But if I have a date upstairs and my family is downstairs, they won’t even come up.”
“If you go out with a girl, people will start to ask her questions. “It’s a lot easier to be gay than straight here,” he had said. As he resumed his narration, I recalled something he had told me earlier. To his relief, the cops nodded us through. Yasser looked behind him to see if he could reverse the car, but had no choice except to proceed. I rummaged through my purse, realizing that I’d left my passport in the hotel for safekeeping. He wasn’t worried about the gay-themed nature of his tour-he didn’t want to be caught alone with a woman. “Oh shit, it’s a checkpoint,” he said, inclining his head toward some traffic cops in brown uniforms. Yasser turned onto a side street, then braked suddenly. Yasser gestured to a parking lot across from the shopping center, explaining that after midnight it would be “full of men picking up men.” These days, he said, “you see gay people everywhere.” Whereas most such establishments have a family section, two of this area’s cafés allow only men not surprisingly, they are popular among men who prefer one another’s company. Men congregated outside and in nearby cafés. Leaving the barbershop, we drove onto Tahlia Street, a broad avenue framed by palm trees, then went past a succession of sleek malls and slowed in front of a glass-and-steel shopping center. Yasser is homosexual, or so we would describe him in the West, and the barbershop we visited caters to gay men. But Yasser wears a silver necklace, a silver bracelet, and a sparkly red stud in his left ear, and his hair is shaggy. Officially, men in Saudi Arabia aren’t allowed to wear their hair long or to display jewelry-such vanities are usually deemed to violate an Islamic instruction that the sexes must not be too similar in appearance. The air conditioner of his dusty Honda battled the heat, prayer beads dangled from the rearview mirror, and the smell of the cigarette he’d just smoked wafted toward me as he stopped to show me a barbershop that his friends frequent. When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.Yasser, a 26-year-old artist, was taking me on an impromptu tour of his hometown of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on a sweltering September afternoon. Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering. Protect your children from adult content and block access to this site by using parental controls. PARENTS, PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to keep any age-restricted content from being displayed to your children or wards. Furthermore, you represent and warrant that you will not allow any minor access to this site or services. This website should only be accessed if you are at least 18 years old or of legal age to view such material in your local jurisdiction, whichever is greater. You are about to enter a website that contains explicit material (pornography).