After I left my home in Allentown for the University of Pennsylvania, my accent betrayed the fact that I was an "Upcountry Dutchman." I was teased about being part of the "too soon old and too late schmart" crowd. The older I get the more I appreciate the truth of that Pennsylvania Dutch piece of wisdom. Age comes too fast and wisdom too slow.

Growing up in Allentown, I had two older sisters, however, I had no cousins. Well, that’s not quite true. I had two cousins but they lived in Birmingham, Alabama and I never met them until they were adults. So, I was thrilled, when I married a lustrous auburn haired South Georgia girl in the mid-nineteen fifties and inherited, through marriage, a passel of cousins.

Our wedding reception was held on the front lawn of her parents’ farm house with cattle mooing in the background as milking time approached. In the receiving line I was introduced to cousins, second cousins, second cousins once removed—I think there were even a few who were twice removed—kissin’ cousins, and country cousins. I couldn’t keep them all straight but it was obvious that in rural South Georgia there was no "six degrees of separation," everyone there had a tenuous relationship of some sort to everyone else.

I never thought, however, of "country cousins" as a term applicable to two countries that have a tenuous relationship to each other—and sometimes not so tenuous—until I finished reading the current issue of the Atlantic where Nadya Labi, a New York based writer, described The Kingdom in the Closet. Since in the 1980s I served as a physician in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I read the article with interest.

According to Ms. Labi, who recently spent an extended time in Saudi interviewing gay men in Jeddah, Saudi’s major seaport, and Riyadh, the country’s capital, homosexuality is thriving within the Kingdom; it’s just not acknowledged or talked about. The comment of a local police officer was, "If they tried to arrest all the gay people in Saudi Arabia, they’d have to put a fence around the whole country."

Interestingly, while homosexual activity is officially forbidden and sodomy is punishable by death, "…as long as gays and lesbians maintain a public front of obeisance to Wahabist norms, they are left to do what they want in private." The Wahabis are the puritanical Muslim sect supported by the Saudi royal family.

"For many Saudis, the fact that a man has sex with another man has little to do with ‘gayness.’ The act may fulfill a desire or need, but it doesn’t constitute an identity. Nor does it strip a man of his masculinity, as long as he is the ‘top,’ or has the active role." Saudis don’t see men having sex with men in terms of genetics, life-style or choice. Instead, they view it as a behavior, which may change. Or, it may not.

The findings by Ms. Labi confirm my own experience of two decades ago. While I was working in an isolated area of the Kingdom, I occasionally visited Riyadh or Jeddah on hospital business. The "suq," or market place, with its curb-side merchants of gold and spices and carpets, was like a scene from The Tales of the Arabian Nights—or more realistically like a centerfold from National Geographic. As I entered the suq in Jeddah one evening—not because I was interested in shopping but simply because the suq was the only entertainment in town—I noticed that a score or more of Saudi men were leaning against the lamp posts and palm trees in the spacious entry plaza of the suq. Responding to urgent signals from my gaydar, I positioned myself in front of a nearby palm. Within a few minutes, a young Saudi wearing the traditional ankle-length white semi-sheer gown called a thawb approached me and asked if I had a match. Now that’s a pick up line that even I recognized. It’s universal to gays and straights and is ageless.

My new acquaintance spoke English well, in part because he was in the Saudi Air Force and had spent two years training in the Atlanta area. He was married, had two children, and his family lived in a desert village north of the city. With some trepidation that the desk clerk might question his accompanying me to my room, he went back to my hotel with me. The desk clerk was busy with other guests and we breezed right by.

The sex, as I recall it, wasn’t particularly memorable but, like a swig of water when you’re in a barren desert country, it was refreshing. Before he left, I questioned him about the difficulties of being gay in Saudi Arabia. Consistent with the findings of Ms. Labi, he didn’t identify himself as gay. He was a married man who enjoyed sex with other men.

His explanation was that, "When we grow up, there’s no such thing as dating girls. Saudis are never intimate with a woman until they get married and for many of us that’s in our late twenties. Up until marriage many Saudi men have sex with other Saudi men and with boys. Some of us find that even after marriage we like to be with men—especially when we are far away from home."

While this explanation was surface reasonable, we both knew that he wasn’t at the entry to the suq cruising out of sexual desperation. His wife was only one hundred kilometers away. Whether he identified himself as gay or not, he was there by choice. Ms. Labi concludes that, "To be gay in Saudi Arabia is to live a contradiction—to have license without rights, and to enjoy a broad tolerance without the most minimal acceptance. The closet is not a choice; it’s a rule of survival."

In the Kingdom, "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" isn’t a military policy; it’s a way of life. The official Committee on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice regulates behavior in the public realm but what occurs behind closed doors is considered to be between a believer and Allah. "This seems to be the way of the Kingdom: essentially, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ Private misbehavior is fine as long as public decorum is observed."

It seems as if KSA and USA share more than their love of oil. We share "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell." In reading The Kingdom in the Closet I realized that no matter how tenuous the relationship between KSA and USA becomes at times, we’re more than political allies, we’re country cousins.