Cabbie: "in our religion, we can't handle that stuff... a man has to be a man,"

That is not exactly true - I have been to the Islamic world - this one gay guy was a really good hairdresser.

All the girls recommended him and he did a good job on my hair too !!

I saw gay guys down there - like normal overtly gay - [Islam doesn't seem to have helped them.] Unfortunately many seem to move towards prostitution - with the older European guys.

It is kind of like the women who lose their virginity before marriage - there are no rights systems and many survive by going into the sex trade.

With the hair dresser guy he owned his own business - and there was no secret he was gay. People said to me - do you know he's ... then they would bend their hand.

But mind you that was a big city - maybe in the villages it might be different.

Of course, getting ejected from a cab can be demeaning, but someone needs to pay attention to the mounting stories of documented abuses of gays in the Muslim world.

Despite a history that many Muslin countries formerly embraced gay people as exotic and harmless, many Fundamentalist clerics are calling for the torture and killing of gay people, which has ocurred with alarming frequency over the past several years in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

While in "moderate" Muslin countries like Saudi Arabia, persecuted gays can only expect to be hunted down, flogged and imprisoned, in the more extreme countries gays are tortured and murdered. The "lucky" ones are merely dragged out of their homes and beaten to death. The lastest fad, documented by numerous human rights organizations, is to kidnap gays, glue their anuses shut and force feed them laxitives, resulting in slow, painful and very horrible deaths. Before executing gay men by this barbaric method, most of the victims are subjected to other brutal tortures to make them give up the names of lovers, sexual partners or anyone else they even think are gay. These stories have been coming out of conservative Muslim countries for the past year or so, but nobody in the Western world (outside of the gay press) seems to notice, care or speak up.

I have no problem with peaceful, moderate Muslims who choose to "live and let live", but Fundamentalist Muslims are quite another story. It is frustrating to see these stories repeated over and over in the gay press yet hear virtually nothing about them in the mainstream media. I've even heard certain no-brain homophobes laugh about it, which is the most attention it seems to have received from heterosexuals.

I'm glad I live in the US. Being denounced as a hell-bound, immoral child-molesting predator by Christian fundamentalist is no fun, but few of them have (yet) called for our outright annihilation.