COMMENTARY: I recently attended IGLHRC's 20th anniversary celebration, an awards presentation and fund-raiser promisingly called “A Celebration of Courage.” But I didn’t see much courage in what IGLHRC ise doing.

The acronym stands for International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the group is tasked with the mission, as its website states, of “advancing human rights for everyone, everywhere to end discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”

It was a nice event, a cocktail party at which my boyfriend and I made a donation; there were pretty views over New York from the penthouse at New York University’s Kimmel Center, white wine, and a serious, professional crowd. And the awards they gave were certainly well deserved: Barney Frank is indeed a vocal spokesman for our causes, and Colombia Diversa, Colombia’s LGBT advocacy group, did an amazing job of advancing LGBT rights in the country in record time.

However, what I heard about IGLHRC’s work left me not just unimpressed. It left me deeply disappointed.

I salute IGLHRC for its involvement in Uganda, where international pressure seems to have put a stop to a proposed law that would allow for the execution of gay people in certain circumstances. But all the rest of the talk was about work in countries where it’s actually pretty easy to advocate for LGBT rights and, while sometimes difficult, far from impossible to live as an out gay person: Mexico, Brazil, Jamaica, Belize.

Not one word about the places where the real atrocities against LGBT people take place today — the countries oppressed by Islam: for example, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq (yes, even after the “liberation”), the Palestinian territories. Consider:

• These countries (and only these countries) have the death penalty for same-sex intercourse on their books: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mauritania, Sudan, Yemen, and parts of Nigeria and Somalia. What do they have in common? They suffer from Islamic governments.