Homosexuality, Saudi Arabia, and the West
Posted by Jack Stephens on April 15, 2007
The blogger of Gay Persons of Color quotes an article from the May 2007 issue of the Atlantic Monthly:
“In The History of Sexuality, a multivolume work published in the 1970s and ’80s, Michel Foucault proposed his famous thesis that Western academic, medical, and political discourse of the 18th and 19th centuries had produced the idea of the homosexual as a deviant type: In Western society, homosexuality changed from being a behavior (what you do) to an identity (who you are).
In the Middle East, however, homosexual behavior remained just that—an act, not an orientation. That is not to say that Middle Eastern men who had sex with other men were freely tolerated. But they were not automatically labeled deviant…“
