One Man's Tale

The Internet brought Horus into contanct with other Egyptian gays who had similar stories of shame, self-loathing and deeply closeted lives. He encountered young men who had been locked out of their homes by their parents and forced to sleep on the streets, others whose fathers had savagely beaten them, some whose parents had forced them to seek psychiatric help so they could be "cured" of their "disease." At the same time, he discovered that his chat room was providing a desperately needed service: it was allowing gay men to be candid about their identities, to discuss their frustrations, and develop a support network of fellow gays. "There were three optimistic years when people were finding their way to us and other Web sites, and we started to have hope that maybe one day people will understand that we exist, that we are visible," he says.

Then came the crackdown. Apparently worried about spreading gay activism and anxious to placate its fundamentalist Muslim constitutency, the increasingly conservative regime of President Hosni Mubarak tightened the screws on Egypt's homosexuals. In 2000, Horus says "we started to hear about an Internet crimes department--set up mainly to trap gray men on the Internet." That year, two men who ran a gay Web site were arrested, convicted of various crimes and sentenced to lengthy jail terms. The government also intensified its harrassment and prosecution of gay men gathering in public places.

In 2000 eighteen homosexuals were convicted and jailed for two years following a dragnet of Cairo nightclubs and discotheques. Then in the spring of 2001, came the case that made headlines around the world and became a symbol of Egyptian intolerance: the arrest of 53 gay men at the Queen Boat floating discotheque on the Nile in Cairo, and their highly publicized trial last November before a special State Security Court normally used to prosecute suspected Islamic terrorists.

The Queen Boat case had a personal impact on Horus. Although he rarely attended parties on the boat, three of his closest friends were among those arrested that night. Within days, the Queen Boat case "took over my life," he says. He pressured reluctant attorneys to defend the arrested men, contacted their families, raised funds abroad via the Internet, followed the trial and wrote lengthy reports for international human-rights groups. He even took the dramatic step of appearing undisguised on CNN International to talk about the case. In the end, 22 of the defendants were convicted on charges ranging from defiling religion to debauchery; one was sentenced to five years in jail, while the others drew prison terms of between one and three years.

The last few months have left Horus feeling increasingly pessimistic. His Internet chat room has all but disbanded. Most of the gay men he knows are frightened and have stopped going out at night. Every day brings new stories of roundups of homosexuals in Cairo and other cities; several friends have been held for as long as sixty days without charges and beaten badly in prison.

Horus is now trying to arrange attorneys for eight suspected gays picked up in the Nile Delta city of Damanhur and charged, like the Queen Boat 52, with defiling religion and debauchery; last week police refused to allow the lawyers entrance into the prison where the suspects are being detained. "Egypt was one of the most open minded countries in the area, but now we are more conservative than any other," Horus said, leading me through the labyrinthine alleys of the bazaar. He flinches at the sight of a half dozen Egyptian security policemen making their rounds past souvenir stalls and coffee shops. "I get paranoid whenever I see the police these days," he admits.