Male homosexuality is punishable by death in sharia, but it doesn’t count as homosexuality if at least one of the partners has not yet gone through puberty. Therefore, boys without pubic hair have been permitted since the time of the Prophet, and have constituted a significant segment of the Islamic slave trade for sexual purposes ever since. I grew up in a city with a big gay subculture and thought that I was wordly, but I was shocked/disgusted at the degree of homosexuality/pedophilia that I saw in Afghanistan. A rich young Kuwaiti girl who was hitting on me once frankly discussed the homosexuality/bi-sexuality in her circles. She estimated that more than half of her family and friends would do same sex partners.
A comment on your experience with the rich young Kuwaiti woman —
Obviously the concept of a Muslim woman “hitting” on a Westerner is totally contrary to the stereotype of Muslim women. However, while my firsthand experience with Muslim women is limited to those who had parents who were not only wealthy enough to send them to the United States but also liberal enough to support education for women in an environment without being protected by family members, it is clear that such women can become Middle Eastern versions of Hillary Clinton. In that respect, the development of people like Huma Abedin doesn't surprise me.
I think those of us who live in the West are very naive about Islam as well as Arab, Persian, and other Middle Eastern cultures. We clearly need to learn a great deal or we're going to make uninformed decisions, and decisions made without good information typically have bad consequences.