Introduction
On 18 August 2022, the Egyptian Ministry of Education conveyed a direct message to all its education directorates across Egypt. The message was to work toward educating primary-stage pupils about moral behaviors in light of the “perverted and deviant messages by some media outlets sent to the public, promoting homosexual activities”. This was part of the state’s “precautionary” measures to prevent the potential spread of homosexuality. As much as it sounds preposterous, this does not even count as one bit of the state’s direct attack on what it considers “sexually deviant beings”; a category encompassing male homosexuals, anti-Egyptian nationalists, and Westernized anti-regime figures.
This announcement also comes within a larger socio-political-legal package: a law manipulated by the state to entrap, incarcerate, and imprison – mostly male – homosexuals; the media playing a fundamental role in stigmatizing and reproducing prejudices against what they would call “sexually deviant persons”; and a political environment where El-Sisi’s regime, and previously Mubarak’s, have used the LGBTQ issue as a scapegoat for their economic and political failures and as a response to the Muslim Brotherhood’s accusations of incompetence and anti-Islamic tendencies within society.
Today, it has been 13 years since the January 25th revolution and 11 years since El-Sisi's regime came to power – two very fundamental turning points in our analysis. In an attempt to examine the role of the revolution in how it affected LGBTQ activism in Egypt, we are looking at two significant cases that pave the way for a better understanding of the queer sphere in Egypt. These are the Queen Boat case in 2001 and the Mashrou' Leila concert in 2017.
Sixteen years separate both incidents. During this period, Egypt witnessed three major regime changes, a revolution, many uprisings, and many hopes for freedom. In those years, queerness has also been normalized in the West and co-opted into their national and imperial agendas which would also affect and reframe the discourse around homosexuality in Muslim and Arab societies, particularly Egypt.
This paper focuses on the two incidents (Queen Boat case and the Mashrou' Leila concert) separately as a means to understand the differences in the responses of the government, the media, and the people. It examines the political context of both periods, as well as the diverse reactions and repercussions. It also argues that while the revolution was a fundamental turning point, its impact has not been evident since the Sisi regime assumed power in 2013. Furthermore, it contends that the 2017 incident has potentially restricted the sphere of activism on many more levels than the 2001 incident.
This is analyzed through the rise of homonationalist discourse in the West and heteronationalist discourse in Egypt. Lastly, it argues that the state’s main concern lies in the threat that gayness poses to the idealized Egyptian masculine figure, which, in this context, becomes a "de-masculine" figure. Taken together, masculinity emerges as the paramount attribute of the Egyptian man, which justifies the state’s attack on de-masculine figures.
20 Years for the Queers as Scapegoats
On 25 January 2011, millions of Egyptians revolted against the Mubarak regime, a regime that was in power for almost 30 years. The key demands were very clear: bread, freedom, and social justice. As much as it was a revolution where the poor demanded basic rights (such as food, clean water, electricity), it was also a revolution for all kinds of rights. It was a revolution of sexuality. This was a moment where everything was possible for everyone demanding to live a dignified life in their country – a transformative moment where many individuals redefined their identities, roles, and aspirations in the wake of newfound hope.
Among the protestors were LGBTQ persons and those who advocated for sexual and gender diversity. Human rights came into focus as a package that cannot be separated. Since direct visibility for LGBTQ persons was limited due to safety and security concerns, their activism took alternative forms, including online advocacy, organizing within trusted networks, and amplifying demands for justice and dignity that aligned with the revolution’s goals. They stood with the rest of the opposition, not necessarily as queer people and certainly not under a queer flag. Yet, their opposition to the regime’s oppression also carried a profound awareness of the specific injustices they faced as queer individuals. Amidst the revolution, social networks served as a crucial form of solidarity and activism, helping during and even after the uprising. The revolution might not have achieved its intended outcomes; however, it shed light on the existence of the queer community and, somehow, instilled a sense of solidarity among the different members who share the same cause.
Ten years prior to the revolution, on 11 May 2001, a police raid allegedly targeted 52 men suspected of being queer in a nightclub called "Queen Boat" based on information received from informants. The men were accused of satanism and homosexuality. The media published their names and personal information as part of a defamation campaign, positioned the Egyptian authorities as society’s morality keepers, and were in favor of the arrests. Later, the men were accused of habitual debauchery under Law 10/1961.
The case was handled by the Supreme State Security Prosecution (SSSP), a special branch of the Public Prosecution responsible for prosecuting crimes related to "state security". This case marked the beginning of a new era of LGBT prosecution in Egyptian history and highlights the tactics and oppressive actions the state would adopt and continue to use to this day.
Yet, six years after the revolution, we were struck with another incident that would also shape the sphere through which queer bodies exist. In September 2017, during the Sisi regime, a group of young Egyptians decided to raise the rainbow flag at the Mashrou' Leila concert. Two people, who were the main victims, Sarah Hegazi and Ahmed Alaa, got arrested immediately, followed by a major arrest campaign that included around 75 individuals. This case, too, was handled by the SSSP. The media, again, was in favor of the arrests and criticized the government for allowing something like this to happen in the first place. This incident helped further situate the Egyptian authorities as the morality keepers and the queer bodies at the center of the battlefield.
There has been an escalating pattern of oppression throughout all those years. According to a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, 179 men were prosecuted under anti-homosexuality laws from 2001 through early 2003. The attack was no longer sporadic arrests but an actual systematic attack and persecution of queer men living in Egypt. According to another report by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the number of men arrested from 2003 to 2013 reached a total of 185 (an average of 14 people per year), while from 2013 to 2017, the number was 232 (an average of 66 men per year). Keep in mind that those numbers are only what they were able to collect and that many other suspects were arrested without formal charges or with fabricated evidence.
Aside from that, and following the Mashrou' Leila incident, there were attempts to pass anti-homosexuality laws in Parliament. The Orthodox Church also issued a statement condemning what happened at the concert, framing it as a “volcano of homosexuality”. And in September 2017, the Supreme Council for Media banned the media appearance of “homosexuals” except in cases of admitting the mistake and/or declaring repentance.
The West’s Homonationalism vis-a-vis Egypt’s Heteronationalism
From 2001 onward, the queer discourse in the West, namely the US, shifted and became more aligned with nationalist and imperial agendas. This shift became more explicit after 9/11. Prior to 9/11, queer bodies in the US were still marginal and seen as oppositional to the nationalist agenda of the US. Particularly by the 1990s, queer identities were more commercialized to fit within the neoliberal economic framework but were not yet used as a strategic layer in their nationalist discourse.
“Homonationalism”, a term coined by Jasbir Puar, explains how queer agendas were co-opted to be part of the nationalist and imperialist agenda of the US. This was also, according to Puar, an instrument to justify the “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq portraying the US as a global savior for women and LGBTQ persons; it leverages the normalization of queerness against and in contrast with the sexual practices and ideas of “the terrorist other”. This has been a purely racist tool and an instrument that constructed a modern, liberal, and progressive America, and the West more broadly, against its backward, barbaric, oppressive, and homophobic other, i.e. Muslim and Arab societies. This inclusion was selective as it constructed queer acceptance as a checkbox of Western superiority and separated the white, cisgender, middle-class queer subject from the racialized immigrant, and non-western queer bodies.
In response to the Western pressure, in its neo-imperial era, on countries to follow their path and be accepting of their queer citizens, Egypt publicly uses cultural relativism and religious values as a justification for not applying what it deems to be Western societal values. Egypt has, in the same sense that the US adopted homonationalism, adopted heteronationalism which places anti-homosexuality as a checkbox for Egyptian nationalism. Egypt, as a counter-revolution tactic, constructs a binary between the “normal” and the “deviant” beings. The deviant becomes the male homosexual and simultaneously the “Westernized anti-regime protestor”. This results in an emphasis on the cultural and religious background of Egypt, which would reject and oppose the behaviors developed in the West, such as queerness. It also allows Egypt to use “reverse pinkwashing” as a strategy pushing forward homophobia in an attempt to reassert its sovereignty. “Reverse pinkwashing,” as Donna K. Huaman writes, is a strategy used by the Egyptian government to distract the society’s attention from economic, social, international, and security turmoil and to prioritize the preservation of “Arab-Muslim” culturally-moral hygiene through sporadic LGBTQ crackdowns.
In light of this, the Egyptian discourse and attitude toward both events, the Queen Boat 2001 and the Mashrou’ Leila Concert 2017 were quite different. In both cases, the response was violent and oppressive, but it stemmed from different narratives. In 2001, it was more on individual moral failures, fewer ties to Western influences, and no explicit political or ideological threats. Whereas in 2017, it was framed as societal corruption and immorality, tied explicitly to Western ideological invasion, a political threat, and the heteronationalist discourse became way more evident and on the rise.
A State of Prejudice and “Morality”
The revolution offered a temporal space that produced hope for people that things might change. The LGBTQ repression did stop during the revolution and under the rule of the democratically elected former president Mohamed Morsi. However, the whole situation changed once El-Sisi's regime came to power.
Soon after, we witness the beginning of an era where the queer cause is framed as immorality, and the state’s authorities stand in a fight with it. The state’s legal players – the vice police, the prosecution office, and the judiciary – all work together to entrap gay people, fabricate evidence, and imprison them.
Internet entrapment was not new when Sisi came into power. The Egyptian police and Ministry of Interior have long had a documented history, which they perversely take pride in, of entrapping gay men through the internet. This practice predates the infamous Queen Boat incident of May 2001. According to a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, the first known case of entrapment occurred in January 2001, when two men were lured by a man claiming to be a Swiss tourist. After their trial, both received three-month prison sentences. Later, in March of the same year, two more men were arrested in Tahrir Square after being lured through internet ads. A series of similar cases also occurred in 2002, again involving internet entrapment.
Between January 2001 and 2003, at least 46 gay men were entrapped online, according to the same Human Rights Watch report. This number is believed to be higher, as these were only the cases that could be documented. From 2013 to 2017, according to a study conducted by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, at least 232 gay men were arrested, with 129 of these arrests facilitated through dating and social networking websites. The same report documents the arrest of 185 gay men from 2003 to 2013, though it does not specify how many of these arrests were linked to internet entrapment.
The problem is not merely the law; it is oppressive, coercive, and violent, but the main issue is how these three legal players use it and manipulate it in their fight against immorality and their goal of protecting the image of the state. The vice police entrap people through fake accounts on dating apps, random street arrests, and home and hotel arrests, without an arrest warrant or a reason behind the arrest. They fabricate the digital evidence by either creating fake screenshots of conversations or the physical evidence by asking the fake informant to ask the person – to be entrapped – to bring condoms with them. They also inflict verbal, physical, and mental abuse on the victims to get a confession from them. The prosecutor’s office never challenges that evidence or the means of arrest or the means of obtaining such evidence. And, by default, the judges do not give enough time to review the case, show prejudice against the victim, and end up placing them guilty. These tactics were presented in Cairo 52’s study on law cases from 2016 to 2021.
The Body as the Battlefield
The effeminate is not at risk; the effeminate is the risk. The state is masculine and shall remain masculine. The state is patriarchal, and its men are those responsible for keeping it that way. Looking through all the arrest cases mentioned above, we have come to comprehend a few facts.
First, some of the random street arrest cases are solely based on the gaydar of the police officer. People, in some cases, would be stopped if, and when, they present themselves as feminine in any way possible. Any sign of femininity, or in other words, any sign of de-masculinity, is a sign of gayness, through which a whole case of habitual debauchery would be based.
Second, those arrested in relation to the Queen Boat in 2001 and the Mashrou' Leila Concert in 2017 as well as two other cases were subjected to anal examination test. An anal examination would, in their defense (which is already medically disproven), test whether the anus has been penetrated or not. And here we come to understand that this is not merely about gayness but rather about femininity or, again in this case, de-masculinity.
Regarding identity, we see, as Foucault and Bersani argue, building on each other’s works, that homosexual acts can and will disrupt the established power relations and social norms. The gay identity can lead to a massive redefining of sociality itself and what we might expect from human communities. This leaves us in a position where we have to ask ourselves: What identities are we allowed to take on? In this case, “the man” becomes the most important identity someone can preserve. The preservation of the masculine identity puts the patriarchal society in safe hands. And with this identity, you can be religious, and sometimes, in some spaces, you can be a nationalist.
To be a good Egyptian and a safe citizen requires some attributes, on top of them would be heteronormativity, patriotism – or nationalism –, docility, and “repetition of the nation”: to reproduce and reinforce the national identity, values, and norms. This is all placed on the shoulders of men -the masculine normative men- which shows the entanglement between sexuality and normativity. Supported by adhering to certain religious values, not necessarily Islamic, and to the nationalist agenda, this produces -and hopefully reproduces- the Egyptian citizen. This way of governing how best to be Egyptian is rather an essential foundation for how to govern Egypt as a state.
Given the above, masculinity is a foundational instrument, weaponized by the state, and fueled by religious and national authenticity to maintain social order and reassert independence from Western domination. Therefore, any deviation from masculinity becomes not only a direct challenge to religion and nationalism but a threat to the whole nation-state.
Queer (In)Visible Activism
How does queer activism and visibility stand within all that? Queer activism in Egypt has always functioned through an “activism from the closet”. In a society where those rights are not thought of as legitimate, it is always risky to be visible. With that, they have adopted a way through which they do not have to be publicly out or visible. They address their rights through a larger and broader range of other issues that intersect with every citizen, such as human rights and freedom. The ‘closet’ here is perceived as a “safe locus for collective strategizing” that gives some sense of security. With that, a developed transnational cyber-activism has also stepped in the face of state censorship. It has elaborated on the sufferings of the community, again, in a way that touches upon other public concerns with a shared goal to terminate the violations of the state.
However, a few queer Egyptians have been publicly out; most notably Sara Hegazi, the one who raised the rainbow flag alongside Ahmed Alaa in Mashrou’ Leila concert 2017. Sarah went in exile in Canada right after her release in January 2018. In the summer of 2020, Sara took her own life. This was quite a shocking event for many queer Arabs, not only Egyptians. Following her death, her image raising the flag became even more symbolic of not only resistance but loss and grief. There were collective mourning campaigns through social media and blogs; a hashtag that says “raise the flag for Sara” was part of that campaign. This memory was transformed into a public memorial to challenge nationalist rhetoric and foster activism within the community, both in Egypt and globally, though in Egypt it primarily existed in the digital space due to state repression. The mourning was militant, which makes it more of a political act against state violence and in support of unity among marginalized groups.
Visibility is a double-edged sword. To be seen is to be policed, Leo Bersani argues. For queer people to be visible, it means that they would be subject to surveillance, policing, and social categorization. Potentially, it might provoke a backlash from the public, and with more visibility comes more homophobia. This is what happened with queer individuals who either chose to make themselves visible in Egypt, which are few in this case, or those who get entrapped and imprisoned and become subjects of attack by the state, the media, and society.
Bersani also argues that visibility produces invisibility; as gays make themselves visible, they, at the same time, become invisible in the larger social context where they would still have to adopt and submit to and within the heteronormative framework. This cannot really be evident in authoritarian regimes like Egypt where there is still a long way to go and fierce fights to have with the state to have the luxury of being visible. However, in American society, drawing from Bersani’s work on Homos, there are different mechanisms which can make the gay visible identity still invisible. For example, gay relationships on TV which mirror heterosexual views of relationships and lack the diversity of queer relationality or how the AIDS crisis brought visibility to gay men but within a rhetoric of shame, victimhood, and moral irresponsibility. Bersani sees the gay desire as radical and disruptive of social norms. Thus, when it is made visible through assimilation, it automatically loses that potential; this disruptive potential becomes invisible. Bersani’s view was aimed at queer activists and theorists in an attempt to reconsider the terms under which the gay body becomes visible and to question the sacrifices made on the radical and disruptive potential of the visible gay body in favor of social acceptance.
Given this context, the act of visibility in Egypt is a dangerous one, a luxury not afforded to queer individuals. While Bersani’s theory suggests that visibility in Western contexts can lead to assimilation and invisibility, in Egypt, visibility directly challenges state power and provokes both state and societal repression. The laws in place make even the simple act of publicly coming out a high-risk endeavor, one that can lead to imprisonment and violence. Unlike in the West, the fight in Egypt is about survival itself, with queer Egyptians struggling for a space to exist without facing prosecution and social exclusion. The state does not only erase queerness from the media; it deliberately and tirelessly silences public expressions of queer life. In this context, queer activism in Egypt becomes a dangerous and subversive act, resisting invisibility while simultaneously pushing back against the heteronationalist discourse and order.
Concluding Remarks
In the state’s journey to fight “immorality,” it has failed to address the most immoral actor in all this—the state itself. There must be a way around this, I believe. And as a starting point, the logical move to take is to pressure the state to moralize its abuse and manipulation of the law. Most of the arrests made were made through entrapment by the police, supported by fabricated evidence and prejudiced prosecutors and judges. This is all illegal. The easy, derived conclusion is for the state to moralize its use and practice of law. However, given the very complex premises shown above, this is not an easy thing to ask.
Therefore, there is also the radical way that Ahmed El-Hady, a human rights and queer activist, suggests. El-Hady is advocating for a direct, full-blown confrontation with the state and society. This should happen because “the gradualist tactic did not work and continues not to work.” This does not have to go under an evaluation of realism, whether it is achievable or not. There might exist some circumstances where this becomes possible, however with outcomes that have a high probability of a massively aggressive backlash from the state. Nonetheless, it could lay the groundwork for a turning point in queer activism in Egypt, where, even if it fails, the potential for more radical acts may rise afterward.
When we try to put recommendations on paper, we are always optimistic, but soon enough, we realize the complexity of the task and how we come to approach it. In my opinion, and under those oppressive circumstances, any kind of resistance, whether grand or minor, is important and shall be appreciated. The continuity of acts of resistance ensures the disruption of the social order, which is a great outcome on its own. This might come in different forms, whether active or reactive, independent or dependent on the state’s actions. It also would necessitate a potential risk of visibility, which again will come at its own risks. But it is fundamental in the process of paving a future where queer persons can fully advocate for their rights.
The views represented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Arab Reform Initiative, its staff, or its board.
