Arabian nights

Recall the media coverage at the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal, times it by about a thousand, and you get an idea of the hysteria currently surrounding gay men in Egypt. That’s not an arbitrary analogy. The social ramifications of coming out as a ‘gay man’ in most parts of the Middle East are the same as for some chap on a council estate in Barnsley declaring in a packed pub at closing time that he has a 12-year-old girlfriend. Two detained gay rights campaigners who waved the rainbow flag at a recent Cairo pop concert, and thus provoked the clampdown, are presently learning that the hard way.

Their unprecedented public LGBT activism took place during a performance by a rock group called Mashrou’ Leila, whose Lebanese singer Hamed Sinno is one of those baffling individuals who feels compelled to tell the whole world that he is gay every time he opens his mouth.