Even my body rejected intimacy as if it were a virus. As a student, I developed a sexual reflex that was completely out of my control: I covered my face every time I ejaculated during intercourse. Whenever I felt the surge of an orgasmic release, both hands – or whichever was available – would come up to prevent my coming face from public view. Moments of ejaculation have often involved little control for me. I used to suffer hugely from premature ejaculation, as if my brain was telling my body I wasn’t allowed to be having gay sex. The moment of ejaculation is when your identity dissolves temporarily, and this lack of control over how I was being perceived seemed to instruct my nervous system to shield my face. I had learnt to be equipped with my armours of identity – from colourful clothes and gaudy jewellery to well-rehearsed anecdotes and witty turns of phrase – so that when I was without them, like during sex, my brain instinctually went into the defensive. All sexual partners I had expressed their frustration over this tic of mine. ‘I want to feel connected with you when you come.’ I can’t let you see the real me – trust me, you don’t want to.
The only person who could have possibly been my boyfriend was a boy at Cambridge who helped produce Denim in its second year. He was a lovely, handsome, big-hearted guy, who showed me only kindness. I adored him. Let’s call him Felix. The first time we kissed was in my first year, at the end of a May Ball. These are the black-tie parties that colleges throw; they’re hideously indulgent and drenched in gallons of champagne. Of course, ever the hypocrite, I went to as many as I could. If you could block out the almost sickening privilege on show, and how grossly indicative it was of the inequality of British social structures – an inequality in which I was clearly complicit – the setting was absurdly romantic.
It was 6 a.m., the sun had risen, and we stood on a bridge overlooking a river of punts teeming with passed-out students in their finery. Before us were the expansive lawns, the dew just starting to rise. We bumped into each other for the first time that night, and as I was a little high on drugs, we kissed. This became an electrifying fit of passion, our tongues and arms enveloping each other like intertwining snakes. We ran off to a park with some of his friends, and cuddled until the early afternoon.
Soon afterwards, we met up, and had a wonderful date, comparing notes on our fears of familial rejection and the struggles of coming out. One night during the university break, I went clubbing with him and his friends in London, and was delighted to see him. Felix was a very attentive date that evening, showing me affection, and letting the entire club know that he was proud to be with me. I wanted to go with it, but the more affection he showed me, the more nervous I felt, and the more he tried, the more my body physically resisted, even though my desires were pulling me towards him. I was sweating profusely, and became light-headed, and had to excuse myself. Outside, in the pouring rain, I suffered a panic attack, and had to get in a cab home, where I took a sleeping pill to neutralise my angst. I ignored Felix for the better part of a year, and I hated myself for it, but it felt like the most natural thing to do.
At a graduation party in a friend’s house a year and a bit later, Felix, emotionally riled up, confronted me in the corner. ‘I’ve just found out I have six months to live,’ he said, stern and matter-of-fact. I completely freaked out, and was emotionally beside myself, before he said, ‘I’m not ill. That was a lie.’
‘Why the fuck would you do that to me? I was so upset … that really hurt,’ I screamed at him, shaken.
‘Well you hurt me pretty bad. Actually, what you did really fucked me up.’ And then Felix left. We were both high, which might explain his decision to test me in such a brutal fashion, but it’s clear he was punishing me for my sudden silence and erasing of our relationship. What I did was undeniably cruel, but it was hard to explain that I didn’t have any control over it. My body quite simply wouldn’t allow me to pursue the direction of my desires – they were working against each other, as if I were a medieval torture victim whose limbs were being pulled in opposite directions. This relationship timeline was replicated with three other boys while I was at Cambridge; I felt an instinctive urge to flee after the third date, and I was powerless to stop it. This was the summation of my romantic life as a ‘proud queer person’, and being around Dennis painfully highlighted this. Dennis and I drifted apart in my final year, and the loss of our friendship hit me hard.
I cared a great deal about the queer community, and had sacrificed so much to set up safe spaces for students to explore their gender and sexual identity in an open way. I would have done anything to keep my drag sisters safe, and worked tirelessly to make my identity political. So, on a personal level, how could I treat these wonderful gay men, the beautiful Dennis and the lovely Felix, my emotional allies, in the way that I did? It’s devastating, really, how awful queer people can be to other queer people, when what they’re really trying to fight are the wider social structures attacking their queerness. We enact repeated cycles of rejection upon each other, obliterating ourselves like aimless Pac-Mans circling a doomed maze.
My early experiences in drag, as much as they were empowering, also felt like dissociative episodes, as though my various selves were splitting into multiple, separate manifestations. I could not figure out how the fuck to merge them together, although with hindsight, the solutions are more obvious. For starters – I was only dressing as white women.
Recently, on that kind of Saturday night when a lack of plans turns to a narcissistic scrolling through every picture ever taken of you on Facebook, I realised, four hours into the void of urban loneliness, that my drag was only referencing Western images of femininity. All my looks were inspired by some image of Western celebrity I had admired. I owned wigs in the style of Lady Gaga, 80s blazers in the vein of (a very unpolished) Madonna, and pretty much everything else was an iteration of Carrie Bradshaw. My early drag was the continuation of me trying to wear the costume of the West at Eton, albeit in a very different guise. In the first five years of performing at drag shows, I did not once address my race. It had zero impact on my material, and I think I was trying to escape all the structures of my race and heritage that I held responsible for my pain. I thought that my drag was a form of ‘Western liberation’, and many commented that I was a particularly ‘wild’ performer. There was one show where I wore just knickers and a wig – without realising that a hanger was caught in it – and spent most of the set thrusting against the floor and moaning, in what must have seemed like a sorry mix between an improvised dance class and an exorcism. In drag, I would get absurdly drunk, mount people uninvited – if you are a survivor of this, I’M SORRY – and would often end up half naked on a pole screaming ‘I’M FREE MUTHAFUCKAS’, like that annoying person at a party who asks everyone to watch them dance when the chorus comes in (and it doesn’t for quite some time). During sets, I became a mascot for secularism, shouting ‘FUCK RELIGION’ and ‘FIGHT THE SYSTEM!’ I mixed up all the problematic Western platitudes that I felt had given me a voice. Drag spliced me from myself, my past, and the parts of me that I had completely fallen out of touch with.
One summer while I was at Cambridge, we were invited to play at the 500th anniversary ball of St John’s College. It would be Denim’s largest performance so far. We had a set in the historic halls, singing and dancing in drag in a brown panelled time-warp that reeked of historical privilege. It’s hard to walk around Cambridge and not feel seduced by the vaulted cloisters and the Gothic spires – the grandeur immediately tells you that the place is worth something, and it’s difficult to fight the impulse to want to be accepted within it. It’s also hard to ignore the fact that pretty much every single portrait hanging in pretty much every single college is of a white man in black robes. When I see such exclusion, there is an inherent drive in me to try to find a place within the very institution that seems to be excluding me. So how seductive it was indeed to be invited to perform in an institution so steeped in opulence and lineage, and in drag too. It fel
t as if the child Amrou who wanted nothing more than parental acceptance was now being accepted by the arms of a different kind of conservative institution, and one much more majestic. If I can be accepted as queer by an institution that might usually reject me – then I’m no longer worthless.
I became addicted to gigs like the ones at St John’s. I wanted to find the straightest crowds, the most patriarchal of audiences, the most archaic of milieus, and win their love, all in the hope that I might no longer feel like someone abandoned by the first institution we’re all born into – family. It was almost as if I was trying to be a Trojan Horse, smuggling myself into the barriered room, not only planning to ransack it, but be accepted within it.
I experience this same instinct whenever I go to straight weddings. As I pan around to watch all the married couples with their children, and the traditional romantic ceremony that tells your friends and family that you’ve succeeded in finding love, I feel simultaneously an urge to reject the weary heteronormativity of the entire proceedings, and a desperation to be part of it. In an early Denim show, I wore a white bridal gown while singing Gaga’s ‘Marry the Night’, in an attempt to assert my right to a place in this white ceremonial tradition (but on queer terms). I was desperate to present as transgressive, but also to be entirely accepted within spaces that were anything but that. This conflict meant that being in drag during those early days always felt combative, and rooted in conflict. I was accustomed to thinking of myself as someone inherently transgressive because of the way that I was raised; all initial experiences in drag hence felt like a performance of the belief that my existence was by nature hostile. I wanted this hostility to be accepted by institutions that might otherwise not want me. Perhaps this is why I always dressed as white women – accept my queerness, and I’ll accept your whiteness.
This desire to lie in bed with the establishment started taking very literal form in my sexual fetish for white, partnered, heterosexual men. After my brief flirtations with genuine intimacy, gay men started to terrify me. If I was at a party, say, and I hit it off with an attractive man, I’d hope upon hope that they were straight. For if that were the case, then I wouldn’t have to worry about my possibly being rejected by them in any real way, or face the risk of some gut-churning intimacy. As soon as I learnt that the boundary of heterosexuality stood in the way, my desires could be expressed according to a pattern I recognised. Eventually, sexually experimenting with men who identified as heterosexual became the only way I ever had sex. But as much as I was drawn to these men, it felt like they were seeking me out too. Without even making a conscious decision, a night out dancing would usually end in me kissing a man who later told me he had a wife or girlfriend. The mere glint in their eye let me know that they were a sexually curious ‘straight man’ who felt like they could have something from me. After one of these nights, which ended in me giving the guy a hand job in an alleyway in Soho, I asked the man what it was that made him desire me.
‘I dunno … you just seem so … confident … sexually free.’ LOL. But I guess the charade is working.
‘You make being gay seem … so … fun.’ It’s hellish too, hun.
‘I wanted to, you know … have a go.’ So I’m your guinea pig?
There was something that turned me on about being viewed as this kind of sexual experiment. It immediately resonated with me because it made my identity feel like something taboo, and this was a natural place for me to occupy psychologically. If I could win around these men, then maybe I could win around the two people who also felt that they couldn’t love me as I am because it was against the rules – my parents.
This was especially the case with one man (a doctor who we’ll call Joseph). Joseph is one of the most disarmingly charming species that has ever roamed this earth. Every single person who’s met him has at one point in their life had a crush on him. He’s a goofily cheeky person, and a constant source of fun. Joseph has one of those faces that’s impossible to get out of your head – a strong, wise nose, a smile so bewitching you’d believe it could solve inequality, and the lithe body of a Greek Olympian. He was a friend of friends, and a notorious womaniser. His need to take up space, which most people read as pure confidence, I read immediately as masculinity in crisis. The first time we met was during a university ski trip, and it took only about five seconds for us to be flirting in private. I was on this ski trip with a wonderful girlfriend from university – let’s call her Sarah – and Joseph, right in front of me, made a move on her. Whenever they kissed, he opened an eye to check whether I was looking, as if he were suppressing and addressing his desires in one action. This performance of heterosexuality in an overtly public manner is also something I recognised, having grown up in a family which prioritised public expectation over the knotty truths. With my self-worth crumbling like a sandcastle on a rainy beach, Joseph’s reminders of all the structures that already governed me – as well as his irresistibility – had me hooked. I was in the palm of his hands.
During that ski trip, I shared a bed with Sarah, and Joseph was in a nearby room. On the final night, Joseph asked if I would sleep in his bed so that he could sleep in mine with Sarah. I was only too happy to be used as his pawn (as well as to lie naked in a bed still warm from his own naked flesh). In the very early morning, when the room was still dark, I awoke to find Joseph crouched on top of me, his hand caressing my face, his teeth and eyes lit by the dawn. We looked at each other in silence, aware that it was only in this darkness that our intimacy could survive.
We went on a series of secret dates and formed quite a genuine, emotional bond. Joseph and I were in a sense total opposites, but I saw a great deal of myself in him. He talked to me about how parental expectation and pressures had instilled in him an obsessive academic drive, and how all of his anxieties came from a fear of disappointing his family. His ability to charm a room was a manifestation of his need to please everyone, lest he should be rejected, and this too I shared with him. Joseph was due to begin a seriously coveted placement in the surgical department of a hospital, and I sensed too that this derived not from passion but from a need to feel validated externally, all to cloak his suppressed queer desires. This is where Joseph and I really differed – he still had the favour of his family, and of society. To the external world, he appeared like the perfect Prince Charming. He was white, successful, straight and rich, privileges that he felt too scared ever to relinquish.
We both pitied each other, and we both envied each other. I pitied him for living a life that he didn’t authentically choose, and for so fervently quashing all his desires – but I also envied him for the connection he still had with his family, and for all the signifiers of success he owned. I think he pitied me for so visibly failing the normative markers of social success, but envied my attempt to live an authentic life and pursue my own desires and creative ambitions. In fact, when we were walking around a festival together once – I was wearing some sort of metallic legging structure – Joseph couldn’t believe the number of looks and homophobic remarks I got. ‘Jesus, Amrou … I’ve never walked around and had this experience before. It’s horrible. Do people always look at you funny?’ ‘I’m a genderqueer Arab living in Britain. Yes, Joseph,’ I said, my hand cupping his warm testicles.
On our dates, it felt like we were each flirting with the other side of ourselves that we had in some way sacrificed. With me, Joseph got to dip his waters into queer nonconformism without having to sacrifice any of his privilege; with Joseph, I got to feel like I’d won a piece of the institution through getting him to desire me. There was a safety in the fact that our relationship only existed within the confines of our private dynamic – the construction of it meant that it wasn’t really real, but more a rehearsal space for both our internal anxieties. It felt a bit like a reality show which no one was watching, as if we were on Big Brother, and the only two with the remote. Unlike in my relationship with Felix, my body didn’t sweat with fear on the promise
of intimacy, for it was always off the table. Thus, when Joseph dumped me with a polite but quite frankly dull and self-pitying WhatsApp message, I felt nothing. Feelings of nothingness became closely attached to all my sexual and ‘romantic’ endeavours. There was another boy I took a particular liking to in Cambridge – let’s call him David. We were in a play together when he was in his final year and I was in my first year. David wasn’t an immediately attractive man, but he was intelligent and sensitive, and had something gentle and protective about him; he was like a young Gandalf. The first-year/third-year dynamic was the perfect power structure to ignite my desires, and once again I wanted to be desired by a man who, in this very small context, was my ‘superior’. As two queer people, David and I had a lot in common and became quite good friends. There was growing sexual chemistry between us throughout the rehearsals, so much so that every cast member remarked that it was an inevitability that David and I would sleep together.
After the party on the night of the final performance, I ended up sitting next to him in his bed at 5 a.m., our first sexual act surely seconds away. As I looked into his eyes, readying to kiss him, he said: ‘Amrou. I wish I could. But I’m not attracted to men who aren’t white. I think you’re an amazing person, honestly … but there’s something about white-on-white flesh I just find so beautiful.’ Only years after the fact did I realise that this was something a Neo-Nazi would say – and I’ve recently told him as much – but at the time, I emptily agreed with him, and yet again felt nothing.
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