Trevor Blake: Androphilia and The Hunted
Jack Donovan, Androphilia [2006]:
Sodomy has been decriminalized in the United States, and America lagged behind most of Europe in this significant achievement. It seems that if gay advocates today were truly concerned about real oppression, they’d be concentrating their efforts on political asylum programs for homos in Muslim countries, where accused homosexuals are still routinely executed or forced, foolishly, to submit to testosterone injections.
Matt McAllester, The Hunted [2009]:
Nuri was riding in a taxi on a February afternoon when the cab was stopped by the commando unit of the Iraqi police at a checkpoint. To be stopped at a checkpoint was no big deal to Nuri, or any Iraqi. The police put up surprise roadblocks all over the city to catch insurgents and criminals. An officer asked for Nuri’s identification, then told him to step out of the car. The officer asked for Nuri’s cell phone, and Nuri handed it over. Then the officer threw Nuri against the car and handcuffed him.“What have I done?” Nuri asked. The officer didn’t answer. He sniggered, put a hood over Nuri’s head, and shoved him into a police vehicle. In the car, Nuri heard the officer talking on his radio, telling someone that he had found Nuri and would put him in with “the others.” [...] Nuri was told that $10,000 would buy his freedom. When he said he barely had any money, he was placed in a cell overnight. The following morning, his interrogators came back and asked if he was sure he didn’t have the money. Nuri said yes, he was sure. The men then handcuffed him, tied a rope around his ankles, threaded the rope through a hook in the ceiling, hoisted him upside down, and stripped him to his underwear. He passed out. When he woke up, he was still suspended in the air. In the evening, the men let Nuri down, and asked him again for the money. The questioning continued the following day. Nuri’s captors asked for the names and contacts of other gay men, but Nuri refused to divulge any. They called him a tanta—a queen. They told him things would get much worse for him if he didn’t tell them all they wanted to hear. “Killing gays is halal,” one of the men said, meaning it was permissible under Islamic law. “We’ll get points in heaven for it.”
Over the next three weeks, nine men, working in teams of three, took turns torturing Nuri. For three days, toward the end of his captivity, the men put a bag over his head and raped him. On the first day, he estimated that fifteen men assaulted him. The second day, six men. The third day, three. At one point, Nuri’s captors took him to the top floor of the ministry building, where, through a small window, he could see the bodies of the five men with whom he had shared a cell. They appeared to have been executed. “It’ll be your turn next,” the men told him. One of the torturers later got Nuri alone, and told him he would let him out for $5,000. Nuri, with the man’s help, arranged for a friend in London to wire the money to a friend in Iraq, who passed it to the officer. Late one night, 25 days after Nuri had been detained, the man came to Nuri’s cell, led him out of the building, and told him to get into the trunk of his car. He was dropped by the side of a road on the outskirts of the city. [...]
In New York, Scott Long began to receive disturbing reports. Long is the director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, an international nonprofit group with headquarters in the Empire State Building. Since February, Long had been hearing from foreign rights groups about a wave of anti-gay violence in Iraq, but so far the accounts were unsubstantiated. On April 1, one of Long’s colleagues, Rasha Moumneh, was the first person from the organization to be put in touch with a gay Iraqi. It was Nuri. He related what had happened to him and said that he had heard rumors of similar attacks on other gay men. He said the situation was dire. HRW typically investigates human-rights abuses and publishes reports intended to spotlight problems, but the group rarely intervenes directly in a situation. In this case, however, Long decided that if Nuri were left in Iraq, he, and probably many more men like him, could be killed. Long and Moumneh formulated a plan. They would build an underground railroad of sorts, reaching out to gay men in Iraq through the Internet and their existing contacts in Iraq, then advising and supporting gay Iraqis until they could ferry them to a safe city somewhere in Iraq, then to a haven elsewhere in the region, and eventually perhaps to the West.
My friend Jack has said that my quoting the above from his book Androphilia makes it ‘sound political, which it isn’t.’ Fair enough. I will merely raise it up as an example of a man saying in a book what should be done in 2006 and three years later just that being done in the real world. Did the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch read Androphilia? I doubt it. No matter the reason, I am glad this is being done. And as for those who will get points in heaven for killing gays? I have no kind words for them or their apologists.