Tunisian LGBT Activist: Gay Community Is Persecuted As So-Called Progressives Stay Silent |

September 28, 2015 – Reported by the Huffington Post: A 22-year-old male Tunisian student was sentenced Tuesday to one year in prison for having sexual relations with a man, in accordance with Article 230 of the country’s penal code, which criminalizes homosexuality. He was forced to “undergo an anal exam against his will,” his lawyer said in a statement, to verify that he’d had sexual relations with a man. “It’s a harsh but unsurprising sentence,” the lawyer told HuffPost Tunisia. The incident sparked outrage among Tunisia’s growing community of LGBT activists. For Badr Baabou, an activist and co-founder of the Tunisian Association for Equality and Justice, an organization working to advance the rights of sexual minorities, the sentence “resembles one from the [Spanish] Inquisition.” HuffPost Tunisia spoke to Baabou about the social and political environment Tunisia’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community has to contend with…story continues below…