After living in the Middle East for a year, I’ve come to understand how to adapt my queerness to the region. I’m fortunate enough to have spent the best part of my year abroad living in a country where sodomy is decriminalised and where if you look hard enough, there is a vibrant queer scene that has embraced me with open arms and shown me its way of life.
But living in that region comes at a price. I met a boy at the beginning of the year abroad who I’ll call Harry for the purpose of anonymity. He’s a DL bisexual man a couple years older than me who I shared a brief moment with…so to speak. There are so many things about Harry that make my heart shatter into a million pieces. One of the first being that I wasn’t exactly his ideal type of guy. Despite this, we remain good friends. I’m someone different to him. I’m a foreigner from London, I wear clothes he considers ‘fashionable’, I wear makeup despite the arguments I have to go through to do so at home and when I’m away from the four walls that raised me, I am my most authentic queer self.
At the start of our friendship, we spent a night together, that I’ll never forget for many reasons. One, because we had the most awkward hook-up on planet earth for reasons which I’ll spare you, and two, because on that same night there was an Israeli Iranian air strike with missiles going in both directions flying over us in Amman. We were strolling around my relatively boring suburb when the sky filled with red dots. As we were walking back to my apartment, I recited a prayer in Arabic (the three quls) and blew air on him which is something we do to ward off evil and as a form of protection. Shortly after this I moved to Tunis for the term, and I thought that our story had ended there. I was lucky enough to return to Amman to continue Hilary and Trinity in Jordan and so our story continued.
Somewhere along the way we enjoyed a night in a local gay bar and danced with each other. A friend compared his face card to that of Asher from How To Get Away With Murder which was a pretty good burn so to speak. An early form of divine intervention for what would ensue when he saw M. He had been talking to M while I’d been living in Tunisia and M is the complete opposite of me. Slender, curves in the right places, a good dancer, feminine and looks like he’s walked straight out of a Renaissance painting. I recognise my insecurities and I know when I am in a position where I cannot compete, and I embrace it. I am not the ‘Barbie doll gay’. I have cellulite, stretch marks, facial hair that I have to shave, and I don’t have a coquettish laugh when I walk into a room. Despite being ignored all night after M entered the picture, I let him crash at mine as he lives quite a distance from Amman.
Whilst I have a nasty habit of staying in contact with certain past flings or ex-situationships there is a reason why I am loath to let go of Harry. We’ve had many a conversation about how conservative his town is. How he cannot wear the clothes he’d like to in his area because it would be considered as فافي (faafi) which is the Arabic equivalent of fruity. We recently went out with my friends to our local queer haunt and had a wonderful night where we danced, kissed, drank and were able to forget who we were and what the expectations are of us as men who were raised in conservative cultures. When we returned to my house at 5am I rested my head on his lap whilst we talked for a bit before he went home. I expressed my sadness at the fact that despite his obvious bisexuality he only has one path to go down: marry a woman.
His response to my words was ‘3adi’ which means it’s ok or normal in Arabic. Every time we’ve talked about sexuality, I think a piece of my heart has chipped a little. It brings me back to that fundamental question. ‘Is it better to speak or to die?’ On one hand conversation is considered therapeutic. The whole argument that confiding in someone might alleviate your suffering, yet every time we speak, I am reminded that freedom of expression comes at a high price. Whilst we live in a generation where there are places that accept members of the LGBTQ+ community for who they are, unequivocally it just isn’t the case for most of the world. I am yet to be lucky in love, but I know when it comes down to it that if I found the right guy at home, I would be able to support myself and have the freedom to love him without fear of persecution. But where does that leave the Harrys of the world? Destined to accept a half love instead of a whole love. Befriending him can sometimes feel like a knife to the heart, yet abandoning him feels like a pain that even a million happy memories would fail to rewrite.