely step outside of their protected world. (Because women in Pakistan inhabit, for the most part, a strictly private realm, it is difficult to say with any certainty how common lesbian relationships may be.)
Homosexuals in Pakistan walk a fine line between harsh legal and cultural prohibition and some form of unspoken social acceptance. “Islamic tradition frowns on but acknowledges male-male sex, and this plays a role in permitting clandestine sex so long as it is not allowed to interfere with family life, which is of paramount importance,” the San Francisco-based sociologist Stephen O. Murray writes in “Sociolegal Control of Homosexuality: A Multi-Nation Comparison,” a collection of scholarly essays published in 1997. Further complicating matters, the most common form of male homosexuality in Pakistan, according to Murray, is pederasty, where an older man entices or coerces (sometimes forcibly) a younger boy into sex
