Sitting with a friend in a café well known as a popular hangout for gay men in Marrakesh, Morocco, Anwar was cruising a handsome stranger in the coffeehouse crowd.
Flirting with his eyes, Anwar was hoping to entice the man to come over and strike up a conversation.
But when the gentleman finally approached Anwar's table, he wasn't interested in small talk. Instead, the plain-clothes police officer pulled out his badge and arrested eight young men, including Anwar and his pal.
"I was very frightened, I was trembling," recalls Anwar, a slender 31-year-old. "It was the first time I'd ever been in trouble like that," he says of the incident, which occurred in September 1998.
At the police station, Anwar's name, address, and place of work were recorded in a file. His family was called and told he had been arrested for being gay, where it is punishable by up to three years in prison, according to Anwar.
After spending two days behind bars, Anwar was released when he was able to convince the police chief he didn't know the café was a gay hot spot.
Six months later, Anwar was arrested again.
This time, Anwar was with a gay couple from Germany, two friends he had met while living for a short while in that country. The Germans were on vacation, and wanted to go shopping in Marrakesh's winding alleys and markets, immensely popular with tourists and famous for local handcrafted goods. Anwar was helping them make their way through the narrow alleys and warding off the bands of local men who badger tourists to hire them as guides.
Two policemen spotted Anwar with the German couple, and stopped him.
"What are you doing with these faggots?" the police asked.
Anwar explained they were friends of his, but the police asked him to produce a badge that all official guides must carry when escorting tourists through the market area. Anwar, of course, didn't have one. He was arrested on the grounds that he was acting as an unauthorized guide.
"It was just an excuse," he says. "I was really arrested because they could tell we were gay."
At the police station, it was discovered Anwar had previously been brought in on suspicion of being gay. This time, Anwar spent five days in jail. He was only able to get out of going to trial, he says, because his mother is a court stenographer and was able to have a judge friend pull some strings.
But as Anwar was leaving the station, the police chief warned him: "If I see you again, you will go to jail for three years."
At that point, though, the police weren't Anwar's worst problem. His family was.
The first time he was arrested, Anwar was able to convince his family that he was just unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But with the second arrest, they knew it was more than chance. They blamed his gay behavior on the time he spent in Germany, and vowed to cure him of it.
Against his will, Anwar's family forced him to get engaged in what was to be an arranged marriage. Before the wedding could take place, however, Anwar got a job with a travel agency and fled to the United Arab Emirates, in the Persian Gulf.
But gay life there was even more repressive than in Morocco, says Anwar. So when he got a chance to come to the United States on a tourist visa last year, he applied for asylum based on being gay. In mid-August this year, Anwar was granted asylum.
If he returned to Morocco now, he says, he would constantly be under the surveillance of the police. If he was arrested a third time, he has no doubt he would go to prison for years.
Even if he somehow managed to evade arrest, he wonders how he would be able to survive the family pressures. His stepfather would likely beat him, he fears, and the rest of the family would keep constant vigil: Forcing him to get married, and watching his every move to make sure he didn't socialize with other men who might be gay.
Since coming to the United States, Anwar has met a boyfriend, an American whom he has lived with for the past year. "I'd never be able to have that kind of relationship in Morocco," he says.
He's also met other gay Muslims—as well as gay Christians and gay Jews—who have helped him reconcile his religion with his sexual orientation.
Anwar knows he is "incredibly lucky": Lucky that he was able to come to the United States, lucky to find a man he loves, lucky that he was able to prove his case to immigration officials.
And, I would add, lucky he was granted asylum before Sept. 11. With the current climate of fear toward Arabs and Muslims, it would be particularly difficult for someone like Anwar to win asylum today.
Ironically, gay Arabs and Muslims seeking asylum are probably more in need of it at this point than ever before. Repressive Arab governments—many of whom the U.S. government considers political friends, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia—have let it be known that part of what they expect in return for their participation in Bush's "international coalition against terrorism" is a backing off of criticism about human-rights abuses.
Gays and lesbians have never been well protected in such countries. Now, they will be even more vulnerable.
"If I had been forced to go back," says Anwar, "I don't know how I would survive."
Dahir receives e-mail at MubarakDah@aol.com
