Grinded to a Halt

Grindr sent Egyptian users a warning after alleged entrapments and arrests.

“Police may be posing as LGBT on social media to entrap you,” Grindr warned in a disturbing alert pushed to Egyptian users in 2023. Yes, that’s right, 2023. A quarter way through the supposedly (more) enlightened 21st century and this fearsome oppression is still very much in evidence in several counties in the Middle East. I experienced it for myself just a year ago. In fact, it would be easier for me to say which Middle Eastern countries I’ve visited that this did not happen: Oman and Morocco.

Far be it from me to go into detail why the rulers of that pair of “Arab” states are a little more lenient than most but you can probably work it out. Whatever the truth of the rumors, this more liberal and dare I say it “Western” approach contrasts wildly with the regimes I encountered in Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Dubai, and the wider United Arab Emirates, even if none of them can be considered democracies. Grindr, the world’s most popular gay app, sent a warning to all of its users in Egypt recently following reports that dozens of LGBTQ people had been arrested in the country over the weekend.

Human rights groups have been documenting the digital targeting of LGBTQ people through dating apps and social media in at least five Middle Eastern countries in recent years. In much of the Middle East, a growing community of gay and bisexual men and women are making use of services such as Grindr, and the slightly less well known Hornet and Growler. It’s no exaggeration to say they are a refuge for a marginalized and almost invisible section of society, but they can also be entrapment mechanisms that can lead to persecution, conviction and even imprisonment.

“We have been alerted that Egyptian police are actively making arrests of gay, bi, and trans people on digital platforms,” the warning message, first sent in March, said. “They are using fake accounts and have also taken over accounts from real community members who have already been arrested and had their phones taken.”

I was only in Cairo for a brief visit to see the world-famous Pyramids of Giza, but I felt such unease about actively hooking up with any of the men I was communicating with I decided not to indulge in a hook-up and waited until I was out of the country. Next stop, Athens, couldn’t have been more different.

It’s not like Egypt doesn’t have form in this area, sadly. In 2014, six men were sentenced by an Egyptian court to two years in prison with hard labor for allegedly advertising their apartment on Facebook for men to have sex with each other for a fee of $200 per night, reports the state-owned Egyptian news site Ahram Online based on information from a well-placed “judicial source.”

This unsavory episode may have been the first case in which Egyptians have been caught on heavily monitored social media groups for charges of homosexuality, something activists have warned could become widespread as the government widens its crackdown on LGBT rights. In the last decade, hundreds of people are known to have been arrested on allegations of homosexuality, including eight men vilified for appearing in a video that shows a couple of men exchanging rings that made headlines throughout the Arabic press as a “gay wedding.”

BY STEVE PAFFORD PHOTO

As the regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi steps up these arrests, there was little solid information about how social media had been used to entrap LGBT people. However, in 2018 news emerged that police had entrapped a Grindr user

There, officers made him unlock his phone so they could check it for evidence. The condoms he had been asked to bring were entered as evidence. Investigators instructed him to say he had been molested as a child, that the incident was responsible for his deviant sexual habits. Believing he would be given better treatment, he agreed — but things only got worse from there.

Firas would spend the next 11 weeks in detention, mostly at the Doqi police station. Police there had printouts of his chat history that were taken from his cell phone after the arrest. They beat him regularly and made sure the other in- mates knew what he was in for. He was taken to the Forensic Authority, where doctors examined his anus for signs of sexual activity, but there was still no real evidence of a crime.

Eventually he was convicted of crimes related to the Victorian sounding “debauchery” and sentenced to a year in prison. But Firas’s lawyer appealed the conviction, overturning it six weeks later. Police kept him locked up for two weeks after that, refusing to allow visitors and even denying he was in custody. Eventually, the authorities offered him an informal deportation — a chance to leave the country, in exchange for signing away his asylum rights and paying for the ticket himself. He jumped at the chance, leaving Egypt behind forever.

As the rightward swing makes its totalitarian presence felt across countries not just in the Middle East but across the world, many others will surely follow.

STEVE PAFFORD is an English journalist, actor, and author of the acclaimed book BowieStyle. Having trained from the floor up in UK music titles Q, MOJO and Record Collector, he’s had his work featured in a wide variety of British, American, and Australian media including the BBC, CNN, The Independent and the New York Times. Steve divides his time between Australia and the south of France. going by the name of Firas, who’d arranged to meet a man in Dokki’s Mesaha Square, a treelined park just across the Nile from Cairo. After a terrifying game of cat and mouse, he was taken to the Mogamma, a monolithic government building that houses Egypt’s General Directorate for Protecting Public Morality.