What struck me most in the Helem Centre in Beirut was the polished wood of the narrow staircase directly off the hallway, the right-angled red sofa along two walls of the main space, the scrawled message above the sink: “Please wash cups after use.”
“This is identical with the Rainbow Centre in Queen Street in Derry,” I accused the gay liberationists. “It’s a global gay design, isn’t it?
The only difference I noticed was that the wash-up plea was in Arabic and French as well as English. I silently resolved to urge Sean Morrin when I got home to be a tad more cosmopolitan with the kitchen signage.
The Helem Centre came back to mind when I read Jim Cusack in the Sunday Independent (October 7) describing Hezbollah as “an organisation that advocates the killing of homosexuals... and has been accused of murdering a number of gay men.”
How do you get on with Hezbollah, I’d cautiously asked the gay activists in Beirut?
The first time they’d had close contact was during the invasion last year, when the centre had opened its doors to refugees fleeing the besieged villages of the South. “Hezbollah people were in and out every day, checking how many more we could accommodate or whether they needed somewhere else, and so on.”
Did they realise this was a gay centre? “Of course. It’s obvious when you come in.”
The posters and bookshelves alone would have left no doubt.
I phoned Beirut the day after the Indo piece. Just to be sure.
Ghassan, one of the founders of the Halem Centre: “I can say categorically there is no truth in those claims. Since the aggression of last year, we’ve been working with Hezbollah’s health committee on projects, including AIDS projects. What you’ve read out is completely false.”
I called Ibrahim, whose mobile number had been given to me by a Hezbollah official as a useful contact if we got ourselves into trouble in south Beirut. Which we did, slightly.
I wasn’t sure that he’d remembered me. But I asked him, anyway: what did he think of homosexuals? There was a long pause. I asked again. “It depends,” he said slowly, “on whether they support Zionist aggression.”
All of the gay activists we’d met in the Helem Centre were clear that they fully supported Hezbollah against the Israelis.
So, what are we to make of the claim that Hezbollah “advocates the killing of homosexuals... has been accused of murdering gay men?”
I don’t believe Jim Cusack wrote this knowing it to be untrue. I suspect he believed that it might be true, and understood that, even if it wasn’t, it would be an OK thing to write because, well, it’s what the Sunday Indo wants said about Muslim organisations that stand up to Israel and the US.
In other words, it wasn’t reportage, but propaganda; journalistic standards didn’t apply.
Is Hezbollah a warm, tolerant organisation, then? Hardly.
The party grew from the oppression of the Shia community in southern Lebanon in the 1980s, occupied by an Israeli army murdering Muslims at will. It has since been involved in a war of resistance of furious intensity. It bears the hallmarks of its formation and experience. If the constant overbearing threat of Israeli violence, like a pain in the heart that won’t go away, were lifted, there’s no telling, certainly I cannot tell, how it might develop and change. Its name means “Party of God,” but it is supported by a formidable contingent of secularists.
Perhaps, in the end, the party line would be dictated by narrow-minded Islamists. Or perhaps the Hezbollah people working with gay health advocates would draw appropriate conclusions and their views would prove decisive. Perhaps it’s all to play for.
What I can say as fact is that the presentation of Hezbollah in the Sunday Independent bore no relation to the complex truth.
In the context of current events in the region, and particularly of the increasingly open threat from Israel and the US of military assault on Shia Iran, the Indo piece wasn’t just propaganda in the broad sense of the term, but war propaganda.

Earlier this year, London Transport banned ads in the underground for Rampant Rabbit vibrators which featured a picture of a woman looking blissfully dreamy and the slogan, “Wave after wave of pleasure.”
The company negotiated with LT which eventually accepted the ad unchanged except for an amended slogan: “Wave after wave after wave...”
Which I think is altogether more alluring.
It was the explicit reference to pleasure which had ruled the ad out. Some things never change.
A new documentary on vibrators, “Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm,” debuted in the US last month.
Since I suspect that Ms. Sexton of this parish will be dealing more credibly with the movie soon enough, I confine myself to a couple of facts to wet (stet!) your appetite in the meantime.
From the age of Hippocrates (he of the Hippocratic oath) in the fifth century BC until the 19th century, doctors masturbated women as a cure for “hysteria.”
In the 1860s, an American created a steam-powered device, the Manipulator, so as to make the job easier for the doctors.
In the 1880s, a British doctor came up with the electromechanical vibrator, which apparently could induce “hysterical paroxysm” in less than 10 minutes, compared with the hour-plus some medical men needed using their digits.
By 1899, vibrators were being sold as “home medial appliances.” The 1918 edition of the Sears Roebuck catalogue offered “an aid that every woman will appreciate” for $5.95 a throw.
By 1930, more than a dozen US companies were competing for the market. Annual sales were in hundreds of thousands.
Still, nobody mentioned pleasure.
Then the male-dominated movie-world blew it. Vibrators began appearing as props in erotic films. The pleasure principle was out of the bag. Churchmen and assorted moralists swooned with outraged disbelief. Vibrators disappeared from catalogues and sales outlets, not to be spoken of openly again.
Not until Rachel Maines began researching needlework patterns in early 20th century magazines and was startled to come across ads for vibrators alongside sales pitches for cotton threads and crochet kits.
She wrote a book, Hysteria, the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, published in 1999. The movie, produced and directed by Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori, is based on the book. It is making the rounds of film festivals in the US at the moment and will then be released on DVD. The ever-dependable Village Voice offers a taster. Check it out www.villagevoice.com/people/0735,taorimo,77632,24.html
The movie revives the reputation of one of the founders of feminism, Betty Dodson, who faded from fashion in the ‘80s, as the women’s movement dropped “liberation” from its title and joined in the upwardly-mobile radicals’ flight to respectability. In the documentary, “the godmother of masturbation” describes how a male lover suggested they experiment with a barber’s scalp massager. The result was “spectacular orgasms.” She became a crusader.
No Betty Dodson, no Charlotte giving her Rabbit a run-out, or in, on Sex and the City.
And she put her finger on the key reason for fear of women using vibrators for pleasure: “Independent orgasms lead to independent thought.”