Michael Luongo Returns To Baghdad

This week Gay City News launches a four-part series from Michael Luongo in which he examines "what changed and what didn't" since he last investigated gay life in Iraq in 2007. Here's an excerpt from the first installment:

This visit would be full of stark contrasts. It was as if there were two different Baghdads — at least. I would interview men from Sadr City, one of the poorest, most dangerous districts, who talked about friends killed by sprays of bullets in drive-by shootings, their gathering places firebombed, their names posted on lists, others raped and disappeared by militia-infested police squadrons at checkpoints. I would see a hospital where the bodies of gay men had been dumped, their anuses closed shut from a heavy glue used to torture them. I would visit a safe house, chatting with gay men and transgender Iraqis who hid for safety, yet at the same time were welcoming and life-affirming, teaching me gay Arabic slang and joking about sex with gay Saddam-look-alikes.

And I would meet other men from different parts of Baghdad, young, fashionable, masculine, with far less to fear, who did in fact cruise along the colorful banks of the Tigris on Abu Nuwaz Street and spend their evenings at fashionable cafés popular among gays in West Baghdad, flirting with men they met through the website Manjam as they sat back in comfortable seats visible from the street. I would grow to fall in love with a newly vibrant Baghdad. Not that I didn’t still have much to fear as a visiting gay journalist — from conversations that could be tapped to entrapment, spies, and the bullets of panicked Iraqi soldiers.

Read the entire first installment.

Gay Journalist Michael Luongo Wins Reporting Award

Last night NYC-based gay journo Michael Luongo won the Reporting Award at the Society for Professional Journalist's New York Deadline Club Awards, for his November 2007 story Our Man In Baghdad, which was published in the Gay City News. The story focuses on the hidden gay life in Iraq, with Luongo meeting some of the hundreds of Iraqi men with Gaydar profiles, both to his and their great peril.

Judges called Luongo's story "a riveting read", saying the story "details the harrowing task of survival, not only in a war zone but also as an outsider in one's own culture. A thorough, well-researched and compelling article on a most timely topic."

I thought Luongo's story was fantastic and by chance happened to get to tell him so on the day it was published. Go check it out.