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Escape from Gay Island

Last weekend at an impossibly crowded Manhattan gay night club — the Britney loud, the heat unbearable, but the boys beautiful — I remarked to a friend that it felt like being in a concentration camp. I was reminded of … Read More

By Jamie Kirchick / November 12, 2007

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I was reminded of this astute (if, admittedly, distasteful) comparison upon reading about the solution Uganda's Sheikh Ramathan Shaban Mubajje suggests for his country's homosexual problem:

He told journalists at a press conference on Friday that he had recommended to the country's President at a meeting last week that all gay people should be sent into exile on an island in Lake Victoria.

"If they die there then we shall have no more homosexuals in the country," he added.

The good Sheikh's views on the existence of homosexuals is actually quite intriguing: he seems to think that if society gets rid of the current crop of fags, then homosexuality itself as a feature of the human condition will suddenly disappear. This reading on the origins of homosexuality seems to posit that homosexuality is akin to a disease like leprosy — something one cannot choose to have, but once isolated from the larger community, will disappear. But how does homosexuality afflict a community in the first place? If it's like a disease, it must have a root? Is not, therefore, a corollary to this contention the condition that homosexuality is a feature of human nature, and will continue to exist despite the Ugandan government's best efforts to exile whatever gays they can lay their hands on? The Sheikh's solution appears paradoxical. Unless, of course, he believes that homosexuality is a "choice" (the product of dreaded Western influences), in which case the gay island will need to be constantly replenished with those "choosing the gay lifestyle." But this would seem to negate his stated belief that the death of present-day homosexuals would end the problem of gay existence itself.

Anyways, his idea is not as novel as it may seem. After all, Fire Island and Ibiza are pretty much gay islands, though they're seasonal tourist destinations, not latter-day Birobidjans.

In Uganda, homosexuality is "against the order of nature" and the country's Muslims (at 12%) rival their pious Christian fellow-travelers in their support for state-sanctioned oppression of gay people.

In response to the gay rights press conference Muslim youth belonging to the Tabliq movement announced they plan to set up 'Anti-Gay Squads' to fight homosexuality.

Wonderful: Youth gangs to wander the streets looking for gays to bash. Just what a dirt-poor, culturally backwards African country needs its young people doing.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan rants on about the supposed "Christianists," explicitly equating American evangelicals to Islamists. Please point me to the major, recognized American Christian leader (Mujabbe is the leader of Uganda's Muslims) calling for the literal extinction by force of homosexuals. And show me the gangs of Christian thugs organized by church leaders to locate gays and maim them. The worst we have in the States are the "ex-gay" summer camps, which awful as they are (and which should probably be shut down by the government as a form of organized child abuse), are a night at SBNY compared to what the Islamists want to do to me. Muslim clerics of this sort are a dime a dozen and constantly try to one-up each other in their fanatical calls for the genocide of gay people.