The title of the table is Prevalence of anal sex between males in select populations in MENA. Here's the figure which jumped out at me: The paper is about HIV, Are HIV Epidemics among Men Who Have Sex with Men Emerging in the Middle East and North Africa?: A Systematic Review and Data Synthesis. He grew a mustache to discourage such inquiries). But today PLoS Medicine came out with a paper with a result which suggests that the anecdotes of relatively widespread homosexual behavior in the Middle East are not totally unfounded or unrepresentative (the journalist Hugh Pope has indicated that Middle Eastern men have sometimes assumed he would naturally be open to sexual propositions because he was a Westerner. This is a taboo topic in much of the region, so getting good quantitative data seems pretty much impossible. More generally Ahmadinejad's comments brought up the issue of men having sex with men throughout the Middle East before marriage. He has to be aware that homosexual behavior is not unknown in his nation. What Ahmadinejad seems to have meant is that a public gay identity does not exist in Iran. A few years ago the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asserted that his nation did not have gays as they did in the West.
