I guess that explains a lot. My wife is Moroccan and she was telling me about gangs of boys preying on other boys sexually. I was thinking man that's fucked up. Who would ever do that but the most twisted, devious minds. Apparently this is common knowledge but unspoken of. Being openly gay is frowned upon.

If you ever see the movie "The Kite Runner" they have a scene where one of the two boys is chased down by the gang of teenagers. Later on his son is also being molested by the same guys, now adults.

This is one of the strangest contradictions in some Muslim countries. And a fundamental reason it exists is because people are too uncomfortable to talk/think about it. It does not help either that their are not too many mediums for those interested to discuss, except for maybe on the internet.

In the West we think of the gender roles as male and female but in the Middle East (and in Ancient Greece in our own cultural heritage) the gender roles are "penetrator" and "penetrated". An adult (or older) male penetrator is not considered homosexual in this culture, nor is an adolescent (or younger) male penetrated. They would say that a homosexual is an adult male penetrated, and only that is taboo.

I heard about this phenomenon from nato troops in Afgahnistan too. Apparently a woman has to be safely transported abroad if she is seen with a man. A friend who was stationed in Meymaneh told me that he had seen men having gay sex in dark alleys after night, apparently out of desperation. He described it as a not too uncommon phenomenon, although he had only observed it once.