Endemic hypocrisy, the importance of "honour", and the strength of family ties all play a big part in the opening chapters' descriptions. Young Arabs (and almost all Whitaker's interview subjects are young) are shipped off to psychiatrists who treat them with electric shocks, or beaten by their brothers, or kicked out of the house (or threatened with the same). And many play along with the game - one Palestinian-American Whitaker interviews declares his intention to get married when he turns 30 - to a lesbian woman from a good Muslim family.

Many of these young Arabs first find real explanations about their own sexuality through the internet, from mostly Western sources, something that is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because it gives them a sense of their own reality and helps them to reconcile with themselves, but a curse because the advice, particularly on "coming out of the closet" intended for young gay people in the relatively tolerant West, can be disastrously dangerous for Arabs. Further, Whitaker sees a kind of "reverse Orientalism" taking place in the Muslim world, as Muslims increasingly identify themselves against the "decadent West", making the current society much less tolerant than it was, say, a hundred years ago.

Having set the stage, Whitaker turns to an examination of the culture, laws, and religious arguments surrounding homosexuality in the Arab world, and if that sounds dull, well, it is. Unfortunately, the text from here on out, however useful and informative, is not nearly so engaging as the first two chapters. In part, the problem is that Whitaker is trying to write for both a Western audience and a Middle Eastern one, and so he has to go into background details of everything from the different schools of Islamic law to the basic arguments about why changing homosexuality through psychotherapy doesn't work and is dangerous to try.

Chapter 3, "Images and Realities", discusses homosexuality in media and art, making the point that homosexuals and homosexuality are usually presented as a foreign phenomenon, and homosexual encounters in stories often take the form of a wealthy, dissipated foreign oppressor buggering a poor, honest, native lad with disastrous consequences.

Chapter 4, "Rights and Wrongs", discusses the actual legal status of homosexuals, and how those laws are enforced. Whitaker finds that in most cases where the death penalty is actually applied, there are charges of rape or pedophilia, and not just consensual homosexuality (whether those charges are in fact true is another question). On the other hand, that a country lacks any laws against homosexuality doesn't prevent arrests - Egypt, which Whitaker identifies as the worst culprit in terms of number of arrests and the amount of effort put into its crackdowns, is one of the few Middle Eastern countries with no law against homosexual sex. Whitaker also takes a brief excursion to remind people that as recently as the 1950s, Britain went on a anti-gay witch-hunt that put anything currently going on in the Middle East to shame.

Chapters 5, "Should I Kill Myself?" looks at Islamic religious arguments about homosexuality. Whitaker draws heavily on on-line Islamic sites, in particular IslamOnline, for his examples. He notes how sites like IslamOnline are drawing on right-wing Christian "psychologists" who promote "sexual reorientation therapy", draws an interesting parallel with attitudes towards lefthandedness, which some Muslim authorities still see as a perversity that needs to be overcome, while others argue that it is an inborn trait that reflects how a person has been made by God, and discusses the surprisingly positive attitude towards gender-reassignment surgery, particularly in Iran, where Khomeini made a ruling that such operations were permissible.

Whitaker then turns to the scriptures. He engages in a close reading of the Lot story, and then reproduces the arguments of Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle that the Qur'an does not specifically forbid homosexuality, but has a positive attitude towards natural diversity that could be extended towards sexual diversity. He doesn't so much make a theological argument himself as outline a possible theological argument that could lead to an Islam that accepts homosexuality.

For his final chapter, en route to a conclusion, Whitaker is sidetracked into a massive nerd-fight with Columbia University professor (and former Daniel Pipes target) Joseph Massad, who is apparently an asshole. Massad claims that "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" are Western inventions, and that by agitating for gay rights, the "Gay International" is somehow limiting the possibilities for sexual expression in the Arab world. As Whitaker points out, rather more respectfully than Massad deserves, the typical newspaper word for "homosexual" is shaadh or "pervert/deviant" - and if Arab sexuality is so category-free, what precisely is the shaadh deviating from?

Whitaker concludes that stasis simply isn't an option for the Arab world, and that reform of sexual mores is going to have to come, along with respect for the other diversities in the Arab world - that "Arabs nowadays have just too much contact with the rest of the world to maintain an isolationist 'cultural purity' approach."

Whitaker has set up a discussion forum and a set of linked footnotes for the book at his site.