Imagine that the weekend has just begun and you decide to meet some friends in a nightclub. After a few drinks and a dance, you are thinking about going home when you are approached by plain-clothes police officers and told to go outside.
Once outside, you are arrested and taken to a prison notorious for its use of torture and held indefinitely in solitary confinement. In the meantime, national newspapers publish your name, address and occupation, identifying you as a pervert and a member of a Satanist cult with links to a foreign secret service.
This is precisely what happened to dozens of men in Egypt last month when police raided the Queen Boat, a popular meeting place for gays in Cairo.
The case featured on the letters page of The Irish Times, under the heading "Arrests at gay wedding" when Senator David Norris corrected a misleading report on the incident. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned the arrests and continued detention of 55 people, none of who has been charged with any offence.
The European Union is so concerned about the case that it is considering a formal approach to the Egyptian government, just a week before Cairo signs an association agreement with the EU. Following last month's harsh prison sentence for the sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, international observers fear that Egypt, until recently one of the most open societies in the Middle East, may be turning towards authoritarianism.
The Queen Boat is one of a number of floating nightclubs moored on the Nile, off the fashionable island of Zamalek. It is not primarily a gay venue but gays meet in the downstairs bar, especially on Thursday nights.
The carpet might be threadbare and the beer overpriced, but the small dance floor is always full of young people enjoying themselves as they would anywhere else in the world.
At about 2 a.m. on May 10th, a group of plainclothes police officers came into the club and, after observing the scene for a few minutes, began approaching the guests.
"The place wasn't very full and at first, the police would nod to individuals and indicate that they should go outside. Then they approached the last five or six and removed them," an eyewitness told The Irish Times.
Once outside, the detainees were escorted by more than 100 uniformed soldiers, armed with machine guns, to Tora prison, which has an appalling record of torture.
"They completely ignored foreigners. I was talking at the bar with a Kuwaiti and they approached him. But when he told them in his best Gulf accent that he was from Kuwait, they apologised and left him alone. The only Egyptians they didn't arrest were the three sleaziest types in the bar, who turned out to be police informers. The rest were fairly innocent types. They were just very ordinary people," the eyewitness said.
EGYPTIAN newspapers, inspired by the Interior Ministry, printed lurid accounts of the arrests, claiming that the men were involved in a Satanic cult that organised gay weddings. One newspaper printed the names of all those arrested, identifying one man as a professor of surgery at a university hospital.
Fifty-five people are still being held in solitary cells and although none has been charged, the Egyptian media has suggested that they could face charges of "contempt for religion", an offence that carries a penalty of up to three years in jail. Only about half of those detained were arrested on the Queen Boat. The rest were rounded up after police monitored gay Internet sites and, according to some reports, enticed men into arranging meetings only to arrest them.
The Egyptian ambassador in Dublin, Ashraf Rashed, insisted this week that the men were being treated well and that all their human rights were being respected. And he said that it was wrong to suggest that the arrests were part of a witch hunt against gay people.
"It's not a matter of being a gay person. You can have the preferences that you wish. But if your behaviour affects other people or affects religion, that's another matter," he said.
Some Egyptian officials have hinted that all but two of the men may be released soon. The remaining two, who ran a gay Internet site, have angered the authorities by "politicising their sexuality" and maintaining contacts with gay rights organisations outside Egypt.
On June 25th, the EU and Egypt will sign an association agreement which includes a clause demanding respect for human rights, including freedom from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The 15 member-states are considering a formal approach to Egypt over the arrests and the Commission is monitoring the case closely.
Some observers in Cairo suggest that the arrests of so many gay men and the lurid press reports surrounding them were designed as a smokescreen to coincide with a round-up of Muslim activists in advance of council elections in Alexandria. However, the publication of their names means that the men arrested almost certainly face professional ruin whenever they are released.
In the meantime, gay men in Cairo are destroying computer files, avoiding the Internet and staying away from gay meeting places.
"People aren't really going out. People are incredibly paranoid. Everyone is very worried," said one gay man.