Unicorn

by Amrou Al-Kadhi

  The more I discovered about quantum physics, the less I felt that I was a prophet from another world. This quantum model of the universe was one that entirely made sense to me, and it allowed me to believe that I must belong to the universe. Once I realised that the laws of reality were merely a construct, at odds with the behaviours of the subatomic particles that actually comprise reality, then it struck me that surely all constructed notions of gender, racial hierarchy and identity were also imprisoning impositions. I was made up of trillions upon trillions of subatomic particles that basked in their multiplicity, existing as many things and in many places at once, and all the anxieties that had come to govern me came from restricting their natural behaviours. The very foundation of me could be a series of entanglements with no fixed direction; instead of hopping from social group to social group, could I exist in a subatomic state where I could find peace in the chaos of my conflicting identities?

  At first, quantum physics can feel chaotic and overwhelming. Things behaving in a multitude of manners feels discombobulating, and navigating your way through it all is arduous and time-consuming. The road to my ‘recovery’ felt similarly so. Quantum physics teaches us that there are multiple versions of the same events happening all the time, and this is always the case all around us. We’re just not aware of these, and become focused on a fixed, set version of reality to get us through our days. I, too, was chasing people and experiences that limited who I was, ignoring the multiplicity of options around me.

  There was one person who hovered at my periphery at this time, and at first I didn’t realise she could be such a saviour to me. She was a Saudi Arabian woman who had moved to the UK following her father’s death, and was studying for a Fashion MA with one of the queens from Denim. Let’s call her Layla. The first few times I met Layla, I had an aversion to her, of the same type that caused my hands to conceal my face whenever I came close to ejaculation. Her gestures reminded me of my relatives, and each time we interacted I broke into a cold, anxious sweat. The first time we met was at a friend’s magazine party, and she came with Crystal, my wonderful sister from Denim. She was dressed like a true Arabian queen, the sparkly glints of her jewellery and Chanel handbag almost winking at me as she was ushered over. Layla’s feline movements, melodic vocal intonations, and unreserved tactility reminded me of the women from the Middle East who I had all but obliterated from my consciousness. Back in the Middle East, kissing every person in the room with at least two kisses on the cheek was the norm (it was usually three, sometimes four). In the UK I had experienced socially dehydrated Brits flinch at my attempts at any more than one (and sometimes even just a hug), so had stopped doing it – but Layla, like a radiant ghost from my past, immediately settling into our shared cultural idiom, gave me three. As she did this, I felt my stomach constrict, as if my body was readying itself for a sudden escape; but I also felt something soften in my chest, as if silk was slowly expanding and caressing my insides. Eventually, I asked her: ‘How’s your course at Condé Nast going?’ to which she replied, with the utter sincerity you’d usually find only in a Nutritional Wellness centre, ‘It’s a journey.’ I immediately smiled, recognising yet another similarity she had with my mother – the ability to say anything with filmic melodrama. Throughout the night, I was both pulled towards and repelled by Layla, but always hovered around her perimeter, like a spaceship peeping at the tipping point of a black hole without wanting to get sucked in. I already knew on some level, this first night that I met her, that Layla would become someone I’d have in my life for ever.

  Not only was Layla uproariously fun to be around, she had an unfiltered emotional purity that I found to be otherwise markedly absent in London. She wasn’t scared to cry in public; she wasn’t scared to shower you with kisses; she wasn’t scared to share. But it took me a very long time to want to share anything at all with her. The first time I tried to distance myself from her was at a friend’s concert. A pair of friends had set up a queer punk band, A Cinematic Masterpiece (ACM), whose gigs could make even Nigel Farage waltz in the street and campaign for a queer utopia. Their songs often told beautiful queer stories, such as of a transgender rocket ship who fled to outer space so that they could find a new home, falling in love with a comet on their encounter. The genius of their music is their use of catchy pop refrains so that an entire room can be united in the queer musical collectivity.

  One rainy afternoon, Layla came to one of their concerts, in a ‘garden’ (it was more like a skip with brown foliage). When we were having a drink, she started talking to me in Arabic. She used the word ‘habibi’, and it felt as if she were lip-synching to a recording of my mother during my childhood; as soon as she uttered the expression, her tongue became a snake wrapping itself around my throat. I smiled and said nothing. Layla was clearly excited at the prospect of being able to speak with another Arab at an event – especially one who was queer – and so continued. I understood everything she said, but the tightening grip of the python grew unbearable, and before I knew it, I snapped, shouting, ‘Please stop talking to me in Arabic because I’m from the Middle East! I don’t speak Arabic. I’m English, OK?!’ Layla looked crestfallen. I hated myself for biting her head off like that, but also couldn’t escape how strongly I felt. And so, for a while, I avoided her.

  My interactions with Layla felt like a recycling of previous interactions that had only damaged me. I ignored the possibility that our relationship might be different, full of alternative outcomes, just like in quantum physics. So instead I reverted to a familiar pattern: I placed my trust in an institution, hoping that it might save me from my past.

  It was at this point that I properly started my search for a boyfriend. I finally made the necessary shift from dating ‘heterosexual’ men to actual, living, gay people. A necessary switch. But it shames me to say that this phase of my London dating career comprised of only courting white gay men. It was my repeated compulsion to win the affection of gay men who reminded me of Mason, of people I automatically felt would never truly want me. If I can convince these white Mr Darcys – no, not white poodles – to desire me as their boyfriend, then I’ll really be worth something. It is not uncommon for people of colour to spend their early dating careers fetishising white people (it is something I talk a lot about with my friends of colour). The reasons why this happens are complicated. For a start, the inherited shame that comes with being a person of colour in a racist society can warp your desires into looking for the thing that might compensate for this shame – in essence, a white badge of approval.

  This can manifest in many different ways; an interesting historical example is from the Eighties/Nineties queer ballroom culture in New York. This thriving subculture comprised of Black and Latinx trans and queer people coming together to compete in pageants and Vogueing competitions (a queer dance form that blends breakdance with fashion-posing). Jennie Livingston’s legendary documentary, Paris is Burning, shines a particularly fascinating light on the practice of ‘realness’, where members of the ball would dress up in ‘Executive Realness,’ attempting to imitate the corporate costumes of successful white middle class Americans. One of the interviewed drag queens explains, ‘in real life, you can’t get a job as an executive unless you have the educational background and the opportunity. Now, the fact that you are not an executive is merely because of the social standing of life. That is just the pure thing, black people have a hard time getting anywhere, and those that do are usually straight. In a ballroom, you can be anything you want. You’re not really an executive, but you’re looking like an executive, and therefore you are showing the straight world that I can be an executive. If I had the opportunity, I would be one. And that is like a fulfilment.’ Whilst there is an inherent element of parody in the ballroom culture of ‘realness’, it’s undeniable that many of those at the ball gain a validation from successfully emanating the ideal images of white America.

  Till this day, the cisgender white male body has end
ured as the trophy within the gay community. And if you’re someone, like me, who has a core belief that you are not worthy of love, you want desperately – as with the queens in the New York ballrooms – to wrap your hands around that trophy. It was in this mindset that I dated a series of white gay men who I felt it my mission to persuade to want me. And I was burned at every turn.

  There was one boy, let’s call him Alfie, who particularly stands out in my mind.

  I had just finished a Denim performance in London, and was high off the adrenaline, my hands waving in the air like seaweed as I floated around a dance floor. I was in an orange, richly textured vest, in a face coated with highlighter and eyeliner, when I spotted Alfie looking at me from across the room. Alfie was the archetype of a fairy-tale Prince Charming – white, masculine, shaggy black hair with endearing facial features and a devilish little grin. I was drenched in the power of femininity that night, and it was as though this bewitched his contrasting masculinity; for before I knew it, he was moving slowly towards me, as if I was reeling in a fish.

  The sex we had was enjoyable, and I could tell he was attracted to my femininity, as well as my race (he said he thought it was ‘hot’ that I was Arab; I’m not quite sure what he was expecting – for me to shout Allahu-Akbar on ejaculation?). There is a breed of white cisgender gay men who actively seek out effeminate boys (especially ones of colour) – I think it makes them feel more like a man to be dating someone occupying the traditionally ‘feminine’ position, and potentially even the racially less privileged one. Things, however, took a sharp turn when Alfie’s masculinity and white entitlement came into crisis. The more we hung out, the more he realised that I was confident in my opinions, driven in my career, and unwilling to make myself small to accommodate him. I was dumped for being an ‘intimidating’ and ‘aggressive’ person. The blame fell to me for being ‘intimidating’, rather than to his white masculinity for being insecure – if I had taken up less space than him, I imagine our relationship might have had a better chance.

  This was a pattern that repeated itself with a few white cisgender masculine men. They met me in a space when I presented as highly feminine, and they made a set of assumptions about me. But following our dates, when they ascertained that this femininity did not mean I was at all subservient or socially submissive, I was dumped for threatening their sense of masculinity. Perhaps there were also assumptions that I’d take up less space than my white counterparts because of my race. As a queer person of colour, people often assume you’ll be smaller than they are. It’s systemic conditioning – there are just so few representations of us that tell the world we’re worth something. So when a queer person of colour seems to have more agency than the white people around them, we get labelled as ‘aggressive’. But it’s not we who are aggressive – what’s aggressive is the system that conditions people to think that we don’t deserve any space. In this period of dating, I learnt again and again that there were structures in place that wanted me to feel small.

  This helped me realise that I was searching in the wrong places, and that the places where I belonged were not the places that I thought I wanted to belong. It was truly time to follow the quantum philosophy – instead of being fixed to identities in which I didn’t fit, it was time to look a little differently. Perhaps the answers were around me in different ways, and I just hadn’t noticed?

  Soon afterwards, at a Denim performance in a club in East London, I completely flipped out, and it was all because of Layla. It was an exciting night for me. I had just signed with my wonderful agent, Kitty Laing – this was a real dream come true – and it was a sell-out show. During the performance, I came onto the stage, performing a comedy set and song about the rejection of my parents in the guise of a jazz song that turns into a scat-exorcism. Layla arrived and took her seat, now with short peroxide blonde hair and an all-metallic sartorial get-up that would have made my own mother proud. As the arts industry is dominated by white people, Layla and I were almost certainly the only two Arabs in a room of over 300 people. During my performance, Layla, who I subsequently learnt was drunk and also medicated on anxiety pills, began ‘heckling’ me in Arabic.

  During my five-minute set piece, the heckling grew in volume and frequency, and it became difficult to get a line out without it being interrupted by one in Arabic. It felt to the rest of the room that I was being booed or insulted, but I was also the only one in that auditorium who understood what Layla was saying – most of her lines were ones of hyperbolic praise, of a kind of melodrama you would only find in Middle Eastern countries – ‘my goddess, my dear love’ and other such sayings. As this was occurring, I felt a serious fracture between the part of my identity that was performing to an almost entirely white audience, and the minuscule, completely weathered fragment inside of me that was listening to what Layla was saying. It felt as if the room were playing tug of war, with me as its rope, and the more Layla chanted, the more I felt a split. It became overwhelmingly painful, and really quite disorientating, and eventually, I screamed at the audience, and Layla in particular. I believe my exact words were ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP’. As a performer, I had long known that getting angry at an audience was never a good idea; the fact that they are there implicitly means that they want you to succeed, and if your fuse blows and erupts in their direction, it upsets the safe performance contracts that give the audience faith that you are in control. When I screamed at Layla, it wasn’t even a conscious decision; it happened by reflex, and I am told by friends who came to watch me that evening that it was really quite unsettling and confrontational. In all honesty, it put the whole room off.

  After the show, I was extremely low. Not just because the night’s performance had been impaired by Layla’s interjections, but more because of my own behaviour. As the only Arab onstage, how could I have lowered myself to attack the only other Arab in the audience? Was my loyalty only with the white middle-class punters who fetishised my otherness for some Friday-night fun? I began to realise that my bodily convulsions every time someone spoke Arabic to me in a queer context were also indicative of a deeper problem I needed to confront. To find any kind of peace in having an identity so shattered, it was imperative I fuse together my queer identity and drag practice with my heritage.

  A few days after the gig, I spoke to Layla. She had no recollection of what had happened at the gig, but was aware that she had caused a scene. Full of deep emotion and guilt, she apologised. I recognised the pain in her voice exactly; a kind of unresolved, childish fear. ‘The thing is, Amrou,’ Layla said, ‘it’s overwhelming for me to see you, another Arab, onstage being so confident, after everything I have been through … I think that’s why I had that reaction.’ Layla’s family were conservative too, and much stricter than mine. She grew up in Saudi Arabia, where women are denied most of their agency, and where traditional codes of dress are a legality. After tragically losing her father to cancer, Layla inherited part of his fortune and moved to New York, before finally settling in London. Her relationship with her heritage is, like mine, complicated and confusing. Layla transgresses many of the gendered expectations of people in Saudi Arabia; to some serious pushback from her relatives, she set up an extraordinary fashion magazine called Cause & Effect that focusses on queer and trans bodies of colour, and she, like me, has suffered constant punishment at the hands of her family for pursuing an individual path that rejects the tried and tested ones everybody else has agreed to. So when she saw another ‘runaway Arab’ – this is what we call ourselves – performing defiantly in drag, she had the sudden impulse to use Arabic in a queer space, also searching for a way to bring this broken part of herself into this new, present, autonomous space. It felt as if we were two asteroids adrift, suddenly roaming in each other’s orbits, each with the ability to help the other.

  When we’re suffering the aftershock of childhood traumas, there is invaluable remedy in connecting with other people. I believe very much in the promise of the chance enc
ounter, that someone profound is always just around the corner, waiting to step into our lives at a time when we need them most. Maybe every human being is a prophet in some way for someone else, guarding some sort of answer, from the gargantuan to the microscopic, holding a key to our coming closer to resolution. Layla was in many ways an unexpected prophet to me.

  Layla’s experience in fashion meant that she was the perfect person to design the costumes for Denim’s first music video. It was in this video that I first started looking to my Arab heritage to find inspiration for my drag. I was hesitant, at first. Drag had long been a vehicle for me to escape all the restrictive structures from my past – it was like a mute button, silencing all the things that I had been led to believe about myself. But I had explained to Layla how empty and fragile I felt without my drag armour, and I was always jealous of the empowerment my other queens had managed to find through drag in their everyday lives. Perhaps, I was starting to think, drag should also amplify our most deeply held fears and beliefs, rather than mute them, so that we can get them out in the open, and completely change our relationship with them. In conjunction with my weekly sessions in psychotherapy, it was time to use drag as a forum to deal with my past, and not just try to forget it.

  Layla’s costume design for me included a sapphire-blue belly-dancing duo, a blue velour tracksuit worn at some point by pretty much every young Arab woman who shops at Harrods, and a whole host of Middle Eastern accoutrements that made me feel as if I had skipped through one of the souks from my childhood and collected every single thing on my way. When I assessed the outfit in the mirror, I recognised myself in drag more than I ever had before – it didn’t feel like I was wearing a mask, but rather a part of myself that I had long lost. I began to get emotional. I couldn’t believe how much I looked like Mama. What a surprise it was to find in drag the image of exactly the woman I thought I was using drag to escape from.