Haider, who met the reporter on Manjam, the gay cruising site, looks out on the Karada district from a hotel window. LUONGO What had only been lines on a map, forbidden and dangerous, were places that had come alive, places that I could now see with my own eyes. I was in Baghdad in mid for my second time.
The post-surge trip introduced me to places I had only heard of in stories โ what then seemed like fables โ told to me by Ali Hili, the director of Iraqi LGBT, a London-based human rights group working with gay men in Iraq, and by other gay men I had met in Baghdad two years earlier. Ali told of walking the reedy banks of the Tigris in Baghdad, a place he said, where gay men laughed, cruised, and picnicked together in the days before the US invasion changed everything.
The recent horrors reported out of this city, for gays and ordinary citizens alike, made it hard to believe such a time ever existed. That is until I was able to see it with my own eyes, in a Baghdad inching, hoping to be post-war. It was a completely different city from the one I discovered in my first visit in , when the insurgent uprising meant that simply being on the street was an invitation to instant death. This visit would be full of stark contrasts. It was as if there were two different Baghdads โ at least.
I would interview men from Sadr City, one of the poorest, most dangerous districts, who talked about friends killed by sprays of bullets in drive-by shootings, their gathering places firebombed, their names posted on lists, others raped and disappeared by militia-infested police squadrons at checkpoints. I would see a hospital where the bodies of gay men had been dumped, their anuses closed shut from a heavy glue used to torture them. I would visit a safe house, chatting with gay men and transgender Iraqis who hid for safety, yet at the same time were welcoming and life-affirming, teaching me gay Arabic slang and joking about sex with gay Saddam-look-alikes.
I would grow to fall in love with a newly vibrant Baghdad. This four-part series does not aim to duplicate the work of reporters who, over the past four years, exposed the targeted killings of Iraqi gay men. My goal instead is to draw on my experiences in the spaces where gay men socialize, where they have been killed and where they hide, to demystify what remains an abstraction for Western audiences. The stories of the men in Baghdad, told from their own spaces, rather than through second-hand accounts or from overseas, humanizes them, makes them more than victims in a war alternately labeled a fight for freedom, a clash of religious ideologies and, by many, a grave mistake by the United States that has thrown occupied Iraq into chaos.
