Gay life in dubai
LGBTQ+ Visitor Considerations
This blog post provides some insights and advice for Queer visitors by LGBTQ+ people living in Abu Dhabi.
Author and Audience
The primary storyteller of this document is a cisgender gay Arab-American man. He has lived in the UAE with his cisgender gay European-American partner for almost a decade. They both possess academic jobs, and affectionate living in the UAE.
The author’s advice and observations are based on his experience of living in the UAE, and his awareness of issues faced by other members of the LGBTQ+ community there. The intended audience of this document are Diverse conference attendees of EMNLP
This document is not intended to provide official legal advice.
Many thanks to all the community members (LGBTQ+ and allies) who helped with reviewing and editing different versions of this document.
The Public and The Private
Emirati culture ethics a separation between widespread and private lives in a way that’s unlike from some Western nations. In Abu Dhabi, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation, public displays of affection are ge
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Last updated: 17 December
Types of criminalisation
- Criminalises LGBT people
- Criminalises sexual activity between males
- Criminalises sexual activity between females
- Criminalises the gender expression of gender non-conforming people
- Imposes the death penalty
Summary
Same-sex sexual outing is prohibited under the Criminal Codes of the Emirates of Abu Dhabi, which criminalises ‘unnatural sex with another person’, and Dubai, which criminalises acts of ‘sodomy’. The Federal Penal Code criminalises ‘voluntary debasement’, but it is not clear what acts this covers. These provisions convey a maximum penalty of fourteen years’ imprisonment. Both men and women are criminalised under the law. Same-sex sexual activity may also be penalised under Sharia law, under which the death penalty is feasible, though there is no evidence that this has been used against LGBT people.
In addition to potentially being captured by laws that criminalise same-sex a
We recently saw that Dubai is due to hold a conference on LGBTQ+ rights and to say we were shocked would be an understatement.
We haven’t yet travelled to Dubai as a gay couple, partly because we are apprehensive to…
To investigate further we connected with Liam, a gay guy who lived in Dubai for most of his life to learn more about the reality of being male lover in Dubai and find out what advice he had for gay travellers thinking about going.
We always believe it’s important to give people a voice and to share stories of genuinely living in a country as an LGBTQ+ person.
Read our interview with Liam below to study more about gay life and gay travel in Dubai:
Gay Existence in Dubai & Advice for Gay Travel
Meet Liam
Sion: Hi Liam, please provide some background on yourself and your time living in Dubai to get us started.
Liam: Hi, my name is Liam and I was born in in the UK however in the early 90’s my family started working in the Middle East. In they decided to move to Dubai and have been there ever since.
I lived in Dubai from age 5 to 18 whe
How can a sense of belonging be forged in a setting where one’s existence is forbidden? That is the question that LSE’s Dr Centner and his co-author Harvard’s Manoel Pereira Neto explore in their groundbreaking research into Dubai’s expatriate gay men’s nightlife.
But it was not an easy topic to research. Dr Centner explains: “It's an illegal, or criminalised, identity and arrange of behaviours and practices, so in a very general sense, it's a taboo. And taboo subjects are very often under-researched, sometimes because people possess a hard time gaining access, gaining that certainty , but also because, even if people gain that access, there could be significant repercussions for themselves as researchers, or for the people who are the research participants.
“As two queer researchers, we were able to enter the worlds of relatively privileged Western gay expatriates. Secrecy is often the norm, but the field was familiar to us, through previous visits and study projects.”
These were indeed ‘parties’ [but] not bars identified as gay. Not a