LI BEIRUT

You have no idea how many rich Saudi fuckers come here," Babak said. "We Beirutis fuck well. The Saudis? They walk around like they are so butch, but once naked they are all bottoms." I laughed.

Babak was the twenty-something founder of Arabian Bears, who organized "Bear" tours of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan for Western gay men keen to sample the delights of the region. Bears, for those not initiated into the ghettoization of Western homosexuality, are the gay men who do not conform to "body fascist" stereotypes and flaunt the hair on their bodies and the ample meat on their bones. Or, as a friend said, "They are just gay men who have given up."

It was Ramadan 2010, almost the end of Islamic year 1431. The year 1432 would be momentous, but I didn't know it then. I was in Beirut to talk to the Lebanese about God and sex. My film, A Jihad for Love, was two years into its run. Our calculations, based on theatrical release in the US and Canada, a huge number of film festivals, good television ratings in countries like India, and thousands of DVD sales, added up to the film's reaching hundreds of thousands of people. I was traveling fast and furiously through twenty countries. Was this my fifteen minutes? The flood of journalists seeking interviews never seemed to cease. The highs had been many. And the fatwas came fast, as did the online hate. Our publicist had taught me well in the school of "there is no such thing as bad publicity."

Beirut was a city finding its feet after years of civil war. A month earlier an Egyptian feminist organization had organized a screening of the film in my beloved Cairo, but I had been unable to attend. So this was the first time I had shown up with my producer in an Arab capital. It was a big deal for me, like a major milestone had been crossed. Getting to Beirut as a servant-class Indian was quite the story.

It had taken months for the Middle East offices of a German nonprofit foundation affiliated with the German Green Party to get me a visa. A proud, green card–carrying nonresident alien in the US, I still held an Indian passport. The women at the foundation were even asked by the Lebanese authorities to sign a guarantee that I would not marry a Lebanese woman in an effort to become a citizen. It was typical Lebanese racism toward people from my part of the world, who form a substantial chunk of the indentured-labor class for wealthy Beirutis. But they finally did stamp my passport. Getting to any other Arab country had never been a problem. I had innumerable Egyptian visas. But Egypt was a poor country that did not import its toilet cleaners from the Indian subcontinent. They were abundant in its own majority, living in wretched poverty. Egypt was the poorest of all Arab countries, but it had remained the cultural heart of the Arab world for centuries. Here in tiny Lebanon, there had always been a wealthy upper class composed of Christians and Muslims alike. The former, with many sub-sects, were almost the majority. The latter were equally sectarian, split between different schools of Sunni and Shia Islam.

Religion was always a complicated issue here. A perilous democratic structure had been formed after two decades of civil war. It was designed to placate all groups. Constitutionally, the president had to be a Christian and the prime minister had to be Sunni Muslim. The speaker of Parliament was always Shia. And then there was Hizbullah ("The Party of God or Allah") that wove into the power structure in complicated ways. For many of the Shia Lebanese, Hassan Nasrallah was a revered sheikh and freedom fighter. For the West, Nasrallah was a terrorist. I understood both sides of the argument, which put me in a tight spot with my Western colleagues.

In Beirut, I was joined by my Jewish producer, David. Like me, he encountered Lebanese border officials surprisingly examining passports at the boarding gate of the Beirut-bound flight while we were still in Frankfurt. Like mine, his passport needed to prove he'd never been to Israel. He'd been to Israel more times than anyone I knew. In any case, to me it was clear: I was entering a police state. I am sure the Iranian visa on my Indian passport did not go unnoticed and was probably a positive. Fortunately, David had always been smart enough to get his numerous Israeli entry and exit visas on separate pieces of paper — a luxury the equally paranoid Israelis offered at their equally aggressively policed borders. I would not know either way because Israel was never on my map of countries to visit. At the time, I was a proud supporter of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement against Israel — a panoply of boycotts that were intended to combat what many of my Facebook friends called "Israeli apartheid." David was excited to be in Beirut. I told him he was a masochist but respected his curiosity.

Within my first twenty hours in the country, I had walked past Beiruti graffiti featuring a Star of David with blood oozing from it. Equally without nuance was the hurriedly scrawled "Fuck the Jews" on a nearby wall. I prayed David missed it. Both of us were gay and proud of our Jewish-Muslim partnership.

We'd split up to do different things, as usual. David and I mostly met at screenings and our joint interviews. I had a Grindr date that night. Grindr, the gay hookup app, was blazing a trail on smartphones worldwide. Everyone seemed to know about it, and for the ultra-fashionable gay Beiruti men it was a must-have. The other popular hookup site, called Manjam, had not yet developed an app like Grindr that told you, right down to the number of feet, where a potential hookup waited. Its heterosexual equivalent, Tinder, was a while away.

Standing in the small lobby of our hotel, the Mayflower, I wondered if David had noticed the map on display. We didn't have an opportunity to discuss it. Perhaps neither of us wanted to. There it was: what I had often seen on many maps of the world in Islamic textbooks when growing up. Lebanon's neighboring country on this map was labeled Palestine and most of its newer Jewish cities, such as Tel Aviv, had been obliterated. Jerusalem was in bold with its Arabic name, Al Quds. There was Lebanon, there was Syria, even Jordan and Egypt, but the entire nation of Israel had been wiped off the face of this version of earth.

My Grindr hookup was getting closer. At 600 feet I told him I was coming down to receive him. Only hotel guests with room keys could ride the elevator.

He was a beautiful and muscular manimal with a perfectly groomed black beard and mustache. The sex was unbelievably good, and predictably he was a bottom, as all Arab men I had ever bedded were. We discussed Beirut, smoking our post-coital cigarettes. He said he would...