Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes
Page 9
CHAPTER SIX
CAIRO
Gay
My Canadian and British friends of my age associate the 1980s high-school experience with new-wave music, shoulder pads, big hair and general flamboyance. My high school, Amoun—in Zamalek, an elite neighbourhood populated by expatriates and well-heeled Egyptians—wouldn’t have registered on the cool scale, but it did not lack in local glamour. In the Zamalek enclave we could all pretend that the tide of radical Islam wasn’t rising. My brothers Wahbi and Khairy were in their final years of high school when I joined them there. Amoun—named after an ancient Egyptian god—was another co-ed private school, but it seemed to attract a who’s who of Cairo’s acting community. I was in the same class as Sherihan—the Miley Cyrus of my generation—and, in senior years, with Salah Sarhan, now a well-known Egyptian actor whose father was one of local cinema’s matinee idols from the 1950s and ‘60s. My friend Adham was the son of Mohamed Rushdi, a famous folk-singer. I carpooled with him on the way back from school for two years. His mother would drive us home on one condition: No music by her husband in the car. “It’s enough having your father at home. Give me a break in the car,” she told Adham sternly whenever he tried to play a cassette of Rushdi’s music.
By sixteen, I had more or less come out as being gay—at least to myself. And if I had any lingering doubts, the movie Xanadu put them to rest. Music from the movie had been circulating among my group of friends for months, and when in May 1981 it opened on a Monday morning, as movies did in Egypt, I stood in a long line of kids to get a ticket at the Metro Cinema in downtown Cairo. I don’t remember much about that first viewing, but the second, a mere three days later at a busy Thursday-evening show, left a lasting impression.
Most seventeen-year-old-boys watching that movie were likely turned on by the beauty of Olivia Newton-John. I, on the other hand, was deeply aroused by the long hair and short shorts of her co-star, Michael Beck, an actor whose career fizzled out faster than the musical itself. When the camera zoomed in on his face during a song called “The Fall,” it all became clear to me. I still get the shivers whenever I watch that scene from that loveable, goofy musical. That’s it, then, I thought: I’m a homosexual. Newton-John looked gorgeous but did nothing for me sexually. Even Gene Kelly looked sexy in that movie. A few days later I went to see it for the third time.
On my way in, I stopped at the convenience store attached to the Metro Cinema and overheard a conversation between the owner and one of his friends. The friend was asking why the theatre was so busy, to which the storeowner replied that it was an audience of fools who were headed to hell for watching haram (forbidden) material. He was incensed that the promotional stills next to his store featured a picture of Newton-John as a 1940s glamour girl in shorts that showed off her long bare legs. “God curse them all,” he said as he handed me my change and gave me a defiant look. I knew that a movie musical wouldn’t be to the taste of a devout Muslim like him, but such intolerance was frightening, and this time I couldn’t enjoy the movie. What was I going to do with my life if I stayed in Egypt? How would I survive the inevitable humiliation and scandal of being gay? I couldn’t be the only one who felt this way, but how could I connect with others, and if I did, how could I be sure that word wouldn’t get back to my family?
There was no way I’d seek guidance from my brothers, and despite my close ties to my sisters, I couldn’t confide in any of them. Just because they were more sensitive to issues of gender and discrimination didn’t mean they espoused liberal views about homosexuality. Any thoughts of talking it through with my male high-school friends were laid to rest whenever we went out and they talked about nothing but women’s breasts and sex with girls. I’m still not sure how I got away without being called a faggot by my friends, since I never participated in any sex-related conversations. The idea of homosexuality probably never occurred to most of them. Either that or some were protesting too much, but I didn’t understand it as such at the time. I now teach seventeen- and eighteen-year-old university students, and I’m stunned at their sophisticated understanding of sexuality. I envy them. My isolation at a comparable age could have led me to a different life altogether—perhaps one of suppressing my desires and seeking refuge in strict Islam as a form of self-flagellation or cleansing.
Luckily, I had other options. My English was improving and I was able to read about homosexuality in the reference library of the British Council, where I began to make the association between being gay and the need to get out of the Middle East. But I was still a high-school student and had no means of making that happen. What I wouldn’t have done to be in London or New York at the time.
THE ROAD TO LONDON at least got shorter by the end of 1981. My sister Faiza married for the second time and eventually settled in Liverpool, where her new husband, Hamza, a British national from Aden, ran a corner store. My mother’s sister Fatima and her family had already relocated to Liverpool in the early 1970s. My dad and two of my older siblings (Helmi and Farida) had visited them in the past and brought back stories about their life in England. To my father, England had deteriorated since he’d lived there in the late 1940s; to Farida, and even for the pre-religious Helmi, it was a great place. When Hamza proposed, my father had to swallow his pride and allow his daughter to marry a shopkeeper of dubious social background. Mohamed figured it’d make his next few decisions easier with one less child to take care of.
Decisions about where to relocate—from Aden to Beirut, from Beirut to Cairo—were becoming more and more difficult as the children got older. By 1982, two more of my sisters had finished university and Helmi finally received his law degree. There was no change on the work-permit front for non-Egyptians. Mohamed’s trips to Saudi Arabia were cut short as he got older and found it harder to accept condescending attitudes from local businessmen. In fact, the breaking point came in 1982, when it became clear that one of his business associates more or less expected my father to procure for him during a visit to Cairo. The businessman assumed that since our family had been living in Cairo, we’d know our way around its prostitution rings. My dad was so defeated by that point he couldn’t, as the English used to say, organize a fuck in a brothel. When he politely refused and declined even to suggest where this man could go, he put some of his business contacts in jeopardy. We found out about this incident several years later, but it must have been another deciding factor for a move that would send my family down a path so different from the one we’d been on: a move back to our ancestral homeland of North Yemen and its capital, Sana’a.
In the summer of 1981, the increased rent for our Tahrir Street apartment became unmanageable for my father, who decided to find a more affordable place, even if it meant going a bit outside our usual neighbourhood. Helmi found a quiet four-bedroom apartment on a side street about fifteen minutes’ walk from our old place. The downside was that it overlooked a busy boys’ public school, so we had to cope with the noise of assemblies and the nuisance of a new generation of aggressive Egyptian kids. This was the kind of school where lower-middle-class families sent their children—a far cry from the private schools we attended. By then, and it had only been a matter of three or four years, we could see many veiled schoolteachers go in and out of the school. We could also hear some of the speeches at morning assemblies, which almost always followed a strict Islamic script about the benefit of prayers or the foolishness of those secular folks who were trying to undermine the rise of the Islamic voice.
Faiza’s wedding, in September of the same year, served as a distraction from the economic stresses and political tensions. At least for her siblings. For my father, the ten-year gap between her first wedding and this one captured his deteriorating financial situation. As was the custom in Arab society, the father of the bride almost always covered the wedding costs. But Mohamed was in no position to go it alone, so he agreed with the groom to split the expenses. The groom and his family would also make all decisions about venue, food and entertainment.
Looking back at this wedding in 1981, I now realize that it was the last time my parents and all of their children were under the same roof. Mohamed could no longer allow his family to live in a society that restricted his freedom and theirs to seek work and make a living. After a couple of exploratory visits to Sana’a—visits that he never enjoyed—he decided to move the family headquarters there gradually over the next year or two.
Helmi volunteered himself as a canary. He was the first to leave Cairo behind, in the fall of 1982, and start a new life in Sana’a. He had some friends to fall back on, and my uncle Hussein, my father’s younger brother, had already established himself somewhat. I can’t say that I was all that sad to see Helmi go. He was becoming erratic in his observance—sometimes hardline and sometimes permissive when it suited his needs. He had one set of religious rules for himself and another for his sisters. His friends had too much influence on his thinking and often made me feel self-conscious about my perceived femininity or, to put it in the proper Egyptian context, lack of manly aggression. Well before “man up” became a catchphrase in American politics, I heard its Arabic equivalent from his friends. My mother had a harder time with his departure and cried for days on end. Not only was he to go to Yemen, but he had to start his life there by fulfilling the obligatory one-year military service in President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s armed forces. My sisters breathed a sigh of relief, at least temporarily, for they knew they’d follow in his footsteps soon enough.
STILL, FOR ABOUT A YEAR or so the mood in the house became relaxed and we got to enjoy the old Cairo that we loved. Two years after the assassination of Sadat, and two into Mubarak’s regime, Cairo was settling into a kind of stability. Yes, incidents of terrorism took place—attacks on government buildings or Christian churches—and the streets got more dangerous late at night because of increased crime and poverty, but we felt safer than we had in Beirut and knew Cairo was a lot more modern and tolerant than Sana’a.
By the time I turned eighteen I was a high-school graduate. Unlike most of my friends and even my own siblings I had no firm plans or any real ambition to go to university. All I wanted was to get more comfortable in my skin. After floundering for a year, I applied to Ain Shams University, a left-leaning alternative institution in Cairo, to study business and economics. I didn’t have the confidence to enrol in the English program after going over the first-year reading list. To me, English wasn’t about literature but a gateway to life as a gay man. I even read up on the gay liberation movement in New York and San Francisco, two cities I made a pilgrimage to in 1991 just to see all the places—Christopher Street, the Castro—I’d read about as a teen in Cairo. I obtained my information about gay life in the West from second-hand weekly news and entertainment magazines like Newsweek and, of all titles, People. Once a week I went to the market in downtown Cairo, the Azbakia, where they were sold. Many American expatriates sold their old magazines, which were then lapped up by Western-media-hungry people like me. To save money I’d walk all the way there and back—an hour in each direction—and spend all I had on magazines. You got the best deals and the widest selection on Mondays, as the expatriates would clean up their apartments on Sunday and get rid of magazines they didn’t want. My sisters loved looking at the ads more than the content. We couldn’t believe how available and attractive everything seemed in America. We’d see ads for food and clothes and assume that was how everybody in the West must have lived. In Cairo, the idea of a supermarket was novel. A handful of them popped up in more upscale neighbourhoods in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Up to that point, all the food we consumed came from the open markets or local convenience stores that sold the staples: sugar, milk, cheese and so on. The idea of buying bread (and not buying it fresh daily) anywhere but at a bakery would have been laughable to my mother.
As we flipped through those magazines, my sisters and I wanted to sample the same types of food. We thought of the newly opened and relatively expensive McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken as treats for special occasions—as did most of our circle of friends. In the hierarchy of foreign foods, however, pizza occupied the top slot. It was like nothing we ever ate, and whenever we visited friends or other families where they served it, we considered it a sign of sophistication. Most Egyptian families adapted the toppings to suit local palates, so they didn’t use much pepperoni or oregano and instead opted for minced meat, hot pepper and tuna.
Raja’a and I, however, wanted to try the original pizza as we saw it in the American ads. So she and I went to a supermarket on Mousadak Street, not very far from our new family home, and searched in the frozen-food section until we found a pizza that looked most like the ones in the magazines. We first had to make sure that the pepperoni was made of beef and not ham, and when we established that, we rushed home to allow it to defrost. The instructions were in English, so I did my best to translate to Raja’a and my mother, who regarded with suspicion the idea of a frozen meal that came inside a cardboard box. To the best of our ability we followed all the instructions—including taking off the cellophane wrapping—and stuck it in the oven for forty to fifty minutes. (We didn’t realize that was for cooking from frozen.) When my mother began to suspect the pizza was getting burnt, she took it out of the oven, removed the scorched crusts, cut it into slices and gathered whoever was at home to try it. She wouldn’t accept it as the main meal and categorized it for now as a snack. We all took one bite and stopped. It tasted awful. I insisted that it was meant to taste that way, but my mother would have none of it. She collected all the slices, put them in a garbage bag and threw it down the chute. It was the taste of oregano that must have thrown us off. From then on, whenever we craved pizza, we had to go out or follow my mother’s traditional recipe. To me it wasn’t pizza; just everyday food on dough.
Aside from magazines, radio became a lifeline. I got hooked on the BBC World Service for its music programming and Voice of America, which broadcast both in English and Arabic. Immersing myself in Western culture and art made me less self-conscious about my sexuality. The connections were being made in my mind: English offered a way out; Arabic a step backward. I remember talking to myself in English as I walked home from the movies or from magazine-shopping sprees. I refused to watch Arabic movies or TV shows. As my family gathered in the living room for their daily dose of Egyptian soap operas, I retreated to the room I shared with my two brothers and listened to the radio or watched anything in English on the second TV channel. (There were only two in Egypt, and we didn’t get a VCR until 1985.) I took great pride in not knowing what my mother and siblings were talking about when they discussed TV shows. And as for Arabic music, that was completely banished from my record collection. I erased all those tapes of my favourite Egyptian singer, Shadia, and used them to record American and British top-twenty hits from the radio. Thursdays were for the British singles chart countdown on the BBC; Fridays for the Billboard US one.
Three decades later, as a man in my late forties, I find it inexplicable that I turned my back on Arabic music, because I think that music is so lovely now. It comforts me and fulfils an emotional need. Maybe I’m just trying to make up for the years I rejected it. I would love to at
tend a concert by Shadia or Nagat El-Saghira now, both of whom retired and distanced themselves from their musical careers once they’d converted to a strict reading of Islam.
BETWEEN 1983 AND 1984, my mother, four of my sisters and my brother Khairy joined Helmi in Sana’a. It was the first time I’d lived apart from my mother, and it didn’t take me long to realize that I was indeed a mama’s boy. Even though she didn’t speak English and was not remotely interested in my choice of music and entertainment, she never stood in the way of my enjoying them and never made a value judgement about the corrupting influence of the language or the music. Every now and then, when Khairy came home from the mosque and found me watching Western music videos on TV, he’d make a comment about how it was all an American conspiracy to get Arab youth to forget about Islam and the Palestinian cause. I just wanted to watch Wham! and, my favourite English band, Spandau Ballet.
A former English high-school teacher suggested that if I liked that culture so much, I should learn more about its history and literature, and after floundering for a couple of years, I got my act together and switched programs from business to English. I didn’t necessarily think of it as a subject for a university degree but as a way to polish my English writing and as a stepping stone to finish off my education in England. Faiza was still living there and in 1984 invited me to visit.
A picture of me taken by a family friend during my first visit to London in 1984. That trip changed my life and helped me come out as a gay man.
I don’t think I slept for weeks prior to my flight to Heathrow. I’d dreamed of such trip for many years. There were two small obstacles to overcome, however: getting a UK visa and my father’s approval (and some money). My first application for an entry visa was turned down because I hadn’t bought a return ticket. I was crushed, but once I re-submitted the application with the ticket (which my brother-in-law paid for in Liverpool), I was given a single-entry visa. Getting Mohamed’s approval and financial support was far more complicated. He’d made it clear that he worried about my losing my way completely if I was exposed to more Western culture. He thought I’d be brainwashed and find life back in Cairo or Yemen too restrictive. He relented only after Faiza promised she’d look after me and not let me out alone.