Someone on Zilvia posted this:
"When i was stationed in Kuwait City 3 years ago, I would get off work late at night and all along the highway on thrusdays cuz thats when there weekends start there would be tons of High Dollar cars, bikes etc lined up drag racing and drifting. Its not Homo to them and there Culture cuz Men are for pleasure and the women are for babies. So this author obviously didnt know the whole truth."
Wikipedia:
Homosexuality and Islam
Among many Middle Eastern Muslim cultures egalitarian or age-structured homosexual practices were, and remain, widespread and thinly veiled. The prevailing pattern of same-sex relationships in the temperate and sub-tropical zone stretching from Northern India to the Western Sahara is one in which the relationships were—and are—either gender-structured or age-structured or both. In recent years, egalitarian relationships modeled on the western pattern have become more frequent, though they remain rare. Same-sex intercourse officially carries the death penalty in several Muslim nations: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mauritania, northern Nigeria, Sudan, and Yemen. [48]
A tradition of art and literature sprang up constructing Middle Eastern homosexuality. Muslim—often Sufi—poets in medieval Arab lands and in Persia wrote odes to the beautiful wine boys who served them in the taverns. In many areas the practice survived into modern times, as documented by Richard Francis Burton, André Gide, and others.
In Persia homosexuality and homoerotic expressions were tolerated in numerous public places, from monasteries and seminaries to taverns, military camps, bathhouses, and coffee houses. In the early Safavid era (1501–1723), male houses of prostitution (amrad khane) were legally recognized and paid taxes. Persian poets, such as Sa’di (d. 1291), Hafez (d. 1389), and Jami (d. 1492), wrote poems replete with homoerotic allusions. The two most commonly documented forms were commercial sex with transgender young males or males enacting transgender roles exemplified by the köçeks and the bacchás, and Sufi spiritual practices in which the practitioner admired the form of a beautiful boy in order to enter ecstatic states and glimpse the beauty of god.
Today, governments in the Middle East often ignore, deny the existence of, or criminalize homosexuality. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during his famous 2007 speech at Columbia University, asserted that there were no gay people in Iran. Gay people do live in Iran, but most keep their sexuality a secret for fear of government sanction or rejection by their families.[49]
From the article itself: “…a rare outlet for exuberance in an ultraconservative country where the sexes are rigorously segregated and most public entertainment is illegal.”
The homosexual thing in Islamic countries is a a combination of extreme boredom, youthful rebellion, and the very real chance of being killed for having sex with a woman you are not married to. So yea, I wouldnt be surprised if it shows up among the same youths who are defiant enough to go out and do crazy things with their cars.
As fucked up as it seems, homosexuality just seems to go more ignored in the middle east than pre/extra-marital sex with women. Perhaps because anything with a woman is supposed to be a holy union and is for making God's children... etc etc. Everyone knows how nuts they are over there about anything to do with religion. It's too bad that some guy with a PhD. who writes for the NYTimes isn't able to do the same research that I did in 15min.