A Return to Baghdad

BY MICHAEL T. LUONGO -

What Changed and What Didn’t Since 2007

What had only been lines on a map, forbidden and dangerous, were places that had come alive, places that I could now see with my own eyes.

I was in Baghdad in mid-2009 for my second time. The post-surge trip introduced me to places I had only heard of in stories — what then seemed like fables — told to me by Ali Hili, the director of Iraqi LGBT, a London-based human rights group working with gay men in Iraq, and by other gay men I had met in Baghdad two years earlier.

Ali told of walking the reedy banks of the Tigris in Baghdad, a place he said, where gay men laughed, cruised, and picnicked together in the days before the US invasion changed everything. The recent horrors reported out of this city, for gays and ordinary citizens alike, made it hard to believe such a time ever existed.

That is until I was able to see it with my own eyes, in a Baghdad inching, hoping to be post-war. It was a completely different city from the one I discovered in my first visit in 2007, when the insurgent uprising meant that simply being on the street was an invitation to instant death.

This visit would be full of stark contrasts. It was as if there were two different Baghdads — at least. I would interview men from Sadr City, one of the poorest, most dangerous districts, who talked about friends killed by sprays of bullets in drive-by shootings, their gathering places firebombed, their names posted on lists, others raped and disappeared by militia-infested police squadrons at checkpoints.

I would see a hospital where the bodies of gay men had been dumped, their anuses closed shut from a heavy glue used to torture them. I would visit a safe house, chatting with gay men and transgender Iraqis who hid for safety, yet at the same time were welcoming and life-affirming, teaching me gay Arabic slang and joking about sex with gay Saddam-look-alikes.

And I would meet other men from different parts of Baghdad, young, fashionable, masculine, with far less to fear, who did in fact cruise along the colorful banks of the Tigris on Abu Nuwaz Street and spend their evenings at fashionable cafés popular among gays in West Baghdad, flirting with men they met through the website Manjam as they sat back in comfortable seats visible from the street.

I would grow to fall in love with a newly vibrant Baghdad. Not that I didn’t still have much to fear as a visiting gay journalist — from conversations that could be tapped to entrapment, spies, and the bullets of panicked Iraqi soldiers. In the end, there was much that didn’t fully makes sense — for me, for the local gay men, and for anyone living in this ancient cradle of civilization, a place somewhere between war and peace.

This four-part series does not aim to duplicate the work of reporters who, over the past four years, exposed the targeted killings of Iraqi gay men. My goal instead is to draw on my experiences in the spaces where gay men socialize, where they have been killed and where they hide, to demystify what remains an abstraction for Western audiences.

The stories of the men in Baghdad, told from their own spaces, rather than through second-hand accounts or from overseas, humanizes them, makes them more than victims in a war alternately labeled a fight for freedom, a clash of religious ideologies and, by many, a grave mistake by the United States that has thrown occupied Iraq into chaos.

Some of the earliest writing — dating to the spring of 2006 — on the killings of Iraqi gay men was done by Doug Ireland in Gay City News, based on interviews with his overseas contacts. Baghdad-based correspondents for CNN, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and other publications in time followed suit.

I reported on the killings for Gay City News and the Gay Times of London after my 2007 visit to Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, though my movement in the capital was then severely limited. The most recent in-depth piece was the emotive October 2009 New York magazine article by Matt McAllester, also largely based on research conducted outside of Iraq.

This series, to the best of my knowledge, represents the first reporting by a gay journalist working for gay media based on in-person research within Baghdad’s gay spaces. I spent six weeks in Iraq from July through September 2009, three of them in Baghdad, a period of time that coincided with the release of a Human Rights Watch report on the killings of gay men. My preliminary research began in April 2009, as gay murders began their spike and my contacts in Baghdad reached out to me, in response to which I wrote an Advocate editorial on the killings.

Before and after my trip, continuing until May of this year, I conducted interviews in the US, Europe, and several Middle Eastern countries, including Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, where I interviewed gay Iraqi refugees and was able to corroborate information gathered in Baghdad — though not everything I learned can be independently verified.

Despite the length of this series, the four installments represent only a fraction of the information garnered. My work would have been impossible without the assistance of Hili, Scott Long of Human Rights Watch, journalists based in Baghdad, staff members of numerous non-governmental organizations around the world, and government officials from Iraq, the US, and other nations. A number of ordinary Iraqi citizens provided critical help, often at great personal risk to their safety; for that reason, many cannot be acknowledged by name.

As of this writing, the massive wave of gay murders in Baghdad seen in 2009 seems to have subsided. However, as Iraq continues to struggle to form a government in the wake of its March 2010 elections, and as the US military and diplomatic presence recedes into the background, the country has faced renewed instability. New attacks are beginning to be reported, including some on gay safe houses in Baghdad and in Karbala, a religious city south of the capital. These might be harbingers of what is to come again, for gay men and for many other groups in Iraq.


A Concert at the Al-Wiya Club: A Reminder of Pre-War Baghdad

One of the best examples of Baghdad’s change that I witnessed came when I went to see friends perform at a classical music concert at the Al-Wiya, a country club off Firdos Square, the plaza where the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled early in the war. The club and the surroundings, like much of Baghdad, have the feel of an apocalyptic Los Angeles. It’s just a few blocks from the banks of the Tigris, where the skyline at water’s edge is punctuated by high-rises pock-marked with weatherworn missile blasts. Dust-caked palm trees with tattered fronds line the approach to the club’s parking lot, where instead of valets, men cautiously approach each car, inspecting it for bombs.

To step into the club is to enter a world vastly different from the Baghdad of news reports, or even that seen on the city’s streets, where women still remain relatively invisible. The club’s auditorium had an audience of a few hundred, virtually all of them locals. A friend, Amanda (anyone identified by first name only in this series has been given a pseudonym, to protect their privacy and safety), and I were among the few foreigners, but in this the elite crowd, there was no shortage of English speakers.

That night, and on many others during my trip, I experienced the reawakening cosmopolitan fabric of Baghdad, where it was possible to imagine how gay people — while remaining closeted — had blended in during the stable years prior to the US invasion. At the concert, alongside husbands and wives and their children were a few gentlemen of a certain age — polished, well dressed, sitting in what appeared to be couples; they would not have seemed out of place at a symphony hall in New York, Paris, or London.

More striking, however, was the revealing way the young women in the audience were dressed. A local Iraqi journalist who helped with this article remarked, “Women with their hair uncovered, in short skirts, listening to music, this is the Baghdad we remember.”

When the concert ended, we walked through the worn wooden French doors to the country club’s gardens to dine on long tables, an abandoned pool staring at us, a reminder of the ravages of the war. Still, the company sparkled — elegant men in tuxedos, young women in fashionable dresses, glasses clinking with Chivas Regal on ice.

Just off the ground loomed the Palestine Meridien Hotel with its funky honeycomb façade. Inside there was the club where Ali Hili once DJ’d, at a time when it was Baghdad’s most popular gay space. As I sat in the Al-Wiya gardens, I realized there was probably a time when a night out in Baghdad would have begun as this one had — a gay man surrounded by co-workers, family, and friends, who likely knew nothing of his sexual orientation. When they had all at last left, his own clandestine night could begin, meeting gay friends to dance the night away in the towering building next door.

Under the Ramadan Moon

The relative ease of moving through a safer Baghdad allowed me to discover more clues to pre-war gay life. My trip coincided with Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the day, but eat an extravagant dinner, called an Iftar, after sunset, with family and friends. Amanda and I decided to treat our driver Wissam to a dinner of mazgoof, a traditional Iraqi meal of filleted carp roasted over an open fire at a restaurant on the banks of the Tigris, along Abu Nuwaz Street, a thoroughfare named for an ancient poet who wrote of love between men.

We sat in the restaurant’s garden, at the edge of a promenade that meandered through overgrown bushes, an area I knew was a notorious cruising ground. I later spent another evening on Abu Nuwaz with several young gay men, and also learned that male prostitution had begun to make a comeback here.

On this first visit, though, it was the area’s beauty that struck me. The crescent moon signaling Ramadan’s beginning hung high in the clear sky. In the distance, the lights of Abu Nuwaz snaked along to the blocky apartment complexes, now slums, which once housed the elite Republican Guard, Saddam’s protectors. The dome of the Republican Palace, later used for a time as the US Embassy, was silhouetted across the Tigris. Helicopters buzzed overhead.

Curiosity got the most of me. My Italian looks allow me to pass as Arabic in the Middle East as long as I don’t talk. Amanda knew why I wanted to explore the walkways in the bushes, while Wissam thought my interest in reporting on gay life was just a small part of my journalistic interests. Both feared for my safety as I set out to investigate, and I promised to text Amanda every few minutes.

The waterfront promenade was a vivid, spectacular carnival. Young men and women held hands along the paths, the women demurely dressed in full black abayas, giggling about their secret encounters as they suddenly dropped from view into the darkness of the bushes. The laughter of children pulled me along toward the broad parks in front of the riverfront hotels, with their rainbow lights, popcorn vendors, picnic tables, and rides.

The walkways, however, were not without risks — young men, wobbly and angry from drinking, shouted at me and tried to block my path as I walked along. In the midst of the lights, sounds, and people, there were a few men alone on the pathways, some staring openly, others peeking from behind bushes.

One short young man, with tight white pants and a pink shirt, walked along hyper-kinetically, slipping showily in and out of the bushes and looking back as I stopped to text Amanda. I would later find out that had it not been Ramadan, a time when sin is supposed to be in check, there would have been many more men cruising the pathways.

A Meeting Two Years in the Making

The video played in an endless loop on the cell phone. Its ominous unseen ending, the murder of a gay man, was all the more chilling as loud Islamic chanting, part of a Ramadan program, played loudly in the background of the hotel restaurant where we sat. It’s an unsettling contrast — the killings of gay men in the guise of religion versus Ramadan and the real Islam.

“I don’t want to think of it, because he is my friend,” Hassan, the man across from me, said as he stared down at the cell phone edging off the table’s surface. Sadness grew on his face as he continued, “He is barbershop, he is working with me, like me.”

This was my second try at meeting Hassan, a point man in Baghdad for Iraqi LGBT, the group Hili runs out of London. I had hoped to meet him in 2007, but the overwhelming violence and fear at the time kept him from the hotel where we were now meeting, one destroyed in a bombing a few months after the interview.

Hassan, 41, was a hairdresser, until the stigma that linked the profession to being gay made it too dangerous, forcing him to give up his work. His hair, dyed a deep black, is hidden under a baseball cap when he is in public. In the hotel lobby, he was visibly shaking, at times too nervous to speak, both of us conscious of the others around us.

He told me of “the danger for us at the checkpoints,” pulling on his hair, long for a man in Baghdad. “How can I look something like this, I leave the hair, and also I have something for relaxing for tension, when I go outside,” he explained. Even having taken pills to stay calm, he fidgeted and jerked his head as sporadic outbursts sparked from him in English and Arabic.

Hassan insisted that I write down the name of the man in the video, Ahmed Sadoun Saleh, wanting to make sure he did not remain simply another gay statistic, someone who anonymously turns up dead. In the video, Ahmed does the same as Hassan, hiding his hair under a baseball cap. Ahmed was transgender, Hassan told me, using a term considered pejorative here in the US — “she-male” — but one that points up his view and that of transgenders I met in Iraq that their identity remains tied to their biological male roots. Ahmed is thin, constantly smiling, trying to project confidence as he is interrogated at a checkpoint, one of hundreds throughout Baghdad.

But the video has an oddly playful quality too, with the soldiers laughing and Ahmed smiling. Hassan translated the conversation, saying, “He says, ‘Why do you do this to me, why do you want to do something like this to me?’” The soldiers at the checkpoint grab Ahmed, pulling small breasts out of his shirt and biting them as they laugh into the camera. Ahmed tries to maintain a sense of dignity, pleading cautiously, showing no apparent fear. Hassan imitated the forced smile he makes, something he explained gays try to do at checkpoints to diffuse confrontations that can end up deadly.

As they fondle Ahmed in the video, the guards laugh, saying, according to Hassan’s translation, “I want to see your breasts. I want to see your ass. I want to see you. I want to come to you. Come to us in the night with us. We want to make love with you.” Ahmed agrees to meet the guards later in the hopes of escaping for now, saying, “I only want to leave.” The guards force him to show his ID to the camera, so they will know where to find him.

Hassan became sad, exasperated: “They are commandos, they are from the Ministry of Interior. Why do they do something like this? Why do they take his breasts and do something like that?”

It’s common for gay men to be detained at checkpoints, forced to pay bribes or agree to sexual encounters in trailers meant for interrogations of suspected terrorists. Once the victimized men become well known to the guards, they can turn up dead weeks later.

This was Ahmed’s fate a week after the video was made: “They put silicone in his ass,” Hassan said, his hand up, imitating an injection. “They killed him with stones, because of religion, and they put silicone in his ass. It’s a mark to say he should not do anything with his ass.” Hassan pulled his hat off, let his hair flop down, and wiped his sweaty brow. He became emotional, his hands flailing until he caught himself and looked over to make sure the restaurant workers were not watching. He tapped his fingers on the table and said Ahmed’s full name again, making sure it was in my notebook.

Then, Hassan fell silent, staring down as the video continued.

Video helped fuel the spike in killings in the first place. Hassan told me that at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, the post-surge safety of Baghdad meant an increase in gay parties. Partygoers and promoters used video as a way to advertise, to let others know of the fun they were having. But this had deadly consequences as they began to fall into the wrong hands.

Many months after I left Baghdad, I met gay Iraqi refugees in another Arab country who had been rescued by Human Rights Watch. One told me that a party promoter was pimping some of the young men, using videos as advertising “so people could see who was coming to the parties” and pick someone they wanted to have sex with. “He didn’t know what would happen with the videos,” this man told me, as they went viral and spread throughout the country.

Later, when the Human Rights Watch refugees began their flight from Iraq, the videos still haunted them at hotels in the north of the country. One man told me he was accused by staff of being “one of the men in the party videos” when he checked in. He himself knew many of the men in the videos when I showed him one I had gotten a copy of in Baghdad. It was a friend’s birthday celebration, he explained, one that started the killings.

If videos gave some gay men away, the neighborhoods where they gathered also posed threats for them. Many of the parties and new cafés popular with gay men were in areas bordering Sadr City, the heart of the religious militia movement, such as along Palestine Street. The presence of openly gay men visible in these areas was seen as an affront — and an easy target. With their tight Western party clothes, they stood out in the conservative district. Attacks on gay men were among the ways that the religious insurgency, discredited and in disarray during the US military surge, could regain legitimacy.

Hassan told me the parties were used by the militia groups, namely the Mahdi Army led by Muqtada Al-Sadr, as damning evidence of “the new Iraqi, the new generation,” which was “soft” and in the thrall of unseemly American influence. “Since the Americans come, they make all these things upside down,” he said, explaining the argument made by the militias, adding, “We see the new Iraqi, because the Americans make the new government. I told you when I walk on the streets, they say, ‘Look at the new Iraqis,’ and they laugh about us, they say there are puppies,” a derogatory Iraqi term for young gay men.

Hassan told me that the owner of one gay Palestine Street café was severely beaten by the militias, using frozen soda cans. “They broke the bones,” beating him nearly to the point of death, sparing him only because he was Shia. The reprieve, Hassan explained, was “mercy for the gays.” He used to go to the café, but since the attack, he said, “When they saw us and they know that we are gay, you know what they say, he don’t want us, to go outside. He make the prices more than the prices.” Tables, Hassan and his friends are told, are reserved for others. He said he experiences the same treatment at the ShiSha Café in Karada, even though it is one of Baghdad’s best-known nightspots popular among gays. The ShiSha’s owner would “make a cross of us,” Hassan said, a cutting sign on the neck, “because they are afraid because they make a cross to his cafeteria if they see gays,” referring to militia spies hunting for gay men. When I visited the ShiSha Café, I found few stereotypically gay men there, part of the way the venue protects itself. (I would customarily not identify the ShiSha Café by name, but USA Today and New York magazine have already used its name and New York ran a photo of it.)

Hassan protects himself and his friends by carrying two phones. If one is tapped, he’ll have an alternate, and when he leaves the house, he carries the phone without stored numbers. If he is kidnapped, the militias cannot use his captured phone to entrap his friends.

Hassan told me that a doctor at one hospital helps gay men fortunate enough to survive attacks. “They don’t ask you about anything that happens to you,” he explained, even of those who have survived the brutal torture of having their anuses glued shut before being given laxatives designed to rip their insides apart. The hospital, however, is also the place where victims, gay or otherwise, are simply dumped. In many of Baghdad’s hospitals, the doctors taking care of victims of violence are shadowed by militia members intent on spying on the survivors and their families.

“Nearly 17, 15,” of his friends have been killed since the war began, Hassan told me, many of whom he had known for years. His words were peppered with “habibi,” darling, and “en-shallah,” God willing, as he lamented, saying, “They love me, and I love them, because I am old, and because I saw them when they were with me, when they were in school and in the discotheque and in the park.”

Hassan started crying, and then he hit himself in the head, as if to reset his emotions. I worried he was having a breakdown. “I am okay,” he assured me, adding, “You know, I live only off the memory from before, before it was very nice. We meet with the friends, in any places if you want.”

He said the militias and Muqtada al-Sadr “want us to come back to Islam. They don’t want us to have hairdressing, entertainment, anything like that. He want us to come back to Mohammed,” the era when Islam was established, before modernity.

I asked Hassan what he wants, what he would like American readers to know about the situation. He told me he and his gay friends “love each other, we see each other, we are afraid for each other… Here in Iraq, we want only them to leave us alone. They know very well we don’t do anything to him. We don’t do anything to him [Muqtada al-Sadr], only to leave us alone, we want safety. Before we have discotheque, before we have bar gay, in Saddam, before. Now we don’t want anything, we want only the safety.”

Still, Hassan told me, leaving Iraq would be difficult at his age. “Baghdad is my home,” he said. “Iraq is my country, I can’t live anywhere else. I am old. A new life is only for the young.”

Gay Death and Gay Life

Even if the killings stop, what lies beyond remains in doubt

There were bullet holes across his chest when I found him in the room.

They were merely a decoration on his black T-shirt, tight against his broad shoulders and puffy biceps. He reminded me of a “Sopranos” character, with the fake bullet holes surrounding the word Mafia. He was only 25, but his gelled hair was thinning, a soul patch adorning a scruffy face.

He seemed afraid to look directly at me, tight-gripped hands wringing, his nervousness compounded by the time he was left alone to think as he awaited my tardy arrival. An improvised explosive device, or IED, was found near my hotel, and I was nearly an hour late.

We met in the Baghdad office of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, a coalition run by Yanar Mohammed, who has been active in helping persecuted gays. She was overseas during my visit, but her staff helped me interview men, some of whom lived in Sadr City, a poor, largely Shia Muslim area of Baghdad at the heart of the insurgency, and named for militia leader Muqtada Al-Sadr’s father. Many on her staff lived there and had gay friends.

Mohammed (anyone identified by first name only in this series has been given a pseudonym, to protect their privacy and safety), the young man I was meeting, had just secured a visa that would get him out of the country within a week of our interview.

An organization that mostly serves women, many widowed, who have suffered horrifically since the US invasion, OWFI has an open door policy to anyone needing assistance. With my limited knowledge of Arabic, I noticed that the staff used the polite term “mithlee” for homosexual, rather than more offensive labels common among Iraqis.

I met with men on the Sadr City death lists, the postings placed throughout this part of Baghdad by Muqtada Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Mohammed was on the list for many reasons, not just his sexuality; the calculus that determines death sentences in Baghdad is jumbled and terrifyingly far-reaching.

My interviews at the women’s center were difficult not only because many men were reluctant to fully explain why they faced persecution, but also because of the OWFI’s office layout. There was no privacy as people watched interviews; little children sometimes played in the room, climbing into my lap as I tried to make sense of a cacophony of languages — English, Arabic, and Kurdish.

A loud air-cooler made hearing difficult, but the power repeatedly blacked out, easing the burden until the Badhdad heat became overwhelming. Still, the welcoming staff made the OWFI one of my favorite places in Baghdad.

Mohammed told me he loves Americans, showing me a cell phone picture of himself with American soldiers. It’s part of what sparked having his name put on the death list. As I tried to dig deeper, he paused, sighed, and told me, “because I drank and stayed out late” and because of his tight Western clothes that showed off the body he built up at a gym eventually shut by the militias as un-Islamic.

Members of the Mahdi Army “phoned me and threatened me,” he said, his words translated by others in the room. Though he never told me why, the militia killed his brother, and his panicked family sent him into hiding. Mohammed told me the name of his brother’s killer, someone the women’s group is familiar with. On another visit, I watched a video of the killer.

I came to learn that in Baghdad people know the murderers in their midst, but can do nothing to stop them. Because of the numerous grounds on which murder victims are singled out, it is quite possible that the number of gay killings has been undercounted, with families saying other motivations were at play.

Mohammed was almost kidnapped during a Mahdi Army visit to his house. “Many of us are on the lists,” he told me of his group of friends, and “there are many guys who look like Mahdi Army, and they come to my home. They ask who is this guy, why does he visit you,” about one of his friends. “Twelve friends are on the list, twelve names, and that people must kill me. I had one friend who had a car come up beside him, and they shot him and they killed him. Another friend was kidnapped, and we do not know what has happened. Still we have not heard from him. I leave my neighborhood, because it is dangerous.”

He looked down again at his twisted hands.

Mohammed was brought to the women’s center by a neighborhood friend, Nadeem, who told me the full story of the murdered friend, killed in front of a Sadr City café popular with gay men, strafed by machine gun fire by men on motorcycles. Nadeem pulled up the cuffs of his jeans and showed me markings on his legs, made, he said, by the gravel forced up by the motorcycle wheels. Sensing that I was skeptical, he pointed at his eyes and shouted, “I saw it with my own eyes!” again and again.

“All the people in the coffee shop went back to their house,” Nadeem continued. “All the people, they go, afraid of the Mahdi Army, afraid for all the people. They are doing with the army and the government, because all the people in the government are with the Islamic party.” Sometime after midnight the day of the machine gun attack, he said, the café, by then empty, was firebombed.

Nadeem, who was often at the women’s center, was in his early 20s, skinny, and with his spiky hair, funky clothes, and flamboyant manner, he could have been a member of an Iraqi boyband. Sometimes, he wore tight jeans, and at others, unbelted loose pants that rode low enough to show off his underwear. His wrists were always adorned with gold chains. That’s fashion to die for in Sadr City, and he said gay neighbors who dressed like that had been murdered.

He pantomimed how he got ready to leave his house, showing how he would wear plain clothing on the streets and then, after arriving at the center, change into fashionable Western clothes and gel his hair, washing it out before returning home.

Nadeem never specifically said he was gay, but spoke freely of his gay friends and of frequenting Sadr City cafés popular with gays. He explained that the firebombed café was rebuilt, but gay men are afraid to return. “I will visit and take pictures on my phone,” he said. It was a simple café, with one window and a single chair on the street, so small, “it don’t have a name [and] is a secret,” except to “every gay in Tharwa City,” Nadeem said, using another name for Sadr City, which is also known as Revolution City, so called because it was constructed after the1950s overthrow of the monarchy.

“Because it is a small area and three million people,” the café’s secret did not last. The density of Sadr City, with its conservative, insular norms, makes it a dangerous place for gays and others who embrace Western ways, even as more secular parts of Baghdad have opened their arms to nightlife.

Ali, who works at the women’s center, told me, “Sadr City is very small, the culture, everyone knows what someone else is doing. People ask, ‘What is this friend doing? Is this friend gay or not?’” Looking at Mohammed, he added that the Mahdi Army has “spies with the youth to know who is gay.”

Even as he recounted his death threats and his brother’s murder, Mohammed remained largely reserved. But at the mention of the Mahdi Army spies, he suddenly became more emotional. “Many eyes, many neighbors,” he told me, adding, “They see everything, they see every home and now they go inside the government. They have a good license to kill. They kill the puppies because they are gay, because of the occasions, because of the parties from the new year.”

He made a starling assertion, one echoed by Hassan, the Iraqi LGBT contact, but labeled impossible by officials I interviewed from foreign governments — that the murders are now spearheaded by the Sawa, also known as the Awakening, the US-backed Sunni militia that has challenged the power of both the Shia Mahdi Army and the Sunni Al-Queda. “It was the Mahdi Army” doing the killings, Mohammed said, “but now the new cover is the Sawa. They are now the ones killing.”

With chaotic side conversations going on around me, I almost didn’t hear his comment that “they call my mother and told her I was to be killed because I was gay.” His family, he said, wants “their son to be outside Iraq. To be free, to feel free.”

As the interview concluded, Mohammed told me, “Nobody in my country cares about my case, so I leave.” It came out as a polite but sad plea. As he stood up, I noticed how brawny he is and remarked that if I were to run into him, I would be afraid he could beat me up. Muscles, he said, are no protection from bullets. If the killers see “me face to face, they shoot me with a gun and they run.”

When I told Yanar in an email about the difficulty in getting Mohammed and others to talk directly about being gay, she responded, “Men in our culture would never admit to being gay… In six years of work in OWFI, only two Iraqi men told me — in private — that they are gay.”

She added that Iraqi male bisexuality has a familiar paradox: “They would not admit that both guys who have sex are equally gay. It is a macho culture which respects the male part of the intercourse.” That attitude seems to fuel the rapes gay men suffer at security checkpoints.

A beautiful black woman from the Sudan working at OWFI, herself a war refugee who reminded me of the model Iman, told me about a male prostitute who had shown up asking for shelter. Veiled and trying to hide her emotions, she couldn’t help tearing up as she described how he was covered in blood, desperate for his life.

“He was taken by four men and raped and beaten,” in the neighborhood of Bedowin, which is known for male and female prostitution. She washed the blood off him, bandaged him, and the group sheltered him for a few days. After that, he returned to Bedowin. “Why would he go back there?” she said.

The staff also told me of male sexual slavery and the harvesting of body parts. One orphaned boy of 15 was adopted by a government official. “He secluded him for prostitution,” sometimes “dressing him up as a girl, and everybody came to him for sex. He was obliged to work as a slave” an OWFI staffer told me, emphasizing that the official was from Babylon, a city that I found many Iraqis equate with homosexuality. Its modern name is Hilla, with residents described as Hili. Ali Hili of Iraqi LGBT purposely incorporates this reference to Babylon in the name he created to protect his true identity; it is a signifier gay Iraqis will understand.

The boy’s fate could have proved more dire down the road. “He wants to sell him, his heart and other parts of the body, his kidney,” the staffer told me of the government official’s intentions.” No one would care if another gay prostitute wound up dead, he said.

But the adopted youth, along with two others forced into sexual slavery, escaped. “One of them was killed, and one of them, he used a sham passport and he fled to Syria,” I was told.

Several months later, I visited Syria and learned from locals that about 9,000 gay Iraqi male refugees are living in Damascus, half with their families who were escaping Iraq’s violence, the rest who went there alone solely to escape gay persecution. That figure, however, represents a tiny percentage of the nearly one million Iraqi refugees who have resettled there.

A Very Different View

He came into the hotel restaurant, calm and confident. He was 24, handsome with a generous smile, short, curly brown hair, and a toned body. His clothing was simple, nothing fashionable. The youngest of a large professional family, he worked in the computer field and was applying to graduate schools in the US and Europe.

Haider and I met on Manjam, the gay cruising website, a tool I have used before to connect with gay Iraqi men, though I make clear my intentions are journalistic. Haider was very interested in meeting, worried about what was happening to gay men in Baghdad. “I’ll help you and support you as much as I can,” he said in one message, telling me later, “I hope to establish a website and a small office that can help the gays to face their problems and make their lives more better.”

His worries did not seem personal; he described himself as masculine and said he fell under the radar of suspicion about his sexuality. “The gays are safer than the she-males,” he said, using a term for transgenders I heard often in Baghdad. “I don’t like to talk about them because they are killed every day at the checkpoints. Every day we must pass through eight checkpoints, so when they see someone with woman’s face and color, and they will cut him and punish him and maybe have sex with him.”

Effeminate gay men and transgender Iraqis suffer similar problems, forced into sexual encounters in trucks or trailers at the checkpoints. Usually, “it is oral sex,” Haider explained, sometimes at gunpoint. If a gay man “is afraid and having long hair and clothes that are not normal, then he will be having many problems at the checkpoint.” Haider told me of a friend who fought back, making it “difficult to rape him.”

But for Haider, “nothing” happens at the checkpoint. The guards assume he is straight, and he passes without incident. His family has no suspicions about his orientation. In fact, since our meeting took place during Ramadan, when sexual activity is supposed to be curtailed, his brother was worried he was clandestinely meeting a girl the day I interviewed him. Haider explained that his closeness with his family is the major source of his conflict about being gay.

“I hope someday to face my father and my mother and tell them that I am gay and cannot get married, but I find it now very difficult,” he said. He fears getting older, that one day he might essentially have to give up being gay. Wistfully, he asked me, “They tell me when you are gay and you get married, you leave the gay community. Is that true?”

It was Manjam that helped him enter the community, when he turned 18. His close friends are much like him — good-looking, masculine men from large, educated families who enjoy nightlife. One of Haider’s friends came out to his parents, but the others also worry that as they age they will marry to appease their families. Two of his friends married, but are now divorced.

Haider and his friends have traveled to meet gay men in other parts of the country — he mentioned gay parties in Erbil, the capital of Kurdish Iraq, and even in the religious city of Karbala. His goal is to create coming-out resources to strengthen the community, yet he knew nothing of the Iraqi LGBT safe houses, nor was he aware of the Human Rights Watch Report on gay killings in Iraq.

He talked about friendship networks sheltering individual gay men, but nothing more formal than that. One of the men his friends helped rescue was a gay Syrian with long hair. “He stayed with our friends for two weeks, to be safe,” Haider said, adding, “When I see him out at the party, I ask him, ‘How did you come here to the party? It is so dangerous.’”

Haider told me of his first love, a man he never met in person, who was a translator for the Iraqi Army. In 2004, they chatted for several months online. He was on his way to Baghdad for their first meeting when “his car was destroyed by a bomb.” Haider looked away, his face sad with nostalgia. “I miss him,” Haider said, adding that every Iraqi loved someone who died in the war.

But war has also brought Haider closer to gay America. He told me I was not the first gay journalist to contact him on Manjam, mentioning a reporter based in San Francisco. “But it is difficult, he is far from us,” he explained.

Haider also befriended a gay US soldier guarding his neighborhood police station, the playful taunting by other American personnel the clue to the GI’s orientation. “I immediately told him, and he told me,” Haider said of their mutual coming out.

Haider has seen “Brokeback Mountain” on a pirated DVD, and was moved by “Touch of Pink,” a Canadian-British film about a gay Muslim man pressured to marry. He also mentioned “Shelter” and “Dante’s Cove” from HereTV, which he finds on the Internet, a form of communication forbidden under Saddam. I later sent him DVDs through my friend Amanda, who moved to Baghdad after we traveled there.

Haider promised to bring me to the ShiSha Café, the idea of showing off Baghdad nightlife animating him. The capital city, he said, is a place “to be just for yourself, to be having fun, to be going out. Baghdad is beautiful in the night.”

Glamour, Politics & Death

“Where are you?” was the surprising text. I stared down at the small screen in my lap and quickly clicked out, “In the parking lot.” I was early. Never before had I met an Iraqi concerned about time. I knew this interview would be different.

My appointment was with Maysoon Al-Damluji, a member of the Iraqi Parliament from the secular Iraqi National List, or Iraqiya, headed by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. The party won the most seats in the March 2010 elections, though Iraq’s new government has still not formed. Al-Damluji is a liberal, secular politician, a leading women’s rights activist, insistent that Ramadan was not stopping her from working — or eating.

I tried contacting other government officials, including Human Rights Minister Wijdan Michael Salim, about the gay killings, but Al-Damluji is the only one I could arrange a meeting with. It’s hard to know if it was Ramadan, the controversial topic, or faulty Iraqi communication that kept me from garnering more interviews.

Al-Damluji sat on the sofa across from me with her hands demurely crossed, breaking them apart to draw on thin Davidoff cigarettes. She struck me as elegant and worldly, and I imagine she was stunning when she was young.

In the room with us, behind me at a desk, was another female politician. Her thick black hair was in a Bettie Page, and she wore a gleaming white, structured Dior-esque suit, giving a sense of 1940s Arab glamour, a circular mural behind her like a glowing halo. This woman spoke no English, but smiled and nodded frequently, and I would turn to her to include her in the conversation.

Several men attended to them, one serving us tiny cups of thick Turkish coffee, spiced with cardamom. Another man, tall, in a dark suit, self-effacingly stepped into the office with a limp. When he entered, I held a gasp — his face looked as if it had been smashed in half and crudely put back together.

Al-Damluji and I have many friends in common, based on her former role as deputy minister of Culture. Despite her liberalism, what she said about LGBT rights will likely shock Westerners; gays, she believes, should return to the closet.

“Homosexuality exists in every society,” she said. “It is not a new thing, but in this part of the world homosexuals have had to remain discreet, and I understand that they have their own communities. However, as I said, they are discreet and they don’t come out. What has happened recently is that for some reason, they have come out and forming nightclubs and such likes. I don’t think the time is ripe for this kind of action now. I am concerned about the safety of all human beings. I mean I am sorry that it happens, but I do hope that they remain discreet until things become different.”

When I asked her opinion of the murders, she said, “I am against killing, full stop,” and looked at me as if it were a strange question. When I reminded her that plenty of Iraqis, even those with political power, favor the killings, we both laughed nervously. “Well not me, not me, I am sorry,” she said.

Al-Damluji was the first Iraqi I met who had seen the Human Rights Watch report covered in Arabic media.

A few decades ago, she explained, “there were a number of well known poets and people who were in the front line who were also known as homosexuals. There was more toleration in the ’40s — maybe ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s — than there is now. This is not only in Iraq, this is throughout the Arab world.” After naming some of the openly gay artists from the past, she said, “This kind of thing is not tolerated these days, and as I say I do care about the safety of all, including homosexuals. I really hope they remain discreet.”

When I told her I was curious how she was even comfortable talking about the issue, Al-Damluji responded, “I don’t feel comfortable. But the reason I do talk about it, not feeling comfortable, is that one has to give another image of Iraqis. Not everyone is a madman with an axe, trying to kill a homosexual.”

Gay issues, she said, have created a stigma regarding all human rights work in Iraq. “Every time we speak about human rights, we are accused of supporting homosexuality,” she said. “It has to be separated, otherwise we lose all human rights.”

Prior to my trip, in May 2009, I met with Jared Polis, the openly gay Democratic congressman from Colorado, who was just back from his own visit to Baghdad. He told me he spoke with Iraqi politicians about the gay murders, but contacts from foreign governments working in Baghdad’s Green Zone told me they’re not confident that American politicians can make much headway in seriously addressing the issue with their Iraqi counterparts.

“Iraqis that I bring it up with visibly get uncomfortable,” one foreign government worker investigating the killings told me. “They just want to get through that part.” He tries to impress on them that the issue “got a lot of publicity… in the Western press,” and that “it does reflect badly on Iraq, even though it is a small portion of the people.”

The Human Rights Watch report said that hundreds of gay men have been the victims of targeted killings; the London-based Iraqi LGBT pegs the number at nearly 700 in recent years. My visit to Iraq came at a time when the bombing of a government ministry killed more than 100 people in a single day.

“Why are you focused on this issue?’” my foreign government source told me Iraqi politicians say, when “we have a number of problems in Iraq. This affects a very small minority of individuals… You’re focusing all your efforts, a great deal of your efforts, on this issue, when we have bombs going off, we have two million widows.”

The foreign government worker understands this perspective, but nonetheless remains shaken by the gay murders. “What caught our attention was the gruesomeness of those kinds of attacks,” he told me, revulsion crossing his face, making it hard for him to speak. Though he emphasized that you never “get desensitized to violence,” he explained, “When a car bomb goes off and people die, you read about it and you kind of move on. When you read a report about individuals taping shut the anus of someone and watching them — ” The man stopped, as if he couldn’t describe the things he has been told, before saying, “ — that kind of has, viscerally, an impact on you.”

But the same man told me Gay City News readers shouldn’t expect miracles in Iraq. Foreign governments don’t have much influence, even if we might think the opposite looking in from afar. “I think that the gay press,” he told me, and “even the mainstream press, to a certain extent, and the centers for policy expect us to be able to march into the prime minister’s office and say this is bad, you’ve got to stop the violence, where as in reality, in our view, that would have a pretty negative backlash and actually hurt the people that we are trying to protect. So we’ve taken a much more low-key and under-the-radar approach in talking to the key officials.”

I heard this repeated throughout Iraq. I interviewed an American woman working in the north of Iraq who contributed to the Human Rights Watch report. She said she was shocked by staff working for her on that research who, after collecting information for the report, made comments indicating that they were repulsed by learning of gay life in Iraq.

One Iraqi, who gave me extensive help and knows many closeted men through his work in the cultural sphere, wanted to make clear his opinion on gays. “I must be frank with you,” he said. “I am not in favor of open homosexuality in my country, but I don’t think people should be killed for who they are. You must approach it from a human rights perspective, not gay rights. It is not that way in this country.”

He also offered a warning: “There are many in government who would want you killed for looking at this. They will tell you they are against the killings to your face, but then they would say something different. And remember in your own country, if politicians could have people killed for being gay, they would.”

He mentioned the police bashings in a Fort Worth gay bar that happened around the time of my Iraq trip, and he also joked about former Senator Larry Craig’s problems at the Minneapolis airport. “Gay Iraqi politicians are the worst on the topic,” he said, breaking into laughter when I asked for names of some of them to interview.

In Maysoon Al-Damluji’s office, we discussed a mutual friend, a ballet dancer seeking asylum in the US after the murder of many of her friends and family. Cultural figures like politicians are often the targets of killings. “There was a time when I used to get threats almost every single day,” Al-Damluji said. “But you learn to become fatalistic when you live in this part of the world.”

I told her I take the same view about being a visiting journalist in Baghdad.

“Well I know,” she said, “coming to Iraq and talking about homosexuality.”

Nervous laughter hit both of us as we said goodbye.

Double Lives Gays Lead in Baghdad

Even when public spaces not lethal, freedom, privacy are relative terms

Hassan mistakenly thought I had a sexual fetish about Saddam Hussein. I made an offhand comment about Iraqi policemen’s 1970s San Francisco clone moustaches — the kind sported by the dictator. Hassan held one hand up high, clenched in a tight fist, suggesting the dead ruler’s iron will, and shouted, “I find you man with a moustache, and big and hairy like Saddam, but gay, so you could have sex with him.”

I didn’t expect humor to be mixed into a mission that could be the death of us. Hassan is a point man in Baghdad for Iraqi LGBT, a London-based human rights group working with gay men in Iraq, and he, several other men, and I were heading to a safe house run by the group. They told me that as of late summer 2009, I was the only foreign journalist allowed to visit; they trusted me because I’m gay, and my dark, Mediterranean looks would allow me to travel to the house without arousing too much curiosity in the neighborhood.

Ground rules were set for my visit. Wissam, my driver, wasn’t allowed to bring me to the house; instead, I had to meet Hassan and his friends alone, in an area of Baghdad unfamiliar to me. It took some time to convince Wissam — who was very protective of me but not fully aware of my plans — to leave me on my own on a Baghdad street. Getting out of the car, I had to look as though I were Iraqi, so I carried my notebook and camera in a plastic bag — backpacks immediately singling someone out as a foreigner.

Wissam didn’t drive away until I assured him I had spotted Hassan. He was a block away, but as I walked toward him, I froze. He was surrounded by police, but after some initial panic on my part, I got the impression he knew them. Still, the contrast between Hassan and the policemen was frighteningly apparent. The masculine, uniformed men had sun-roughened skin, bushy eyebrows, and moustaches, while Hassan was effeminate, with smooth, whitened skin, neatly plucked eyebrows, and long, oddly dark dyed hair — something no Iraqi man his age would sport — still visible even under a baseball cap. I immediately saw how intimidating a police checkpoint could be for him.

Hassan didn’t say a word, but motioned toward a small car. I hopped in and he followed, waving goodbye to the policemen on the corner. Though we were close to the safe house, he said there was no need to worry about these policemen. He had earlier told me he has bribed officers to prevent them from raiding the safe houses, and I wondered if these were among them.

At the safe house, we stepped from the car in silence, and I followed the group to a staircase leading to the top floor of a two-family home. I could see a man staring up at us, the neighbor from below. As we entered, Hassan whispered that someone had called about me, but didn’t go into any more detail. I later found out he received several calls about his meetings with me, communications he felt suggested his life could be in danger.

The living room had a couch against a wall and a glass coffee table covered with lace and pink plastic flowers. More floral knick-knacks were scattered on a glass étagère. Though the curtains were drawn, the house was surprisingly bright. An empty area, where a dining table could go, was in front of a large patio window covered by blinds, a small kitchen to the side. A doorway one step up led to a brown-tiled bathroom near the apartment’s two bedrooms. One of those rooms, stuffed with furniture, had a queen-size bed covered by a peach satin quilt, with stuffed animals scattered over the pillows. The walls were adorned with photos of one of the men I’d met in the car. I later noticed another picture of him on the living room wall and assumed it was his or his parents’ house, though the rent was paid by Hassan from Iraqi LGBT funds.

I saw nothing out of the ordinary until I entered the other bedroom, a windowless space with a pungent stale odor. The room had no furniture except for piles of foam mattresses covered with cheap acrylic velvet cloth in red floral patterns — the kind that are common in Arabic countries. Hassan told me that eight to ten men might crowd into this space at any given time. “If there is safety, we don’t care,” he said of the less than pleasant surroundings. One of several safe houses run by Iraqi LGBT, this one had opened in January of 2009, just over seven months before. If the neighbors become “nervous,” Hassan explained, they’d be forced to move.

The men staying at the house were a mixed bunch, representative of the country as a whole. One was Christian, another Shia, two were Sunni, and one a Kurd. Sami, the Christian (anyone identified by first name only in this series has been given a pseudonym, to protect their privacy and safety), spoke the most English and, along with Hassan, did most of the talking. I was fascinated, though, by Laith, a quiet, delicate young man whose photos appeared throughout the house. He had shoulder-length hair, pulled back, and piercing blue eyes from colored contacts. When he took off the white jean jacket he’d been wearing, I could see he was dressed in a tight white tank top and had small breasts, like those of a pubescent girl, poking out from his tiny frame.

Hassan told me Laith was a “ladyboy” undergoing hormone therapy. Despite the scarcities of wartime, Hassan said, hormones are readily available. Opening his shirt and exposing his own breasts, Hassan said he too was taking hormones. Suddenly, I understood his babyface and smooth skin that looks like it never needs a shave. Here within the safe house Hassan revealed to me things he and Laith hid in public out of fear for their lives.

“When we dress,” Hassan told me, “we wear a jacket, or when we go to buy something, we come back quickly because of the checkpoints.” He talked about a friend who had been killed just a few days before in the Karada district, the generally liberal neighborhood that is home to the ShiSha Café, popular among gay men. “They get him from his car, and there is another one who comes to the car and kills him,” he said. He reminded me, as well, of a video he had earlier shown me of Ahmed Sadoun Saleh, a transgender friend killed at a checkpoint, who tried to hide his physique under a jacket, his hair, like Hassan’s, tucked under a baseball cap. In the heat of the summer, such clothing stands out, making the winter an easier time for transgenders to escape detection on the streets.

Laith brought out photo albums, showing me friends who had moved to Lebanon and Syria. One wears makeup and dresses openly on the streets of Damascus. “You can wear makeup and it is okay,” he said. “No one gives them a second look. In Syria, it is normal. Here it is danger.” Two of the men in the safe house mentioned visiting Lebanon and Syria, where they have boyfriends. Syria has recently seen its own crackdown on gays, but to the Iraqi men still at home, these countries seem like open societies, reminding them of Baghdad before the war. Lebanon is in particular, they said, the gay Arab promised land.

As we looked through the photos, the conversations went off chaotically in different tangents, a mix of Arabic and English. Mohammed, the Shia man, was 35 and unmarried, thin and shy, and had experienced trouble with his family. Hassan told me Mohammed had a beauty shop, with three or four gay employees, until the war. His employees were kidnapped, and his family sent him away, forcing him to study the Koran. “His family was too religious,” Hassan explained, “so he make a telephone and he come to be together with us.”

Sami, the Christian, was 28, stocky and hairy — a self-described “gay bear.” Always smiling, his English came across in a manner that reminded me of Kermit the Frog. Sami’s family blamed his being gay on the fact he was the only boy growing up with five sisters. His parents, Hassan explained, told Sami, “You want to see your life, then go,” though he has returned on and off to live with the family.

Sami told me he was almost arrested, caught in the act with a boyfriend. “I was in a bad situation in a car, and when the police came they shined the lights and caught us,” he said. “But they only arrested my boyfriend. He was Sunni, and the guards were Shia. They were from the Badr Army,” a powerful militia group that has infiltrated the police. He said that the guards told him, “You’re Christian, go, but my friend was Sunni, and one year in jail. I have seen him in jail.”

Other friends, Sami explained, have experienced worse fates. One made a date on the Manjam website and was never heard from again. Other friends who went to the ShiSha Café “were rounded up by militias, who came in to take a look.” Despite his friend’s disappearance, he said, “We are meeting on Manjam, it is safer.” Often, however, the connections remain only virtual, given the dangers of going out to meet men.

Still, Sami displayed a playful sense of humor, teaching me gay Iraqi slang, like how to describe myself as a fat, hairy gay bear.

I noticed the men in the safe house called each other “habibti,” the Arabic term for “my darling” or “my love,” but one meant for a woman. Man to man, the usual term is “habibi.” The men taught me other Arabic greetings, but I was unaware they were switching genders on me. A few days later, I tried out the phrases during a joint Iraqi-U.S. army training embed, and the puzzled Iraqi soldiers told me I was talking to them as I should to a woman.

Sami showed me pictures of a new boyfriend who was Iraqi, but so blond he looked German. He also told me he had dated an American living in Baghdad, but offered no details on how they met. As the men joked about photos Sami showed me of his boyfriends over the years, the feeling of fear in the house momentarily slipped away.

Still, the men worried about me recording our conversation and taking photos — I assured them I was not capturing their faces. They also warned of the dangers of me staying too long and having neighbors hear English. Asked what they want the West to know about gay life in Baghdad, Sami, no longer seeming carefree, said, “We want to go out of here, Europe, America. We want to go anywhere, but not Iraq, it is dangerous.” Hassan said, “Here there is always tension, always fear. Sometimes, we want to die.”

A Night on the Town in Baghdad

Karada at night was full of people, a mix of locals in dishdashas and other groups of men in fashionable Western clothing. Haider, a gay man with a masculine demeanor, was taking me to meet his friends at the ShiSha Café, and we walked in the street, avoiding the crowded sidewalks so we could speak English unheard by other pedestrians.

The ShiSha Café is on the second floor of a shopping complex. The police checkpoint nearby made me apprehensive, but Haider paid it no attention, whispering simply that I must be completely silent as we climbed the metal staircase. I had agreed not to take notes or use the small camera I brought along. Haider explained it was important that people not know I was a foreigner, especially a journalist. Ordinarily, I would not publish the café’s name, but both New York magazine and USA Today have done so already.

The place is garish, full of glass, metal, vinyl, red and black tables, and environmentally-friendly corkscrew light bulbs sticking out from multi-colored ceiling fixtures. I don’t think rainbows were the intended look, but that’s what came to mind. The café was divided in half — one side dark with tightly packed tables; the other, brighter and spacious, with booths. Haider’s friends were seated before the huge plate glass windows looking out onto the street, partially obscured by advertising posters. Music videos playing on a wall-mounted flat screen TV, amplified by speakers, were so loud the window rattled in its metal frame. It was annoying, but it masked my English conversation with Haider, who reminded me not to sit like an American, with my legs crossed and the bottom of my shoe facing out. “This is not the Arabic way,” he said.

Settling in, I realized the ShiSha Café is the Iraqi pages of Manjam brought to life. I was able to see the men whose faces were usually masked in their photos. Finally, eyes were visible above their smiles and chin lines; their physiques were no longer truncated bodies.

One man in particular struck me, sitting alone at a table across from us, and I asked Haider if he knew him from the website. “I don’t know him,” he responded, adding, “Everybody here has a profile on Manjam, but they don’t always put their picture. It could have family, could be married, but still on Manjam.”

Had I seen most of these men on the street, I would not have assumed they were gay — in fact, not all were. Hassan told me that men like him — effeminate or transgender — are refused entry, part of the café’s survival strategy. Both Haider and Hassan said the Mahdi Army used to visit to scan the crowds. I told Haider what a shock the openness at the ShiSha was after having met men hiding in a safe house and others on Sadr City death lists.

Men moved from table to table, chatting with each other; a few of them knew Haider and his friends and shouted greetings. I asked Haider if there were rules about how to meet men at the café. It varies, he explained: “Maybe he is shy, and he want to meet another day… and someone, maybe if he feels naughty, maybe he goes out to table and talks with him.” Haider doesn’t like making dates with men he meets at the café. “Maybe he don’t know anything about me, because this room, it is open and we are inside,” he said. He prefers to first find someone on Manjam and then meet him in person. The ShiSha, he said, is too conspicuous a place.

Peering through the window at the Karada streets, I recalled hearing about a Sadr City café popular with gay men that was machine-gunned and firebombed. “Does this place worry about being bombed?,” I asked. Haider deadpanned, “Maybe, but every place in Baghdad can be a target, can be bombed, but people still come.” He seemed far more concerned about the drama of running into ex-boyfriends there, and called out to the waiter to take our order. The waiter was 18 or 19 and lived in Haider’s neighborhood. Though not gay himself, he knew Haider was. He brought us flavored shisha, also known as nargila, the water pipe from which the café gets its name. We ordered fruit cocktails as well; when I asked if they were alcoholic, Haider replied, “No, we are Muslim.”

Haider’s three friends didn’t speak much English, so he would occasionally break off with me to gossip with them about the men at the café, sometimes mentioning details from their Manjam profiles. The oldest and most fashionable of his friends, Ahmed, was 30, tall, and wore clingy white cotton pants and a white semi-transparent gauzy shirt, unbuttoned halfway down, that revealed a toned, neatly clipped chest. He was quite striking, with a closely cropped beard, shorn hair, a prominent nose, and wide, almond-shaped eyes that were close together under a well-tamed unibrow. Something about his face reminded me of an Assyrian sculpture, but when Haider translated my observation to him, Ahmed told me his large eyes have given him the nickname Uday, after Saddam’s murderous, sex-crazed older son, something he hates. Ahmed was self-conscious about his looks and obsessed about remaining youthful and desirable. He was married once, but is now divorced, like another man in Haider’s group.

I asked Ahmed if his clothes made him a target, and Haider responded, “He could not wear that in Sadr City, it is very dangerous.” Karada, however, is different, Haider describing it very much in terms that we might call metrosexual. “Now, we cannot decide who is gay and who is not in Karada City, and so everyone comes to Karada,” he said.

I learned that Ahmed has a boyfriend, someone closeted and much older, a member of the Iraqi military. It almost sounded as though he were kept by the older man. Haider had told me about being courted by powerful, wealthy men who offered “a car, money, anything.” He said he always refused, “because you feel like a hooker.”

Having finished our drinks and left the café, we looked for a cab to take us to Abu Nuwaz Street along the Tigris River. Haider again cautioned me, “Don’t say a thing.” But once we got into the taxi, there was a lot of giggling, and I sensed that Haider and his friends were flirting with the driver. “Wow,” Haider said in English, and then quietly told me that the driver offered his phone number to one of his friends.

At Abu Nuwaz, Haider told me that if it were not Ramadan, on “a normal day, you see parties, you see a group of people who are gay are here.” He caught himself though, admitting, “Not actually all of them are gay, but some of them, but they do parties, they sit in the grass. They do what they like.”

As Haider, Ahmed, and I walked along the pathways near the river, his two other friends, Ali and Mohammed, fell back, deeply engaged in conversation. Later, when we turned around, we didn’t see them. “They are fucking,” Ahmed said in English, and Haider shouted, “Bitches,” followed by Arabic words I didn’t understand. His outburst surprised me, but I noticed that there were fewer families around than when I was there several evenings earlier. The walkways were full of young people, some of them straight couples, others young men out alone, looking like they were cruising. Haider and I freely spoke English.

We stopped at the Baghdadi Café, a popular restaurant, and ordered kabobs. The men continued joking with each other, giggling, the words “bitch” and its Arabic equivalents falling from their mouths, along with Arabic words for gay. Then, suddenly serious, Mohammed put his kabob down and changed his tone of voice. Haider explained that Mohammed wants to travel to America as a refugee, though not because he’s gay. Mohammed’s father was a policeman murdered as a result of the war. As we talked, I realized Haider’s friends thought I was a human rights worker, not a journalist. When I told them otherwise, using my limited Arabic vocabulary, I heard a collective “ah” from the men.

Then, with a look of wonder in his eyes, Haider, considering the possibility of Mohammed traveling to the US, said, “You can do anything in America.” When I explained the difficulties I’ve heard about from Iraqis, gay and straight, who are exiled in the US, we sat quietly for a moment, and then Haider murmured something so surprising I made him repeat it. “The gay life is so beautiful,” he said. “It is so easy being in the life.”

“No one would believe that in the United States, because of what we hear,” I responded.

“No one believes that here,” he said, reminding me of just how varied life can be for gay men in Baghdad, with some finding shelter in safe houses, others seeking help at a women’s shelter, and the least fortunate targeted for death in Sadr City. As we traveled by cab back to Haider’s neighborhood to beat the midnight curfew, we were stopped briefly for interrogation at a checkpoint where bomb detectors warned of possible explosives in our taxi. After being waved along, Haider told me that the detectors, which I later learned have been found wholly ineffective at sniffing out chemical bombs, can be set off by cologne. I wondered how often militias have, in this way, identified gay men like Haider, out for an evening, one that would be their last.

Exploring Sadr City

“Mr. Mike, no sunglasses and no seatbelt, you must look Iraqi,” Wissam, my driver, warned me as we prepared to head to Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood at the heart of the gay killings. Wissam was at first wary of the trip and thought about changing cars to avoid having his license plate recorded. He also warned me not to use my cell phone once we entered. “The signals are picked up,” he said, on walkie-talkies the Mahdi Army uses to monitor calls. If they heard me speaking English on my phone, Wissam said, they would tell each other “there’s someone foreign come to visit us.”

We agreed we would limit how much risk we took, not traveling too far in. Sadr City is divided into 79 zones. I had been told of two different locations for the bombed-out café I had heard about — one in the 20s, another in the 30s. Wissam laughed when I asked about the possibility of visiting those areas. We would visit “part 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, then we will be back,” he said, referring to areas where Shia and Sunni live together and the central government and the American forces still exerted some degree of control. Beyond that, he explained, “Jungle’s law only. When they catch Sunni, they kill him here, if he has name like Omar,” adding, there is “no music, no art here. If they see you play, they kill you.”

As we approached Sadr City, Wissam said that if we ran into trouble, “old men, we can trust, but young…. they are Mahdi Army.” After passing through a checkpoint along a canal that formed one of the sprawling district’s borders, Wissam laughed at a sign reading “Welcome to Sadr City” that bore an image of the Grand Ayatollah Muhammad al-Sadr — Mahdi Army leader Muqtada Al-Sadr’s father, who was assassinated in 1999, most likely by Saddam, making him a martyr to the Shia community. Wissam explained that we would see many guards wearing masks, perhaps because “if he has the dust, he will be thirsty” and couldn’t drink because of Ramadan. Just as likely, though, the masks were meant to conceal the identity of Mahdi Army men enforcing that militia’s authority in the area, he said.

Sadr City is dusty and low-rise like most of Baghdad, and is full of buildings largely destroyed by bomb blasts, some carried out by locals, others the work of Americans forces. Pointing at one, Wissam said, “American chopper.” There were more men in dishdashas and with beards than in any other area of Baghdad I visited, though we also saw men in Western clothing — nothing tight or fashionable, just jeans with plain or plaid shirts. Few women walked the streets, but those who did were robed in black abayas.

The district is permeated with a strong smell, like gasoline, from private electricity generators, and every so often, I saw flocks of sheep grazing on garbage that littered filthy streets. Black and green banners with gold religious writing on them are displayed everywhere, as is the visage of Muqtada Al Sadr, his fleshy, angry, bearded face crowned by a thick black turban. It’s on lampposts, stores, and mosques — an inescapable reminder of who holds the power. Any gay man with a fashionable, cultured, or overly Westernized look would be in clear danger traveling through Sadr City.

Wissam put a cigarette in his mouth, something that is technically forbidden during Ramadan, but happens anyway, even among the most religious. “I want to look like bad boys,” Wissam said to me, joking. “I’m in fashion, I am Mahdi Army.” His comment was funny, but full of disdain. A storefront sign in English reading Ahmed Hairdresser surprised Wissam so much he turned his head back around to see if it were real. “That is amazing,” he said. “They use only Arabic here.”

As we passed the Jamila Market, the traffic grew dense, slowing us down. Since so few cars in Sadr City have air-conditioning, we decided to roll our windows down; Wissam told me not to speak anymore or dare take any photos. Close to the district’s edge, the lively market was packed with people, including some in fashionable clothing. This was the only part of Sadr City where I thought I might be seeing gay men among the crowds.

By this time, it was nearly sunset, and Wissam asked me, “Shall we leave now?” We passed a large banner just before arriving at the exit checkpoint. Wissam explained that it read “We don’t like foreigners in our country.”

Entrapment and Spies Among Us

“The Ministry of Interior is listening to me!” Hassan screamed to me on the phone. His voice cracked with fear and desperation, he continued, “They called me and they want to know why I am talking to you and to CNN and to USA Today.” Though he uses two different phones, that precaution apparently failed to protect him from being monitored. He told me the Ministry of Interior had asked him to come to their office to discuss what he had been telling the American media about the killings of gay men in Iraq.

I later learned that nothing came of this. Hassan did not go to the Ministry, nor was he kidnapped by its henchmen, which is one of his greatest fears. The conversation with Hassan, however, helped me better understand something I had noticed on my own cell phone. For days before his call, I thought I was crazy, certain I heard the sound of rustling papers and a woman’s voice repeating key phrases of my conversations, especially when I said the word “murder.”

It’s well known that the US Embassy has monitored journalists and others working in Baghdad. Visiting the embassy, we were required to leave our phones in their care, during which time they could do anything to them. Whenever I worried about being monitored, I hoped it was by the embassy and not by the Iraqi government.

I had also become afraid of entrapment by somebody I had for a long time thought I could trust. As with Hassan, I was first in touch with Douglass, an Iraqi, during my first visit to Iraq in 2007, but was unable to meet him because of the intense violence outside the protected Green Zone at that time. Douglass, whom I originally met on Manjam, told me he was a translator for an American security company. He used his Americanized name on the website as well as on Facebook, and my communications with him during my 2007 trip aroused no suspicions in me.

By the time of my second visit, however, Douglass’ behavior had turned bizarre. He started sending me extremely provocative sexual messages, which prompted me to remind him I was a journalist interested only in an interview. He also expressed anger that I had entered the country in Kurdistan, and he began to scrawl on my Facebook wall that he wanted to murder “Kurdish she-males.” His Facebook profile, meanwhile, was full of frank sexual descriptions that seemed more appropriate for a hustler than a contractor. Of course, he could have been both.

Before I arrived in Baghdad, Douglass texted me repeatedly, asking when I would get there. Finally, I decided to tell him my plans had changed and I would not be traveling to Baghdad. Soon, he sent more text messages, pretending to be someone else. “Help, I am poor Iraqi gay someone is trying to kill me,” he wrote in one message. Later, he wrote, “Why won’t you help me, I am a gay Iraqi being persecuted. I only want to tell you my story.” I didn’t respond to either message, and wondered how he could think I wouldn’t recognize his number.

I couldn’t remember if I had told him where I planned to stay in Baghdad, but it was the same hotel that I was in during my earlier visit when I tried to arrange a meeting with him, so I decided not to update my Facebook profile when I arrived in the capital. I thought of un-friending him, but decided instead to keep my eye on his page.

Looking through my notes since my first trip to Iraq, I realized that, making use of the same phone number and email address, he had assumed three different identities. When I carefully examined his Facebook and Manjam profiles, I concluded that despite the face being obscured, all the pictures were not of the same person. Gays in Iraq often go to great lengths to hide their identity, but there was little doubt in my mind that as an American journalist investigating the murders of gay men, I had been targeted for some sort of entrapment.

Douglass is still out there, though he has changed his name on Facebook, destroying his previous identity. And he is still on Manjam.

But Douglass was not my most unsettling encounter with monitoring in Iraq. That came on my last day in Baghdad at the Al Rasheed Hotel, a Green Zone venue that’s a favored meeting spot for Iraqis and foreigners. The lobby is a spy movie cliché — full of intriguing characters, from Iraqi sheiks to sexy local TV anchorwomen in tight skirts, US military officials, and polo and khaki-wearing fair-haired American contractors meeting local businesspeople. There are also a lot of men who sit around, seemingly with no purpose, their faces buried in newspapers.

I was interviewing a government official on a completely different topic than endangered Iraqi gays, but I noticed, the entire time, three men surrounding me, clearly watching me. Two were in suits a few seats in front of me, and another behind me in a striped shirt and jeans. They often nodded to each other.

After my interview, I went up to talk to the one who seemed to be their leader, bringing Wissam with me for translation. The man had a thick body, a dumb, thug-like face with a beaming smile, and big ears that stuck out from his head like handles. His cell phone ring tone was the theme from “The Godfather,” and he was wearing a gray sharkskin suit, just like his companion, who was handsome, though his face was blemished by a hairy dark blotch. Both men had thick, well-maintained beards, while the younger, more casually dressed third man, sitting separately, was clean shaven —and obviously nervous. Ali, the leader of the trio, explained that he and his friends were looking for jobs and hoped to meet politicians and journalists at the hotel.

Ali offered me a cigarette, but clumsily singed my eyebrow as he lit it. His soft voice suggested more gentle giant than thug. Telling him I was a journalist, I said I had no work for them, Wissam explaining I was an American freelancer. Despite the fact that I obviously relied on Wissam for translation, Ali, pointing to several stereotypical Americans in the lobby, insisted I was Lebanese, “because you are dark and have black hair.” As he continued to press his argument that I was an Arab pretending to be American, I gave him my passport. Ali flicked the pages and held it up to the light, carefully examining the photograph, trying to see if it were a forgery.

It was then that things got really odd. Ali told me he had been imprisoned in Abu Ghraib, where he was tortured — hung in the air as his tormenters inserted objects into his anus. At other times, he said, guards sat on him and committed the same offenses.

“If you look at some of the pictures, you will see me,” he insisted.

He holds no grudges against Americans, he said. “It’s the gay Iraqis,” he continued, as his face betrayed disgust. “They are the problem in this country.” The idea for homoerotic torture came not from the US and British soldiers, he said, but from gay Iraqi prison workers. “They could do what they wanted to us.”

Throughout the conversation, Ali remained friendly, and he mentioned a number of Iraqi journalists he knew, including one killed by insurgents. Wissam, who confirmed he had heard about that killing, was cautious, guiding me in some of my answers and careful to keep me from mentioning the hotel where I was staying. I was amiable toward Ali and the other men, even taking photos of them. Still, in spite of saying they were looking for work, none had any contact information to give me.

Any journalist, foreign or otherwise, working in Iraq has reason to worry about being monitored — or worse. Still, gay Iraqi friends have told me that in a country with as macho a culture as Iraq, it is completely out of character for a man to tell a complete stranger that he had been raped in prison, or to bring up the issue of homosexuality unprompted. One friend insisted the men were sent to watch me, but if that is true, I will never really know by whom.

Gay Baghdad: Final Thoughts and a Call to Action

“I push for this because of who I am. This hits me harder,” my friend from the US Embassy in Baghdad said about why the gay killings have so moved him, why he reached out to me when they peaked last year.

We were surrounded by men in shorts and Capris, tight tank tops on toned bodies, rainbow flags adorning every doorway. Clearly, we were not in Baghdad. It was Chelsea in the midst of New York’s 2009 Gay Pride Week. He was home on vacation, helping me strategize for my upcoming six-week trip.

Gay Americans obsess about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — and rightly so — but legions of gay civilians are in the war zones: in the State Department, the United Nations, non-profits from many nations, and even among the gun-toting contractors. Many of them work with gay and lesbian soldiers who are not officially out.

Gays and lesbians — especially thoes who are single and have no children — are the perfect war-zone demographic. The change we can enact behind closed doors on international LGBT issues has long been overlooked, but it’s part of the premise behind former State Department employee Mark Bromley’s group, the Council for Global Equality.

Looking at the issue of the gay killings in Iraq from San Francisco, London, or New York, it might seem that our embassy has done little or nothing. Though I firmly believe there was much more that the US could have done officially — after all, we have occupied the country for more than seven years — I also know that behind the scenes, unofficially, there have been people pushing for more.

I look at America’s occupation of Iraq like a Rudyard Kipling novel — many good people working in a bad colonial setting over which they have no control, reporting to people in capital cities thousands of miles away who have no clue about the reality on the ground.

I asked my friend what he thought could be done about the situation for gays in Iraq. Frustrated, he said, “Even if I could heli-vac all the gays out of Iraq, what about the Christians, what about the women, what about all the other persecuted people?”

The two of us were both well aware that gays are just one small part of the country’s refugee crisis. To put it in perspective, the 9,000 gay Iraqis in Damascus would nearly overload the official US quota system for the number of Iraqis our nation will accept in one year. There are many other persecuted groups and millions of displaced Iraqis.

I grew up in a neighborhood in New Jersey full of children whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, most of whom were painfully aware of how the US immigration system at that time blocked the opportunity to save tens of thousands of persecuted Jews and other Europeans. Clearly the killings in Iraq are on a different scale from the Holocaust, but we cannot blame a mad dictator for those deaths. It is happening because the United States invaded Iraq, and still we refuse to change our quota system.

My Embassy friend would get angry at times, sensing what I was thinking.

“Journalists come in with an attitude that we should not have invaded,” he said. “We can’t go back in time. The argument that none of this would have happened if we hadn’t invaded means nothing anymore.”

He told me this simplistic media attitude shuts down Embassy personnel, creating a defensive wall around them when dealing with reporters.

It’s true that the violence was unleashed by the power vacuum we created when we took out Saddam. A new power vacuum and a spike in violence — with a new government still waiting to be formed seven months after the latest election — are happening once again. But the question is no longer what should have been done — but what can be done.

My friend said that change must come from within Iraq.

“In a perfect world, the Iraqis would begin to protect their own people, gay people included,” he said, but then added, “The Iraqi government can say anything it wants, that it wants to protect gay people, but meanwhile there is a militia out there killing people.”

He offered a simple solution, telling me, “I suggest we have an expedited program working with other governments who can take more [refugees], using current NGOs [non-profit, non-governmental organizations]” working in Iraq.

It’s an idea I’ve heard from others, a workaround to the US procedures that prioritize refugees who have worked with the US military, giving them SIVs, or Special Immigrant Visas.

The vast majority of gay Iraqis I know who are now in the United States are on SIVs or received asylum or refugee status for reasons other than being gay. My translator for the Gay City News article I wrote about my 2007 visit to Iraq, a gay Baghdad native, is a refugee because he had been kidnapped while working for a NGO. He wondered if being gay might expedite his case, but most people advising us felt it was a bad idea to add his sexual orientation to an already existing application. It might create confusion about his qualifications, leave him vulnerable to attack in Baghdad, or cause the US military, where he worked during the application process as a translator, to fire him. He also worried that coming out might mean his refugee caseworkers would stop helping him.

Gay refugee status is not so easy.

In March of this year, in New York, I met a young man who had once worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He talked about how seriously the UN took gay refugees. That may be so, but gay Iraqis I met in Syria were terrified of visiting Damascus’s UNHCR office. Simply being witnessed going there by Syria’s secret police was dangerous, let alone filling out paperwork admitting they were gay.

I met this former UNHCR worker at a talk given by Dr. Joseph Massad, a tenured Columbia University professor. In this lecture — attended by Scott Long, then the long-time director of the LGBT desk at Human Rights Watch, and Hossein Alizadeh of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) — Massad made flippant remarks about gay Middle Eastern refugee and asylum cases, using the example of Jordan, his home country. Even gay students in attendance laughed.

Massad is controversial, but he is not alone in his lack of understanding about the seriousness and complexity of these issues; even LGBT activists who should know better show startling lapses and misjudgments. One from San Francisco posted pictures of a gay Iraqi asylum seeker whom he did not like on his website, giving his full name. That’s the sort of thing that could lead to the machine-gunning of this man’s entire family in Baghdad.

I want to make something perfectly clear. While activists and others in London, San Francisco, and New York argue, make jokes, or simply treat gay Iraqis as trendy cocktail banter, real men have been dying in Baghdad.

I am a journalist, not an activist, but if I am going to risk my life writing about something, I’ll choose a topic I hold close to my heart, hoping to at least bite out bits of the truth — even if what results remains messy, murky, and sometimes false in its own way.

In fact, there are many truths, especially in a place like Iraq. In a tale of two cities for gay Iraqi men, there is more than one Baghdad — at times deadly and dangerous, with blood-splattered, frightened men bearing witness to the deaths of their friends; at other times, for some men, posing no problems at all, even offering a fragile return to joyous adventures along the banks of the Tigris.

My biggest surprise was discovering the Arabic version of my book “Gay Travels in the Muslim World” for sale in Baghdad. How can that be so? Wouldn’t simply buying the book mark someone for death?

Only by directly witnessing and inhabiting spaces in Baghdad can some sense at all be made of the confusion — the deaths along with the revival of gay life; the horrific posture of the Iraqi government and the seeming inaction of foreign governments.

After having visited Iraq and seen the randomness of the violence firsthand, the disconnect in our attitudes here in the US angers me the most. After reading four installments of my reporting about Baghdad and the dangers gay men face there and beyond — roughly 16,000 words, including part 1, part 2, and part 3 — what are you going to do about it? And where does all this fit into the broader crisis facing gay men and lesbians around the developing world, such as in Africa, a new frontier of anti-LGBT violence?

It’s easy to sit in the comfort of one’s home, after watching “The A-List” or “Dancing With the Stars” or the latest escapades of Lindsay Lohan, and say, “Oh, I care about gay Iraqis!” But how is that abstract, touchy-feely thought put into practice?

It’s true that when I tell other gay men I am writing about gay Iraqis, they often ask me what they can do, some with the utmost sincerity. If you’re one of them, well, here’s an answer.

Are you willing to write letters to members of Congress and to the State Department, provide money to groups like Human Rights Watch, IGLHRC, the London-based Iraqi LGBT, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, the List Project, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), or the International Rescue Committee (IRC)?

How much does seeking asylum or refugee status even cost? To give you an idea, when Human Rights Watch (HRW) helped gay Iraqis flee to another country, they needed a few thousand dollars for each individual to cover flights and other incidental expenses. One of the men they helped told me he could not legally work in his temporary host country and it would take up to a year for his refugee paperwork to be processed. He paid $250 rent for an apartment out of a monthly $400 stipend HRW provided, which was due to run out shortly after I interviewed him in February — long before he would officially be granted refugee status.

Multiply the costs borne by this man by so many months and so many other gay men, and you recognize the exorbitant bill that the warm and fuzzy notion of saving lives means for a group like HRW, even without considering the staff salaries it takes for it do this work in the first place.

Ali Hili’s Iraqi LGBT group pays rent on safe houses, with some of the money raised no doubt going to pay bribes to corrupt Iraqi police, something there is no official budgetary line for. And once that rare refugee or asylum seeker reaches the US, he’s usually not allowed to legally work for up to a year. What is the cost of housing this person? And where does that money come from?

In spite of the enormous, even bankrupting sums of money spent on the military and government contractors in occupied Iraq, the US government and NGOs, both American and foreign, put very little money into asylum and refugee work. When my translator came here as a refugee, he received a free bed, a free chest of drawers, and three monthly stipends of about $400 each. That amounts to a total of $1,200 to live in New York City, with no legal right to work for 12 months at least.

This is what we give a refugee from the country we invaded. And he was someone lucky enough to have been allowed to come here.

So if you really are concerned about gay Iraqi refugees, how about putting your money where your mouth is and opening your home to one? Can you feed him, clothe him, and explain a new culture to him? Help him get a job in the worst economy since the Depression? And do this for as long as a year?

It is not so easy.

In the Broadway play “Time Stands Still,” about the relationship between a journalist and a photographer returning from Iraq, Mandy, a seemingly vapid character who knows the couple, complains about having to read about the horrors of the Iraq war.

She asks, “What do I do with this information?”

Is it a silly question — or one that makes perfect sense in the case of a war to which few Americans seem to have any connection and or even think about at all?

After reading this four part series on gays in Iraq, Mandy’s question is the one you should ask yourself.

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