by DAVID GOLDMAN

Last fall, Faisal Alam did something that's become fairly commonplace for gay Americans. He organized a conference for "LGBTQ" members of his religious faith.

But the fact that Alam is a Muslim and the nearly 40 people who attended worship in the Islamic tradition made this convention anything but routine. To weed out homophobes who might seek to invade it, Alam interviewed each interested person for an hour over the phone. He revealed the meeting's Boston location to selected participants only a week before it occurred.

"If most Muslims hear about us, they think we're a joke," Alam said. Skeptical gays who first hear of Alam's group often worry that it might be a fundamentalist front intent on outing gay Muslims. "One woman thought the fundamentalists were going to line us up and shoot us," he said.

That picture isn't too far from the reality gays face is some parts of the Muslim world. In Afghanistan, authorities still carry out the traditional death sentence in which, after a sham trial, a wall is collapsed on top of those convicted of sodomy. (In an especially ironic touch, victims who remain alive after 30 minutes beneath the crushing rubble are given medical attention.) And yet this is the same Islamic world, observers say, where strict segregation of the sexes routinely leads men and women alike to turn to their own gender for love and physical companionship--the same Islamic world from which Western gay men sometimes return with head-spinning stories of wild homosexual adventures.

Ponder this seemingly irreconcilable contradiction, and you begin to glimpse the enormous spiritual conflict with which gay Muslims wrestle every day.

A modest beginning

"We are about 200 years behind Christianity in terms of progress on gay issues," said Alam, 22, the founder and director of the Al-Fatiha Foundation ("for LGBTQ Muslims"). He is a field associate with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C. "Islamic attitudes toward homosexuality are barbaric. That's the only way to put it. It's an issue that has not even begun to be discussed," Alam said. "It's still viewed as a Western disease that infiltrates Muslim minds and societies.

"If you tell most straight Muslims you are gay and Muslim, they will tell you it's an oxymoron--you cannot be both. The first thing most gay Muslims say when they hear of another gay Muslim is, 'My God, I thought I was the only one.'"

A desire to combat that withering isolation led Alam, in November 1997, to launch an Internet listserv for gay and lesbian Muslims. That list has now grown to include 250 people in 20 countries.

In October, Al-Fatiha (which means "The Opening") organized the First International LGBT Muslims Retreat. The event drew fewer than 40 participants--yet these present were from the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. A second gathering, held Memorial Day weekend in New York City, attracted 60 people. Alam plans to hold another nternational meeting in London in June 2000.

In addition to the Al-Fatiha web-site, Alam maintains the "Queer Muslims Home Page" on the Internet. Yahoo also features a "queer Muslim" club. But Alam said he rarely looks at the posted comments, which are often "letter after letter of filth" written by Muslims enraged at the idea of granting any vestige of respect to homosexuality.

Indeed, a quick glance at another web resource reveals the level of resistance that confronts gay Muslims. "Queer Jihad"--itself, a gay-friendly site--includes a link to a site offering "Islam Questions and Answers." A search here for "homosexuality" unleashes a torrent of hate and judgment. Muslims are encouraged to feel "total abhorrence towards this shameful act" which Islam "emphatically forbids." A catalog of horrors is reserved for the guilty, including, "Allah rained upon them a storm of stones of baked clay prepared specifically for them and destroyed them completely."

Given this condemnation and the fact that some half-dozen Islamic countries continue to impose the death penalty for sodomy, why do gay people remain in the Islamic faith? Their answers are as complex as the ancient religion itself.

Traditional ties

"For each of us, it is a struggle," Alam said when asked why he stays a Muslim. "Probably 90 to 99 percent of gay Muslims who have accepted their sexuality leave the faith. They don't see a chance for a reconciliation. They are two identities of your life that are exclusive.

"Islam has been such an important part of my life since I was a teenager that I cannot see myself living without it. But I am the last person on earth to say I have reconciled it with my sexuality," Alam said. Though he still considers himself a Muslim, Alam is not now religiously observant.

Part of the dilemma that confronts gay Muslims stems from the unique character of the faith. Islam is now considered the most rapidly growing religion in the United States and in the world. As a monotheistic system born in the Middle East and allied with the prophet Abraham, it shares much in common with Christianity and Judaism. And yet the faith struggles for acceptance and understanding--Islam was omitted completely from the Human Rights Campaign's just-published "Mixed BlessingsOrganized Religion and Gay and Lesbian Americans in 1998."

As it is practiced in most societies, Islam is a non-hierarchical religion. Abdullahi An-Na'im, a law professor at Emory University and a Muslim, noted that Sunni (as opposed to the more radical Shiite) Muslims make up the majority of Islamic faithful. "Sunni doctrine is strongly against centralized institutionalized religious authority," he said.

So while Islamic scholars may make various pronouncements, there is neither a Muslim Vatican nor a Muslim pope to hand down decrees to the common folk. As a result, Islam is "much more decentralized, more informal, and for that reason much more democratic," An-Na'im said.

However, An-Na'im affirmed that public policy and private behavior regarding homosexuality differ widely. "My personal opinion is that it's much more tolerated than one would expect. Given the conservative nature of Islamic societies, one would expect more intolerance than exists in practice."

In fact, An-Na'im--who said he knows no gay Muslims--speculated that opening a dialogue on the matter might make things worse for those in the sexual minority. "If it were talked about a lot, it would become an issue. The fact that it is not debated allows the informal practice to continue more than if it were debated," he said.

Some of what goes on--not only privately but also in publicin these officially anti-gay Islamic societies seems wild by Western standards. Alam, a native of Pakistan, said that forced segregation of the sexes leads to the impression that "sexuality is something very fluid. It's much easier for two guys to express their love toward one another and be accepted than it is for a male and a female." He recalled seeing men holding hands and kissing in public, all the while followed by wives completely veiled in the Islamic tradition.

Sexual roles, too, play an important part. In Arab culture, Alam said, the male who performs as the "top" is not considered gay. Teens and younger guys take the active role in sex with older men. Alam said that old accounts exist of British soldiers on duty in the Arab world who wrote home ecstatic about the willingness of Arab men to play the "top" role. "If you haven't been fucked by another guy by the age of 14, it's very unusual in Saudi Arabia," said Alam. Even so, those caught at it risk being thrown into quicksand. And the situation is "100 times worse" for lesbians, Alam said, owing to the oppressed status of women in most Islamic states. Alam's site includes a link to a site put up by Lazeeza, an Arab lesbian group, but the new site at present contains mainly links to other sites.

"What you have are very close and frequently sexual male-male relationships, but very often these are in a bisexual context," said John Voll, professor of Islamic history and associate director of the Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. "One of the things that is clearly visible and has been historically is that in a society that adopts a very strong and rigid social segregation of the sexes, you have among both women and men a very high level of same-sex sexual and love relationships," Voll said. "This is deeply rooted in society."

The role of scripture

Like the Old Testament, the Muslim Koran includes the story of Lot (Lut in the Koran) who narrowly escaped destruction when God destroyed the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. But Voll said a larger issue forms the basis of Muslim homophobia.

"Probably in terms of informed Muslim argument, it would be that the Koran really does make a clear distinction between males and females, and anything crossing that line would be un-Koranic," Voll said.

Another issue is the individual's relationship to the faith. "Most Christians have internalized that the Bible is the word of man, inspired by God. That is a significant difference. Most Muslims might have intellectually accepted that position, but it is not part of their internal faith," Voll said.

Many Muslims adhere to a fundamentalist view of the Koran. "It means that you have a real fear of doing anything, saying anything or thinking anything that would imply that the Koran is not exactly as it has traditionally appeared."

Lacking a central hierarchy that could order the "repeal" of anti-gay policies, the avenue left to gay and lesbian Muslims is to appeal to Islamic scholars.

"Is our religion that is homophobic, or have our cultural attitudes done this to us?" Alam asked. Indeed, this question is much the same one asked and answered by Christian writers like Dr. Daniel Helminiak, former Catholic priest and author of "What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality."

Alam said Al-Fatiha has identified several "progressive and open-minded" Islamic scholars in the hope of encouraging them to break with hard-liners. "If one of two of them will say something on this issue, we will have gotten somewhere." But such an attitudinal sea-change would surely come slowly.

Coping in a hostile world

In the meantime, Muslims like Alam are left coping with an often hostile environment. Alam said that even though orthodox Muslims reject Rev. Louis Farrakhan, leader of the radical Nation of Islam, he is still the best-known Muslim to many Americans, leading to widespread mistrust of Islamic people. Alam, who said he used to be "very religious," now feels "ostracized" from the larger Muslim community. He was asked to leave a Muslim youth group when it was learned he was gay. When his parents found out, they cut off his school money.

And Alam is not blind to the danger he faces--even in the United States. "A lot of people have asked me, 'Are you afraid for your life? Are you afraid of being killed?' I'm not worried, but I do take precautions," he said. He described himself as "very out--but not in the Muslim community."

Though he has long anticipated a backlash from conservative Muslims, Alam continues to organize. Al-Fatiha now has chapters in New York City and Toronto, and Alam has plans to launch groups in Atlanta, Vancouver, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Detroit and Chicago. "We're asking for tolerance," Alam said. "It's a far cry from asking for gay marriages. That issue will not happen until hundreds of years from now."

Al-Fatiha is an international organization dedicated to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims & their friends!

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