Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes

by Kamal Al-Solaylee

  Finally, I thought, I was getting to go to London, not realizing that Liverpool was three hours away by train—and, more disappointingly, not knowing that Faiza and my aunt lived only in England by name. When I arrived in Liverpool, I discovered they still listened to Arabic music, watched Arabic films, cooked Arabic food and socialized only with other Arabs. Visiting my aunt’s house in the multiethnic neighbourhood of Granby felt like I had never left the Middle East—except the streets were full of Asian and black people as well, all of whom kept to themselves. Even with part of my family living in England, I had to get away from them. I wanted to see the real England, so I hit record and book stores for hours during the day and was glued to the TV at night. I bought (and hid) my first copy of a gay magazine and daydreamed about a point in my life where I didn’t have to read it secretly late at night. But it would be four years, and another summer visit to England, before that would happen.

  When I returned to Cairo after that first visit, and as he’d predicted, my father and I started to argue much more. I’d tasted freedom and wanted more of it. As he travelled back and forth between Sana’a and Cairo to check in on us, he got stricter and stricter. He disapproved of me going out with friends late at night and always questioned their background. If you grew up in the Middle East, you got used to controlling parents, but Mohamed’s interference suggested one of two things: his fear that I’d be experimenting sexually in the age of AIDS or, in a more Freudian twist, resentment towards me for becoming a better speaker and writer of English, a language in which he was as good as a native speaker. With my mother and most of my sisters in Yemen now, there was no buffer between the two of us.

  He was right about the sexual experimentation. The visit to England gave me a confidence boost and I found the courage to call the Liverpool gay helpline and ask for information on finding other gay men in Cairo. Much to my surprise, the helpful operator said that the international gay guide Spartacus listed some bars in downtown Cairo as meeting places. “Are you sure?” I asked in disbelief. It was hard for me to imagine the possibility of meeting other people publically who felt the same way that I did, given how isolated my early years as a gay teen had been. “Well, the Tavern at the Cairo Nile Hilton comes up in various guides,” he replied. I knew the hotel but had no idea where that tavern was, or what to do when I got there.

  Though I was already twenty, I was very naive and inexperienced. But even in the Cairo of 1984 the possibility of meeting gay men, particularly Westerners, was too big an attraction for me to miss. I remember going to a fancy hair salon in Cairo and asking the stylist to straighten my long hair with a flat iron. I wore by best wool sweater and cotton pants—I was anything but fashionable—and walked to the Nile Hilton in Tahrir Square, a landmark in Cairo since 1959. Once I identified the Tavern pub, I circled its doors a few times before I walked in. When I did, I had no idea what to expect. There was an Australian lounge singer doing a version of “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” a few leather seats, a big screen that divided the place into two and a rectangular bar with a terrifyingly stern-looking Egyptian barman. I had never until then consumed any alcohol, and when I found a seat at the bar, I couldn’t think of anything to order except a gin and tonic because I’d heard of it in American movies. I had no idea what it would taste like. I began sipping it—it didn’t taste so bad—and looking around. To my horror I immediately spotted a family friend, who either didn’t recognize me or chose to ignore me. I began to connect the dots. So, lots of men on their own or talking to other men. Very few women, Egyptian or Western. The men were all trying to catch each other’s eye. Older white men. Younger Egyptians. Lots of furtive glances and nervous laughter. The lounge singer started humming “Sometimes When We Touch,” which I had never heard before but immediately thought the most romantic song ever.

  Then it happened. A Swiss businessman said hello and raised his glass. I thought he’d probably mixed me up with the waiter and was just ordering another drink. I don’t remember how we got talking, but it would be the very first time I ever chatted in person to another human being who identified himself as gay. It would be the start of many Thursday-night encounters at the Nile Hilton Tavern. I loved nothing more than being chatted up and seduced by older Western or Egyptian men. It became a sport, and I’d always felt I’d lost the game if I wasn’t invited back to a hotel room or at least got a ride home and a fondle in the car with one of the Egyptian businessmen, who were almost always married and couldn’t take me home anyway. Not that it was always that easy. I had nightmares about being caught or contracting HIV, which was just beginning to be the great epidemic that would define sexuality in the 1980s. But the pleasures outweighed the restlessness and fears—including the very real threat of being arrested and charged with sodomy. Building a network of Egyptian and expatriate gays changed my life. I wasn’t alone, and even if I still lived a secretive life, I had some older men to guide me through it.

  Ahmad, a tailor, and his boyfriend, Bill, an American high-school teacher, took me under their wing. Both were in their late thirties and communicated largely in broken English and Arabic. Ahmad came from a poor working-class background and his English was largely picked up from previous sexual encounters with other Americans and Brits. Occasionally, I’d act as a translator between the two. I couldn’t have been happier. They introduced me to Cairo’s authentic gay scene—as opposed to the one based on meeting foreigners in hotels—which centred around a seedy part of the city known as Haret Abu Ali. Of the many chapters in my life, this one seems the most surreal to me now. It was like discovering that a lost city we’d only heard of in fables existed all along and was just a cab ride away. Belly dancers who’d seen better days had ended up there performing in cabarets for a clientele of wisecracking tough Egyptians and groups of gay men. Westerners would come as guests of the Egyptian gay men for the novelty factor, but you had to understand Egyptian Arabic to make the most of the comedy acts or the music. Even though I hated that kind of music, I quickly appreciated its camp value and its meaning as part of the Egyptian gay experience. I’d always loved belly dancing anyway and the religious crackdown in Egypt meant that there were fewer and fewer dancers. For a brief moment, I was living in a Cairo that recalled the golden days of the 1950s and early ‘60s that I saw on TV.

  Of course it wouldn’t last.

  IN 1986 MOHAMED INSISTED on relocating the remaining members of his family to Sana’a. Keeping two households had become too big a financial burden for him. I didn’t need to visit Sana’a to know I wouldn’t be happy there—not after I’d finally settled into Cairo’s underground gay scene. I saw what living there was doing to my sisters when they visited the family home in Cairo on their summer vacations. For one thing, they complained about life in Sana’a all the time. After the relative freedom they grew up in, they were having to adjust to a society where women had to cover their heads and wear an abaya—a black, loose-fitting coat to hide the contours of the body. For the first time, they experienced full-blown misogyny and discrimination, both as women and as Aden-born Yemeni citizens. Sana’a of the 1980s was a very closed society and rarely welcomed strangers. To the average Sana’a male, women from Aden who were educated in places like Beirut and Cairo were loose by definition. I don’t think that attitude has shifted much in the past thirty years, despite all the uprisings and anti-government protests.

  On a political level, President Saleh ran the country like a private club and a police state. My sister Ferial was under security investigation for many months and denied an identity card—the most essential document a Yemeni citizen needs—because she was more outspoken and independent than my other sisters. The rest experienced various but milder forms of intimidation and harassment before they could work legally.

  The combination of living in Yemen, an extremely conservative society, and being under my father’s and brother’s thumbs, both of whom were equally rigid by now, meant that my sisters had to internalize the dominant culture’s attitude toward
s women. “What’s the use?” Hoda would tell me when I suggested she should relax a little now that she was visiting Cairo, “I’m going back to prison in a few weeks.” It was both a physical and psychological prison. When we went out for lunch or dinner in Cairo, I noticed that my sisters left it up to me to do all the ordering and talking with waiters. Just a few years before, I’d left those decisions to them. They surrendered their voices to the nearest male relative, which on those occasions meant me. When we went shopping, they’d gravitate towards the most conservative clothes and avoid items that could give the wrong signals—high heels, bright colours—even if they covered whatever they wore with the abaya. How different were these shopping trips from the times we looked for bikinis for the summer season together.

  As a man, I knew I’d probably fare better than my sisters in Yemen’s male-dominated society. It’s a privilege to be a man there, period. But not a gay man. Leaving Cairo now would be one thing; leaving it for Sana’a another.

  I didn’t have a choice. I’d failed to secure any scholarship to complete my studies abroad, and all the flirting and sleeping around hadn’t landed me a partner who might whisk me off to somewhere in the West. I had flings and silly crushes but no relationships.

  After fifteen years it was time to say goodbye to Cairo. My mother flew back from Yemen to help with selling the furniture and to pack years and years of clothes and collectables. When she and my sisters had departed for Yemen a few years earlier, they had left most of their belongings in Cairo. Perhaps they were secretly hoping they’d return after a year or two of Sana’a. Maybe if they left some clothes in Cairo, Yemen wouldn’t seem so permanent.

  Wahbi and I were responsible for arranging the furniture sale and using the proceeds to buy our plane tickets. Neither of us was any good at that sort of transaction and the shrewd second-hand furniture dealers saw through us. One after another they made lowball offers—everything for three or four hundred Egyptian pounds—hardly enough to pay for one ticket, let alone two. It was a handy reminder of the gap between us as Yemeni expatriates and Egyptians and, to my brother, another reason why we should leave. We saw ourselves as part of Cairo society, and they saw us as rich Arabs to whom a few hundred pounds would make no difference.

  Back then, you didn’t just call a second-hand store and ask them to come and have a look; you actually had to go there and bring the owner or an employee home. When I was asked to bring back a furniture seller from the working-class neighbourhood of Imbaba, I took a taxi there and expected a ride back in the shop owner’s truck. I did get a ride back. On a donkey cart. I had seen them on the streets of Cairo before and in movies but never expected to ride in one. I don’t know if I ever told any of my friends in Cairo about that experience. To me now, it’s just another quirky Cairo story. At the time, I was mortified. When we eventually made it to our street, the salesman, as expected, made an even lower offer than the rest.

  That’s when my mother stepped in. Safia may have been illiterate, but she knew how to bargain, having shopped in Cairo’s food markets for years. When the salesman was about to stage the first of his many walkouts to force us into accepting his offer, Safia made him a counter-offer. I can’t remember the exact figure, but it was above what we told her two airline tickets to Sana’a would cost. She asked him to accept it now and she’d throw in some clothes—including some of her fur coats, which she hadn’t worn since the early 1970s—or he could leave right away and not come back. A minute or two later we had a deal. Cash in hand. For about week or so, we had no furniture except the beds, which the seller returned to pick up on the day we left for Sana’a.

  I’ve taken many plane rides before and since and have moved from continent to continent in the last two decades, but nothing came close to how frightened I felt holding that one-way ticket from Cairo to Sana’a. What would I do in Yemen, and what would Yemen, a country that punished homosexuality with public hanging or lashings, do to a twenty-two-year-old gay man like me?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SANA’A

  Ancestral

  It couldn’t have begun on a worse note. At the Customs counter of Sana’a International Airport in the fall of 1986, a severe-looking officer with a military overcoat on top of traditional Yemeni clothing insisted on examining a box marked in Cairo as “Heavy.” It contained two years’ worth of the British pop music magazine Record Mirror, which my sister had been sending to me from Liverpool. They were my window into British and American pop music, especially as each issue carried the UK and US album and singles charts. Back in Cairo, my friends would take turns reading old issues and making note of upcoming album releases. The magazine always featured flamboyant indie acts on the cover, men with makeup or women dressed in skimpy clothing: the Cure, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, Madonna.

  “This goes against our traditions as a Muslim country,” the Customs officer said, and told me he’d confiscate all copies. “Shame on you for bringing this to our land,” he added as he flipped through them, himself transfixed. Wahbi insisted that they were for private use, but the officer countered that it made no difference. A few supplicating “ma’lesh,” never minds, and “yallahs,” come ons, later and I made it out with my magazines. It never even occurred to me that a general-interest music magazine would be considered pornographic in Yemen, but the experience coloured my perception of our so-called ancestral homeland before I even left the airport. “You’ll get used to it,” my mother told me later the same day. It wasn’t long before I discovered that the full sentence should have gone something like, You’ll get used to it, but you’ll not necessarily like it.

  Culture shocks are meant to happen when you take an individual from his native environment and drop him onto completely unfamiliar ground. By all rights, Yemen shouldn’t have been so culturally alien. Unlike Aden, however, which was a port city and colonial melting pot, Sana’a had isolated itself from the world for much of the twentieth century. It was literally a gated community, with the historic Bab al Yemen, the Gate of Yemen, closing off the city at night to visitors in the old days. Nearly twenty-five years since the troops of Gamal Abdel Nasser helped local republicans liberate the country from the pseudo-monarchist rule of the Sayyids, or the Masters, the city, like the country as a whole, was divided along the lines of those who wanted to modernize it in the style of the Gulf states and those who fought to keep it in a time capsule—somewhere between the late Victorian and early modern eras. Judging from the increasing number of businesses, cars and electronics stores, the modernizing faction was winning. Just about.

  Getting used to Yemen while resenting it captured the mood at our reunited family home. It had been just three to four years since my older siblings left Cairo, but within days of arriving in Sana’a I noticed a disturbing family dynamic. Our new residence was two separate apartments in a detached house in the then-quiet Hasaba district, a short bus ride away from Sana’a’s own Tahrir Square and the historic Old City. (The Hasaba is the nerve centre of the student protests that escalated into a civil war in 2011.) Helmi had got married the year before and lived with his wife and, shortly after my arrival, his first child in the family home. My sister Ferial worked in the USAID as an education officer, while Raja’a landed a job as a librarian in Sana’a University. Hoda had changed jobs as an executive assistant a number of times but was settling in at the main local administrative offices and factory of 7UP. Hanna had started a new job as a social worker in a government-run school and was married to a man who mainly showed up for work to collect his paycheque, which, in Yemen, literally meant taking your salary in cash at the counter. I always saw it as a sign of how strange and yet incredibly safe Sana’a was that on payday men and women would carry around plastic bags containing wads of cash. No one feared being mugged.

  I can’t say my sisters weren’t independent financially. The country was generous to them in that respect. This was Yemen before the inflation of the 1990s and the economic decline of the last two decades of President Sa
leh’s rule. The US dollar was worth about five Yemeni riyals, so the purchasing power of the professional class—which, legitimately, became our status in the world now—was high. (At the time of my writing this book, the US dollar stands at 250 riyals, which explains why the country is routinely described as one of the poorest in the Arab world.) But while they gained financially, my sisters lost some serious ground in terms of social and intellectual independence. Whether they liked it or not, they had to wear headscarves and abayas and learn not to engage in arguments in public spaces with, say, shopkeepers or taxi drivers. Women didn’t speak much in Yemen, as their voices might be too tempting for men, and limited their socializing to home gatherings with other women. My sisters, for example, couldn’t just sit in a restaurant and eat a meal together without a male companion. Yemenis considered it both dangerous and suspicious for women to walk alone at night. Even if my sisters had to walk just a few blocks home after a house party, they’d take a cab or call me or my brother to accompany them. In effect, my main role for the first few months was to chaperone them. The culture in general smacked of centuries-old hypocrisies and a fear of women. Even the few liberal men we knew, people who had once lived in Cairo or Beirut, or had got their education in the UK or the US, would say in public all the right things about women’s equality and freedom but act like prison guards to their own wives and sisters. I remember, a day or two after arriving in Sana’a, opening my arms to my cousin Yousra, who was my favourite as a child and like a sister to me, only to be rebuffed with a handshake—a warm handshake, but a sign that I could no longer hug my own cousin in this society.