NEW YORK, NY — Homophobia in the Muslim world is “becoming very inconvenient for liberals because liberals are apologists for Islam,” Michael Lucas, a gay pornographic film star and director, charged in a radio interview Sunday.
Lucas slammed liberals for being largely silent amid increasing reports of gay people being persecuted in the Muslim world. And he said that he has noticed a trend in which the left-wing focuses on a specific country’s leadership instead of “political Islam” when attributing blame for anti-gay policies and actions.
Lucas said he is noticing a trend in which more and more “gays are leaving their base and the party line because the party line is ‘Islam is a good thing. Islam is our friend.’”
Lucas is the founder and CEO of Lucas Entertainment, New York’s largest gay adult film company and one of the biggest gay porn production companies in the world.
He was speaking in an interview Sunday night on this reporter’s talk radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio, broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM.
Listen to the interview below:
Fifty-seven people were reportedly arrested by Egyptian authorities in recent days in what the news media have described as the widest crackdown on the country’s gay community.
According to Amnesty International, as well as lawyers for some of those detained, forced anal exams were carried out on some of the individuals accused of having homosexual sex. Egyptian Judicial sources cited by Reuters did not deny the anal examinations, instead defending the procedures as legal and not a form of abuse, as human rights organizations have charged.
Lucas said the liberal world has been struggling to react to the events in Egypt and other recent reports of homophobia across the larger Islamic world.
He stated:
Now that we are talking about Muslim homophobia, it is becoming very inconvenient for liberals because liberals are apologists for Islam. So it is becoming very inconvenient, and that is why they usually tie it to some specific person; specific bad leader. For example, it would be [Egyptian President Abdel Fattah] Sisi, or it would be in Chechnya the leader [Chechen President Ramzan Akhmadovich] Kadyrov, or it would be one individual that is responsible — or maybe at the most one political party, but not political Islam. So that is exactly what is happening here in this situation.
This was happening before Sisi. This is happening all over the Muslim world — all of those Muslim countries to one degree or another. For example, in Saudi Arabia, it is a daily routine, while in Egypt there are waves.
“Gay Media Censorship”
Even though Lucas is a celebrity in Western gay culture, he said that most gay publications where he regularly penned articles in the past gradually stopped publishing any of his pieces related to Islam. He charged that this “censorship,” as he labeled it, escalated as he started noticing what he described as a change in the attitude of talkbacks within the U.S gay community toward Islam.
Lucas stated: “Gays, no matter how much you brainwash them, it is very difficult in the end to say, ‘No, Islam is not an enemy of gay people.’ So as public opinion of gay people was changing, gay publications, most of them stopped publishing my articles about Islam.”
“And that is actually very interesting. I could write about anything but not about Islam because gay people should be in their own box … It is becoming dangerous that gays are leaving their base and the party line because the party line is ‘Islam is a good thing. Islam is our friend.’”
The latest crackdown in Egypt, meanwhile, began on Sept. 22 when a handful of attendees at a concert by the Lebanese alternative rock band Mashrou’ Leila raised a rainbow flag, and the incident went viral on social media. Authorities arrested at least four people for hoisting the flag at the concert.
Reuters further reported on the timeline of events following the concert:
Almost immediately, local media, dominated by state-aligned television personalities, began a campaign against homosexuals, saying they were receiving foreign funding and hosting callers who compared their threat to Islamic State.
Egypt’s media regulator then banned homosexuals from appearing in the media unless they were “repenting,” calling homosexuality a “shame and a disease that should be kept under wraps, not promoted” in order to protect public morality.
…
The overwhelming majority of those arrested are not involved in the flag case, however, and have simply been arrested over their perceived sexual orientation in the following days. Police have raided homes, parties, and used online dating apps to lure gay men — a common tactic in Egypt — to arrest most of them, their lawyers say.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
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