The arrival and uses of new media forms
Apart from Casablanca, a metropolis of around four million inhabitants, Moroccan cities are
relatively small places where family and local neighbourhood (houma) relationships are highly
valued. The arrival of the Net and through it, access to sites providing information on
opportunities (amongst other things) for emigration and working abroad was a decisive step
forward for large numbers of young Moroccans seeking to opportunities leave a country with
levels of youth employment. Dating forums of various kinds provide another way of linking up
with the outside world. In cities where open same-sex relationships are almost never openly
discussed, aside from a limited circle of intimate friends, francophone chat-sites like
cybermen.com and ABCoeur.com provided an unprecedented opportunity to join a global identity
community. Reinforcing knowledge of a broad set of gay concerns was satellite television, with
gay issues increasingly treated in entertainment and the news on French television. Pink TV, the
French gay channel launched in 2004 was immediately picked up on by Moroccan gay men.
The wider context: Arab gay identities made public
While Moroccan gay men – or at least those able to use a keyboard to read and correspond in
French, Spanish and English - are now arguably aware of the features of a global gay culture,
there remains the question of if and how a gay communitarian identity might emerge in the Arab
world. To date Lebanon is the only country where an independent organisation, HeLeM (see
www.helem.net) has emerged to combat legal and social discrimination touching the LGBTQI
community. (Significantly, this is the first organisation, to the present writer’s knowledge, to use
the term LGBTQI community). In other Arab countries, notably Egypt discrimination remains
rampant and chat-sites have been used to entrap gays. In the context of the Queen Boat trials
(early 2000s), Egypt saw possibly the worst anti-gay human rights abuses to date in the region.
Despite the development of more conservative forms of Islamic practice and the emergence of an
increasingly comfortable middle class, Morocco has yet to see either government-sponsored
crackdowns on a nascent gay community or the emergence of gay activism. In summer 2004, the
arrest of a number of gays at a private party in the northern city of Tetouan was hushed up and all
those detained release. A major tourist destination, Morocco could not afford to have its
reputation stained by a potential media firestorm in France over such an event. Local press
comment was measured and limited. At the other end of the spectrum the ALCS (Assocation de
lutte contre le Sida, the main NGO dealing with the fight against AIDS) has conducted
prevention campaigns with official blessing targeting all sectors of the population.
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Convention