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Gay life in dubai

LGBTQ+ Visitor Considerations

This blog post provides some insights and advice for Queer visitors by Homosexual people living in Abu Dhabi.

Author and Audience

The primary writer of this document is a cisgender gay Arab-American gentleman. He has lived in the UAE with his cisgender gay European-American significant other for almost a decade. They both have academic jobs, and love living in the UAE.

The author’s advice and observations are based on his encounter of living in the UAE, and his awareness of issues faced by other members of the LGBTQ+ group there. The intended audience of this document are Homosexual 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 proofreading and editing other versions of this document.

The Public and The Private

Emirati tradition values a separation between public and private lives in a way that’s different from some Western nations. In Abu Dhabi, regardless of gender persona 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 activity 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 remove what acts this covers. These provisions carry a maximum penalty of fourteen years’ imprisonment. Both men and women are criminalised under the law. Gay sexual activity may also be penalised under Sharia law, under which the death penalty is workable, 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 maintain a conference on Gay rights and to speak 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 being to learn more about the reality of existence gay in Dubai and find out what guide he had for homosexual travellers thinking about going.

We always believe it’s key to give people a voice and to contribute stories of genuinely living in a country as an LGBTQ+ person.

Read our interview with Liam below to learn more about gay life and homosexual travel in Dubai:

Gay Animation in Dubai & Consultation for Gay Travel

Meet Liam

Sion: Hi Liam, please provide some background on yourself and your time living in Dubai to obtain 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 functional 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 study 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 establish of behaviours and practices, so in a very general meaning, it's a taboo. And taboo subjects are very often under-researched, sometimes because people have a hard time gaining access, gaining that trust, 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 fit 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 research projects.”

These were indeed ‘parties’ [but] not bars identified as gay. Not a