BY SEAN HANSEN
“Are you a mule, or not?!” His kidnappers shouted, using a derogatory slang word for a gay person in Libyan Arabic.
Abdough Ilbosiphi cowered in the back of a blacked-out Toyota, as it drove away from his hometown of Soq Aljuma’a, Libya. As his kidnappers hit him repeatedly on the back of the neck, Abdough remained silent. Locked in the backseat, he frantically thought how he could dispose of his cellphone. “It has all my details, photos of my ex-boyfriend,” he recalls, still traumatized.
Abdough was just sixteen when he and his best friend launched Libya Pride, a gay rights blog that quickly drew the attention of Libya’s underground LGBT community. At the time, he was riding the wave of optimism that followed Libya’s 2011 revolution, and had hoped that his anonymous blogging could shift perceptions of homosexuality in one of the world’s most conservative societies.
But four years after the revolution, as Abdough sat blindfolded and uneasy in the back of an SUV, he felt little pride in what had become of his country.
The car stopped. Abdough shuffled out.
“I was blindfolded when we got to their place,” he recalls, but he soon found himself in an empty, brightly-lit room — sitting across from a large man with a thick beard. Judging from the man’s traditional Muslim dress and beard, Abdough guessed that his kidnappers were members of the Quwwat alrude alkhasa, the conservative Islamic militia controlling Tripoli at the time.
Abdough doesn’t know how long the interrogation lasted, but he hasn’t forgotten the feelings of fear and panic. “They were asking me about the blog,” he says, his voice laced with discomfort. “They kept asking, ‘Who is behind it?’ and I would insist that ‘It was nothing. It was just me and my friend. We were just bored.’”
After several alternating rounds of interrogation and beatings, a new face entered the room and changed the line of questioning: “Do you watch American movies? Do you listen to English songs?” Abdough felt the mood in the room shift. He sized up the new interrogator as “the good cop,” and he played along.
“Yes, I do,” he admitted. As the man launched into an hour-long lecture about western media propaganda being haram, or against Islamic law, Abdough found himself sobbing and nodding in agreement.
“I started crying, just breaking down,” he says. “I put my head on his chest, and told him I was deluded.”
The charade worked.
Within hours, the kidnappers let Abdough go. With a promise to shut down the website and continue praying five times a day, he left the compound — forced to walk for several hours to his home. Traumatized, Abdough returned to his family, unable to speak about anything for fear of reprisal.
“I went back home and just pretended like nothing happened,” he says. To this day, Abdough’s identity as a gay man remains hidden, save for a small circle of friends.
Abdough’s story is remarkably common for LGBT Libyans living in the post-Gaddafi era. Kidnappings and arbitrary detention based on one’s assumed sexual orientation have become routine practice by militias and security personnel. The Libyan Red Cross estimates that over 600 Libyans were kidnapped or killed by militia groups between February 2014 and April 2015, the same window when Abdough was abducted.
Discrimination and hararassment against gay Libyans continues to exist in Libya’s penal code today, with same-sex relations punishable by up to five years in prison.
But instead of leaving Libya behind, Abdough chose to stay and continue his social justice campaign — only in a different way. He enrolled in law school, where he currently studies human rights law.
With a more nuanced approach, Abdough continues to stay active in Libyan civil society today. “You cannot just come to people and tell them, gay rights are human rights,” he says. “It doesn’t work like that in Libya.”
“We’re just trying to make people more open to the idea of human rights themselves — and that takes time,” he says.
Despite having lost hope in Libya’s current political class, Abdough remains optimistic. He says that most Libyans are not against gay rights, “but they wouldn’t dare to say that in public, because they don’t feel safe.”
As he says this, it’s as if Abdough is channeling the atmosphere around him.
He abruptly cuts me off.
“Okay, I can’t chat anymore. I’m out in public and there’s a lot of people staring at me now. Ciao.”