Under the Afghan veil, men in love with men

A motorbike repairman, he has a youthful face, a jaunty black mustache and a post-Taliban cleanshaven chin. As he talks, his knee bounces up and down, an involuntary sign of his embarrassment. ‘‘These are hard questions you are asking,’’ Daud says. ‘‘We don’t usually talk about such things.’’

Although rarely acknowledged, the prevalence of sex between Afghan men is an open secret. It is especially true here in Kandahar, which was the heartland of the Taliban movement.

It might seem odd that such a sexually repressive society is marked by heightened homosexual activity. But Justin Richardson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, says such thinking is backward — it is precisely the extreme restrictions on sexual relations with women that lead to greater prevalence of the behaviour.

‘‘In some Muslim societies where the prohibition against premarital heterosexual intercourse is extremely high — higher than that against sex between men — you will find men having sex with other males not because they find them most attractive of all but because they find them most attractive of the limited options available to them,’’ Richardson says.

The love by men for younger, beautiful males, who are called halekon, is even enshrined in Pashtun literature. A popular poem by Syed Abdul Khaliq Agha, who died last year, notes Kandahar’s special reputation. ‘‘Kandahar has beautiful halekon,’’ the poem goes. ‘‘They have black eyes and white cheeks.’’

When asked directly, few deny that a significant percentage of men in this region have sex with men and boys. Just ask Mullah Mohammed Ibrahim, a local cleric. ‘‘Ninety per cent of men have the desire to commit this sin,’’ the mullah says. ‘‘But most are right with God and exercise control. Only 20 to 50 percent of those who want to do this actually do it.’’

Following this math, this suggests that somewhere between 18 percent and 45 percent of men here engage in homosexual sex — significantly higher than 3-7 per cent of American men.

The Koran mandates ‘‘hard punishment’’ for offenders, Ibrahim explains. By tradition there are three penalties: being burned at the stake, pushed over the edge of a cliff or crushed by a toppled wall. During its reign in Kandahar, the Taliban implemented the latter.

In February 1998, it used a tank to push a brick wall on top of three men, two accused of sodomy and the third of homosexual rape. The first two died; the third spent a week in the hospital and, under the assumption that God had spared him, was sent to prison. He served six months and fled to Pakistan.

Many accuse the Taliban of hypocrisy on the issue of homosexuality. ‘‘The Taliban had halekon, but they kept it secret,’’ says one anti-Taliban commander. ‘‘They hid their halekon in their madrasas.’’

It’s not only religious authorities who describe homosexual sex as common among the Pashtuns. Dr Mohammed Nasem Zafar, a professor at Kandahar Medical College, estimates that about 50 percent of the city’s male residents have sex with men or boys at some point in their lives.

He says the prime age at which boys are attractive to men is from 12 to 16 — before their beards grow in. The adolescents sometimes develop medical problems, which he sees in his practice, such as sexually transmitted diseases and sphincter incontinence.

‘‘Sometimes when the halekon grow up, the older men actually try to keep them in the family by marrying them off to their daughters,’’ the doctor says. Zafar cites a local mullah whom he caught once using the examination table in the doctor’s one-room clinic for sex with a younger man. ‘‘If this is our mullah, what can you say for the rest?’’ Zafar asks.

Richardson, the psychiatry professor, says it would be wrong to call Afghan men homosexual, since their decision to have sex with men is not a reflection of what Westerners call gender identity. Instead, he compares them to prison inmates: They have sex with men primarily because they find themselves in a situation where men are more available as sex partners than are women. ‘‘It is something they do,’’ he notes, ‘‘not something they are.’’

Daud, who says his first sexual experience with a man occurred when he was 20, would like to get married. “But the economic situation in our country makes it hard,’’ he says.

Daud thinks if coeducation returns and the dress code for women eases, men will have fewer reasons to seek solace of other men. ‘‘If I find someone, I will send my mother over to her’’ to ask for her hand in marriage, Daud says. ‘‘I’m waiting to see her.’’

(LA Times-Washington Post)