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The first UN General Assembly session on AIDS-- some 22 million deaths into the epidemic-- took place in New York at the end of June. UNAIDS, the UN's epidemic central, aptly invited a gay human rights group to attend. The invitation launched an international cat-fight that offers an Alice-in-Wonderland view-through-the-looking-glass at the global politics of sexual identity and human rights-- wherein nothing is as it seems.

Even if heterosex and dirty needles are now the most important vectors of the world's HIV epidemic, the continuing entanglement of homosexuality and AIDS made it perfectly reasonable for UNAIDS to invite the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) to an official round-table.

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But the participation of avowed gays at a UN summit gave diplomats from some Islamic nations apoplexy. Acting anonymously, 11 states exercised their privilege and demanded-- and won-- IGLHRC's ouster.

"Barring a gay human rights group from a UN gathering on AIDS and human rights is a travesty of the whole purpose of these meetings," IGLHRC protested.

A few years ago, that probably would be the end of the story. However Canada-- with support from the European Union, and other, mostly Western governments-- appealed to the UN's full General Assembly to reinstate the gay human rights group. Diplomatic fur flew over a weekend of back-room lobbying. When the General Assembly met on June 26th, there were two hours of bitter argument. Outflanked, the Islamic bloc and its allies tried preventing a quorum: their delegates simply declared themselves absent. The parliamentary ruse failed. In the end, the General Assembly voted 62 to 0, with 30 abstentions, to let IGLHRC be seated. Even the US threw in its support. It was a fight, declared Norway's representative, for the soul of the UN. The prize? A symbolic, three-minute speech by IGLHRC's Karyn Kaplan to the General Assembly, in which she said groups that are stigmatized and silenced are made thus vulnerable to HIV.

Pot calling kettle

IGLHRC indeed knows a thing or two about silencing and stigmatizing. The San Francisco-based organization led the charge to purge radical gay groups from the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) after the US Senate in 1994 passed a resolution sponsored by Sen. Jesse Helms that would have effectively barred ILGA's (ultimately unsuccessful) bid for consultative status at the UN if it continued to host organizations asserting the right of youths to sexual autonomy.

And in a host of recent cases where Western governments have silenced radical gay voices, IGLHRC has kept mum.

When France gratuitously barred Michel Caignet-- editor of the provocative journal Gaie France-- from ever publishing anything again after a pornography conviction, IGLHRC refused to act.

The group was asked, but declined, to oppose a Canadian law imposing prison sentences up to ten years for writing or possessing texts describing sexual acts involving adolescents-- a law Canadian AIDS and civil-liberties groups condemn for criminalizing safe-sex materials, along with shelves-ful of gay literature.

In July, IGLHRC declared they would not protest-- or even investigate-- the Dutch government's October, 2000, seizure of the collection of the Brongersma Foundation, the largest raid on a gay archive since the Nazis destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1933.

The Brongersma archive was raided after Lex van Naerssen, professor of gay studies at the University of Utrecht, went to court to prevent the destruction by two fellow boardmembers of documentary accounts of pederastic relationships.

In May, ironically, IGLRHC touted its role in negotiating hundreds of thousands of dollars from the US and Dutch governments to commemorate Nazi abuses against homosexuals.

"[W]e are not taking action on this case because Western Europe is not currently a priority region for our work," said IGLRHC executive director Surina Khan. IGLHRC spokesman Sydney Levy adds that with its resources stretched, IGLHRC only can take on cases where it feels it can make a difference and where its efforts are not duplicated. He insists that IGLHRC does not withhold Western governments from scrutiny.

New pink triangles

If so, one frights to think how much further repression based on sex could go in America and Europe before IGLHRC would protest. For years, the gay movement has lobbied governments to recognize sexual orientation-- in anti-discrimination, marriage, and hate-crimes laws-- as a category with legal standing, like race or sex. But in granting the point, states discovered that they could wield sexual identity also as a weapon. Forcible ascription of sexual identity by the state is the theme of a new wave of repression in the West.

Civil commitment laws, for example, provide for the permanent imprisonment of people based on what the state asserts are their sexual feelings. Sex-offender registries force those convicted of everything from public sex to relationships with minors, as well as actual rape, to suffer labels such as "Sexually Dangerous Predator," and have their names and addresses posted on lamp posts and web sites. Lifetime parole permanently deprives sex offenders of civil rights, and lets the state send them back to prison at whim. The machinery of sexual identity has proved as amenable to demonizing as liberation.

The new repression may be aimed at "protecting children"-- the West's new political religion. But the repression's reach extends to playful eroticism that used to fly below any authority's radar screen, and encompasses much of male homosexuality. Were they alive today, such men as Walt Whitman, André Gide, Oscar Wilde, F. Holland Day, and Alan Turing would be subject to life imprisonment, physical or chemical castration, and Apartheid-style registration laws.

Canada's kiddie-porn statute makes a large proportion of gay men liable to years in prison for their fiction libraries or physique-magazines, but is so popular that Ottawa vowed to amend the constitution if the Supreme Court, like two lower courts, found the law violated Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Averting a constitutional crisis, the Supreme Court upheld the law earlier this year. If IGLHRC had made a stink about its thoughtcrime law, it's doubtful Canada would have gone to bat for it in June at the UN-- or that IGLRHC could have been invited to address the General Assembly in the first place.

Other paths

If IGLRHC's appearance at UN as representative of the global queer nation was the fruit of a Faustian bargain, IGLHRC's Islamic opponents also were other than they appeared. A yawning gap between what people-- or cultures-- say and what they do should surprise no one. Islamic politicians' vocal opposition to Western gays has to be understood in the context of Islam's long, varied, and continuing customs of homosexual expression-- with traditions of homoerotic poetry and institutionalized homosexuality found nowhere in Christendom.

The Koran promises the faithful that in heaven they will be "attended by boys graced with eternal youth who to the beholders eyes will seem like sprinkled pearls." But on earth, with rare exception, homosexual expression in Islamic cultures takes place in tight, local contexts, among friends and cousins, not anonymously. This same-sex activity doesn't involve anyone assuming a special identity, especially if they stick to the fucking, or if the fuckee hasn't yet assumed the mantle of manhood. Under-the-wraps male homosexuality remains commonplace in Islamic societies wherever fundamentalism doesn't reign-- and persists even where it does. Egyptian morals police may snoop Internet chat rooms and target those who congregate at Western hotels-- like the 50 young men arrested recently on a tourist boat parked at the Cairo Marriot. But what goes down in towns and villages is what always has. Not for nothing did queer Europeans the likes of Sir Richard Burton and Oscar Wilde tour the Arab world to escape repression at home.

Confess, or be destroyed

Cultures all over the world incorporate homosexuality into the social fabric without talking about it. But to the West's political elites, silence is a public-health hazard.

"For many, there is a reluctance to recognize groups affected by HIV/AIDS including men having sex with men; much of that reluctance is based on religion and on culture," said Mary Robinson, the UN commissioner for human rights. "A failure to recognize it means the numbers of those infected can only grow."

But Robinson's blanket claim is false. The Islamic countries, which prefer doing homosexuality to talking about it, have some of the lowest HIV-infection rates in the world-- not because same-sex play isn't rife, but because, thanks to silence, the social groupings in which it occurs are so local and impermeable. Westerners shouldn't feel smug: the increasing rate of HIV infection among young gays in America and Europe raises the question whether even safe-sex messages exquisitely tailored to subcultural identity can really change an individual's urge to pleasure and risk.

With such a disconnect between rhetoric and reality, the UN vote on excluding IGLHRC was seen by many nations as a referendum on Western cultural imperialism-- an exploitation of AIDS to push politically-correct Western sexual mores. Which is why Russia-- no friend of Islam-- along with Cuba, Haiti, and the Vatican joined the Islamic bloc in seeking to ban the gays.

In deference to the Muslims and anti-globalists, the Special Session's final report avoided naming homosexuals, and spoke instead of those put at risk of HIV due to "sexual practices"; instead of mentioning prostitutes, it described those exposed to HIV because of "occupation"; instead of prisoners, reference was made to those exposed because of "institutional status." Calls to legalize prostitution and gay marriage also were shelved.

In a completely clear-headed world, it would be better perhaps if those demands stayed in. But in the West, at least, pursuing an explicit sexual politics around identity has reached dead-end-- with every seeming advance gained for sanctioned sexual minorities inexorably tightening the noose of repression around the demonized.

Last month's UN contretemps over gays and AIDS wasn't a fight between the forces of light-- of human rights and freedom-- versus the forces of darkness-- complacency and repression. It was rather a clash between a hidden Islamic homosexuality that cannot speak, and a Western homosexuality, cloaked in power, that increasingly can only lie.