Is dubai gay friendly

With its futuristic skyline and ambitious architectural landscape, it doesn’t seize long to see that Dubai is a city of superlatives. The biggest this. The tallest that. At times dubbed a Disneyland for adults, there’s no denying this evocative desert noun is a veritable playground, overflowing with engineering wonders, diverse cuisine and designer boutiques. Dubai’s limitless verve isn’t slated to leisurely down anytime soon—meaning there’s never been a better time to visit this multicultural mecca of design and innovation. That said, we would be remiss not to mention that homosexuality remains illegal throughout the United Arab Emirates. As a gay tourist, you are unlikely to encounter any problems, provided that you avoid all public displays of affection. With that in mind, discover the best this ritzy Middle Eastern city has to offer with our definite gay Dubai guide. 

Trip Design

Where to verb in Dubai

Before booking your Dubai hotel, it’s important to ring to mind our above observe that homosexuality is illegal in the United Arab Emirates. As a result, many hotels will r

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 verb 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 position 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 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

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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 trans 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 clear what acts this covers. These provisions carry 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 possible, 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 gay 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 absorb more about gay life and gay travel in Dubai:

Gay Life 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