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. 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.
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