The verdict is in at the long-running trial of a group of men arrested last May on a floating disco on the Nile called the Queen Boat.

Rumours of a ‘gay marriage’ abound, and of men dressed as women, but details are scarce. Twenty-three men were jailed for an average of two years, each having already served six months inside. Twenty-nine were set free, but the freedom that awaits them is dubious, as they have already had their names and addresses published by the Egyptian press, listed as homosexuals. For all of them, a life of persecution awaits.

In the supposedly more moderate Islamic republic of Egypt, the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights has remained silent on their incarceration ‘because that would have done a lot of harm to the cause of human rights in Egypt,’ according to their head, as quoted in the Guardian. That places these men in the category of

subhuman, it seems. But hey, that’s Islamic government for you. In Egypt, apparently, homosexuality is seen as a Western disease, that infects some poor Egyptians, who perhaps trade a blowjob for a pack of American

cigarettes in the parks late at night from rich businessmen.

Homosexuality is a western disease. It flourishes as a cultural phenomenon wherever western liberal values take hold, whenever traditional family

support systems give way to individualism, and whenever the state lessens the grip of religion on its laws and permits freedom of speech. Which is not to say that there are only homosexuals in the west; but the concept of the ’gay man’ or ’lesbian’ is not applicable to non-Westernised societies.

It is a social construct that is as Western as Coca-Cola and Levis. It is no mere coincidence, in my mind, that Starbucks opened a branch in the Forbidden City the same year that the Chinese government decriminalised homosexuality. Overnight, the majority of the world’s homosexuals ceased to be criminals, and became lesbians and gay men. Probably too simplistic an equation; but it serves my point.

Only after decriminalisation can a subculture turn itself properly into a consumer class. Turn subjects into citizens, transform peasants into service industry workers, free children from eternal bondage to their parents, and you loosen the conservative moral grip that poverty dictates.

You end up with the heresy of people deciding what to do with their own bodies, for love and pleasure. In Western cultures, parks late at night are full of men sharing blowjobs for pleasure, not for profit. We are all equally exploited now.

Capitalism is debauchery; it seduces people from allegiance to a social order or faith that requires the submission of individuality. Capitalism is also

soulless; by ripping through the fabric of traditional cultural values and ethics in service to homogeneity and

globalisation, the concept of what is sacred or meaningful struggles to

compete with the relentless drive to hedonism. Gay men are shopping and fucking their way to Versace Nirvana, the world over.

As the sound of music is heard in Kabul for the first time in years, and men can shave their beards in the Western (ie effeminate) way, and women can emerge from house arrest blinking into the light, I’m pleased, of course. But I’m also left with a profound sense of unease.

That the Taliban regime should ever have been tolerated as a government by the community of nations on this planet is outrageous. That it should have taken the events of September 11th to bring about their downfall is a miserable comment on what motivates us as a race.

A distinction has to be drawn between faith and theocracy, between freedom of religion and dictatorship by the clergy. Although I mourn for children brought up in intolerant faiths, at least in secular societies, when they turn eighteen, they can do what they like with their lives.

Somewhere along the line I’ve lost faith in democracy as a primary virtue, because in Islamic states, with Mullahs in charge, liberalism dies – the fact that the majority of people in that state voted for it does not make it any more palatable to me.

Fundamentalist Islamists rightfully see Western, secular, capitalist culture as their enemy. They may persuade me that globalised trade results in exploitation and destruction of tribal cultures and natural resources. They may decry the profit motive as being the engine of evil, and I’d find it hard to disagree, in principle.

They may wail at the loss of the sacred in Western life and I’d have a great deal of sympathy with them. They may caution against seeing women as sex objects, and be dismayed at the way female flesh is commodified in the West, and I’d say they have a point.

They may assert with some validity that Western democracy is a fiction anyway, for, when taken to its decadent extreme, as in America, only those with money can be elected, and people cease voting as elections cease to be relevant to their daily lives.

Multinational corporations are the real world powers, they say, with the major companies managing budgets larger than those of many developing nations, with the decisions they make in the developing world often being profoundly cruel and destructive. To whom are they accountable except the God of Mammon, the profit motive, the principle of speculation, of gambling? Too right, I say.

It’s far from perfect. It is grossly unjust, in fact. But I know that, as impotent as I may feel about the way the Western world is heading, at least I have the right to voice my complaint. As soulless as I may find the consumerist sex-obsessed culture of gay men, at least I am free to find my own sense of spirituality in its midst, or out of it. My passion for freedom of choice may not be as psychotically intense as those suicidal Islamists murdering for their cause; but then my freedoms are relatively protected in Europe now, although Ireland’s recent theocratic

history still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

I wish to seduce you from allegiance to the tyranny of theocracy, to the cause of secular liberal Western

capitalism, as flawed as it may be. Debauchery is the only option. To those men suffering in an Egyptian jail, imprisoned for their Western disease, I wish them comfort as they are brutalised and raped, the patience of a saint, and a quick and automatic visa to the godless West on their release.