Update from Bologna: gay rights and the politics of the whorehouse

In the past week, Sweden introduced full marital rights for same-sex couples while Australia legislated for everything but. Yet, as Parvez Sharma’s 2007 documentary A Jihad for Love makes painfully clear, such rights are a very distant dream for gay Muslims.

Possibly the most heartbreaking inclusion in Bologna's Human Rights film festival, the film documents the lives of nine gay and lesbian Muslims from countries where homosexuality is either criminalised or heavily taboo.

“I asked God to make me normal,” says Maryam. Like the film’s other subjects, she desperately seeks acceptance by Islam, but her feelings of guilt and self-abnegation create an identity crisis. Amir from Iran received 100 lashes for attending a gay event, after which he fled to Turkey with three friends: Arsham, Payam and Mojtab. They are all waiting for the UN to consider their refugee applications and together they form the emotional backbone of the film.



Their mutual support for each other is inspiring, even though their futures are uncertain. In a café Arsham offers some much-welcome light relief, pretending to divine his friend’s fate by "reading" the residue in his coffee: “A man loves you. I see you lying with both your legs in the air.” They burst out laughing.

This film is so rich a portrait of homosexual identity under Islam, that it is difficult to convey all the moments of pathos. Suffice to say: humour, humanity and pain are always close to the surface. At some point, all the characters ask: "Why can I not be both gay and a good Muslim?." “It will take a Jihad,” Payam predicts. And while he may be right about the fight for acceptance, I prefer another subject’s forecast: it will require Itjihad, an Islamic principle that means "independent reasoning."

On Palm Sunday, while church bells are trying to out-do each other around the city, I catch a feature called Working Girls (1986) directed by Lizzie Borden—a controversial portrait of life as a prostitute in a New York hostess house. Here we witness the vicissitudes of prostitution as a business; sex is commodified less because of the male clientele than because of the Madame. “You can’t just leave,” she protests as protagonist Molly quits, “You know I’m short of girls.”

Borden’s film was banned in Italy due to censorship, which explains why artistic director Giulia Grassilli wanted to include it in the festival. The film underlines that is not just men who profit from the sex trade, and that the potential to brutalise others is in all of us. This is no mute point: exploitation has many faces.