Why Some Gay Men Fear for Their Life

April 12 -- On that fateful May 2001 night when a ghastly watershed in official Egyptian homophobia was set, Maher Sabry missed the party on the Queen Boat, a floating disco moored on the Nile.

The Egyptian writer and theater director was too tired to drag himself to the popular Cairo gay hangout that night, so he stayed home.

It was a decision that was to change the course of his life.

In a crackdown that gripped the country and provoked widespread international condemnation, Egyptian security officials swooped down on the party and arrested about three dozen men. More than 50 of them were then put on high-profile trials on charges ranging from "devil worshipping" to "habitual debauchery."

While international rights groups dismissed the trials as "spurious," the local media published the names and photographs of several detainees — a personally crushing disclosure in a conservative society.

In Crawford, Texas, today, President Bush is hosting Hosni Mubarak at his Prairie Chapel Ranch during the Egyptian president's visit to the United States. A presidential invitation to the ranch, as diplomats well know, is an honor reserved for only a privileged few world leaders.

But while the Egyptian strongman is viewed as a vital Arab ally in the war on terror and the efforts to secure peace in the Middle East, international groups have widely condemned Mubarak's domestic human rights track record.

In the days following the Queen Boat sting, Egypt's dreaded security apparatus carried out a chilling anti-gay crackdown, infiltrating Internet chat rooms in cyber stings, setting up suspects, rounding them up, and then proceeding to interrogate, intimidate and often torture them.

Sabry may have missed the boat, but he was in imminent danger of getting caught in the subsequent witch hunt. Nearly five years after he wrote and directed the landmark Arabic play, The Harem — Egypt's first play on the subject of homosexuality — the 36-year-old writer is a refugee in the United States.

The transformation from a gutsy artist exploring new cultural terrain in his homeland to a refugee fleeing persecution due to his sexual orientation has been a painful journey. And today, Sabry sounds like a man crushed.

"The Queen Boat was a shock," he says softly, sadly, from his new home in exile in San Francisco. "We had hopes that Cairo was becoming more tolerant, we had hopes for more rights, more acceptance. But this was a strike that killed any hope, any movement, any dream."