Muslim gay men: identity conflict and politics in a Muslim majority nation

While a number of investigations have examined how gay Muslim men view homosexuality in relation to religious Western homophobia, this research constitutes the first account of the experiences of self-identified gay men living in an African, Muslim nation, where same-sex sex is both illegal and actively persecuted. We interviewed 28 gay men living in Tunisia in order to understand how they assimilate their sexual, religious and ethnic identities within a highly homophobic culture. Utilizing notions of homoerasure and homohysteria (McCormack and Eric Anderson 2014a, b), and examining the intersection of identity conflict and new social movement theory, we highlight four strategies that participants use to negotiate the dissonance of living with conflicting identities in a context of religious homophobia:(1) privileging their Islamic identities and rejecting homosexuality as a legitimate sexual …