The suffocatingly sweet scent of peach-flavored tobacco wafts through the Male Box, swirling around the disco lights that ricochet off mirrored walls. The smoldering aroma is rising from a series of hookah pipes perched on glitter-flecked tables — a rather odd juxtaposition in a beer-and-shot gay bar that’s located on a desolate stretch of Seven Mile Road in Detroit. It’s Saturday night and the place is slowly filling up with men of a variety of ages and races — but this isn’t any ordinary evening. Tonight, the bar is playing host to Arabian Nights, a series of monthly events designed to validate and unite one of the most closeted communities in the area, and in the nation:

Gay and lesbian Arabs. (more…)