This article examines the interconnected legal history of queerness and sex work in contemporary Egypt, positing that the criminalization of queer individuals is not merely a de facto reality but is explicitly articulated through anti-vice legislation. Legally sanctioned sex work historically provided safe public spaces for queer expression. However, this article traces the evolution of anti-vice laws, particularly Law 10/1961, which were originally enacted to target sex workers but were subsequently expanded by the Court of Cassation to prosecute individuals not engaged in sex work. It details the government's political campaign during the 1990s, which sought to publicly equate the charge of debauchery with homosexuality, culminating in the landmark 2001 Queen Boat case. The article concludes by critiquing the post-2011 Egyptian LGBTQ+ movement for adopting a Western homonormative framework that neglects this shared history of persecution, thereby pinkwashing anti-vice laws as purely anti-queer laws and erasing any intersectionality in the process. This phenomenon of queer exceptionalism obscures the experiences of queer sex workers and impedes the development of a broader, more effective solidarity — a sodality of the immoral — between all individuals targeted by state moral campaigns, including non-queer sex workers, in opposition to state moral regulation.
Nora Noralla (Wed,) studied this question.