Mideast Piece

Anyone who’s been to the Middle East knows that the men around here love to hug, kiss and grope each other - especially the straight ones! Those Puritan-era inhibitions about body contact and sex inherited by modern Americans simply do not apply to to this part of the world, and it’s a good thing.

There is nothing quite like Middle Eastern men greeting each other or saying goodbye. Hands clasp the backs of necks, and sometimes asses, and - quite regularly - lips meet for a quick embrace. This behavior is not considered “gay” by any means, but rather a sign of warm friendship.

My friend Josh is a soldier in the Israeli army, and after fighting in Lebanon some of his unit went on a hiking vacation in Turkey. Quite a few of his photos are of hunky soldiers, totally naked, posing next to waterfalls, mountain views and cliffs. It was quite a struggle to conceal my raging hard-on while we watched the slide-show on his laptop.

Josh is California-born, scruffy, and in possesion of a killer smile and plush bubble butt. He is as straight as they come, and knows I am gay, so I’m sure he got a kick out of showing me shots from his IDF Naked Vacation.

For a full minute I thought about offering him a slow, deep blow job in gratitude for protecting the country in Lebanon. Surely a blow job from a guy could not be too much gay-er than taking dozens of outdoor nudie shots with his buddies for an entire week? Soon after my fantasy began to rage in earnest, his girlfriend walked in.

The male affection norms apply to Middle Eastern men regardless of religion or nationality. The two dorky-looking Arab men above are sharing a quick kiss outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. They don’t have to worry about gay-bashing or the Purity Police throwing the book at them. Here in the Middle East, it’s far more acceptable for men to behave like this in public than it is for a man and a woman (ever hear of the Taliban, or the mullahs?). No, you don’t need to go to San Francisco to catch some hot public man-on-man action.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Too Cute, Too Sexy, Human Rights, GLBTQ, Gay, Middle East. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.