Sex and the Citadel (35 page)

So long as it’s away from my ass, I don’t mind.
¹

—My grandmother, on the importance
of minding your own business

This is a tale of two cities, in as many city blocks. About a year before the uprising, I made my way through the streets around Tahrir Square to a party at a private club. My host was Nasim, an immensely charming and cultured man in his forties and a teacher at an elite foreign language school. The place was heaving that night, rickety tables jammed with artists, writers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals—Muslims and Coptic Christians, like Nasim, united in leisure. Alcohol was flowing freely, and conversations switched seamlessly between Arabic, English, and French. It was a lively and sophisticated scene—and unmistakably, unabashedly gay.

I don’t use that word lightly, since “gay” carries some hefty baggage outside the West. A few years ago, Joseph Massad, a Palestinian academic based in America, raised a storm by suggesting that the “Gay International”—an alliance of Western NGOs promoting the interests of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people—was foisting a Western gameplan on the Arab world and perverting its natural sexual order, in which men have sex with men, and women with women, without considering themselves “homosexual” or “gay.”
²
In Massad’s book, this form of sexual imperialism puts the lives of those whose inclinations and activities transgress the heterosexual norm at risk by linking such desires to a despised Western agenda of gay rights, as well as limiting the sexual sphere of Arabs by freezing them into rigid sexual categories with specific
labels, while their own tastes freely flow from one sex to another. As Massad put it:

When the Gay International incites discourse on homosexuality in the non-Western world, it claims that the “liberation” of those it defends lies in the balance. In espousing this liberation project, however, the Gay International is destroying social and sexual configurations of desire in the interest of reproducing a world in its own image, one wherein its sexual categories and desires are safe from being questioned.
³

Back at the club, these “configurations of desire” were busy getting down on the parquet dance floor, well-honed bodies in tight T-shirts and snug jeans, gyrating to the sounds of Dalida, a gay icon. Around the room, clusters of men, arms draped over each other’s shoulders, were head to head in conversation. At first glance, there was nothing out of the ordinary in this. Intense homosociality, including close physical contact and strong emotional attachments among people of the same sex, is perfectly acceptable in Egypt without necessarily signaling sexual attraction. These interactions can be confusing to those brought up in the West, where the one is generally assumed to follow the other. I remember as a child having to be restrained by my mother when one of my father’s friends took his hand while we were walking in Luxor. This wasn’t early-onset homophobia, mind you, but pure and simple jealousy that someone other than my mother and I should claim such intimacy. Today, even after years of working in the Arab region, I still do a double take when I get messages like “My darling Shereen, how I miss you and count the days until I see you again, God willing. Much love and kisses”—this from a happily married, straight-as-an-arrow female friend.

But even before being introduced to Nasim’s friends, I could tell from the look of frank disgust on the waiters’ faces that this was something else entirely. “And you?” I swiveled around to answer what I thought was a question directed at me, because it used a feminine pronoun in Arabic; it turned out to be one man talking to another. Nasim shook his head, in clear disapproval of this sort of
grammatical gender-bending. “It’s to joke, but I hate this. Some of the guys get quite camp. The important thing is how you appear. Enjoy yourselves, just don’t make a scandal.”

A few weeks later, and a couple of blocks away, another face of Cairo came to light. I joined Munir and his friends at an
ahwa
, a traditional coffee shop, where men gathered around tables, talking and laughing between sips of strong coffee and syrupy tea. A football match was blaring on a tiny TV mounted high in the corner, and the only women in sight were myself, a colleague, and some female sex workers in the back trying to sweet-talk a few of the men. The
ahwa
is an intensely masculine space—you’d swear they put testosterone in the shisha—where Munir and his friends were clearly in their element, although all of them happen to have sex with other men. It was a world apart from Nasim’s smart set. Munir and his friends are all working-class—when they can get the work, that is. Some of them turn tricks with men to make ends meet.
⁴

Like heterosexuals in Cairo, Nasim and Munir rarely mingle socially. “We’re all educated, wealthy,” Nasim remarked, looking around the club. “The problem is that the gay community is very segregated, classwise. The idea that a minority will lose its social differences because it is a minority? This is not so.” Nasim is no snob, but he is wary of those outside his circle. “The rich lead their own lives, and the poor lead their lives and there are real dangers in mixing. You cannot imagine what a relief it is when I find a man and he doesn’t want to rob me, beat me, or rape me. When you find such a man, you grab him.”

The tie that binds these disparate classes is distrust. Nasim is extremely wary of the places and parties he frequents, and if the scene gets “too gay,” in his words, he steers clear. His caution comes from a defining moment, the aptly named Queen Boat incident of 2001, in which a lively party on the Nile was raided by police, triggering a roundup of more than fifty homosexual men, who were charged, convicted, named, and shamed in the media.
⁵
Even men who were children at the time, too young to understand the nature of the incident, today find their attitudes and activities colored by it. While Nasim exercises caution, prison is not his main concern.
“When [the police] see me, they see my social identity, so they don’t do it [arrest me]. It’s about power,” he explained. From the other side of the tracks, Munir confirmed this great divide. “If [a man] is arrested and he knows someone important, he calls him and [the police] let him go. In the high-class gay places, the police cannot go. So expensive places, nobody cares whether they are gay or not.” Outside this shiny bubble, however, people do very much care; what most concerns Nasim is the specter of public exposure to family and neighbors should there be any sort of run-in with officialdom.

Over at the
ahwa
, Munir and his friends are also careful of the company they keep. “Some people are afraid and apprehensive. They do not speak freely with anyone,” Munir explained. “We are not safe. We are afraid to go this place, or that place. I will never linger in any place where there are many gays. It is very dangerous. Most of the gays, they are young, they are still hyper, they are not very safe.” The danger here is the police. For Munir, jail is not some abstract threat. There is a complex array of laws in countries across the Arab region criminalizing same-sex activity. None specifically mention “homosexuality” per se, though they manage to embrace it all the same through the criminalization of sodomy, vaguely defined “homosexual acts,” and other loosely interpreted infractions.
⁶

Egypt, along with Jordan and the West Bank, does not actually have a law against sodomy or same-sex acts, but it does have long-standing laws on public indecency and prostitution, including the charge of “habitual debauchery.” This has been thrown at Munir twice, as well as some trumped-up drug charges. “The police can take you just sitting here … just for gathering. If they hear about us, or someone tells him that I have HIV, you can be arrested.”
⁷
The night we met, Munir and his friends were distinctly on edge. There had just been a murder in the neighborhood, and the group was resigned to the prospect of being rounded up among the usual suspects.

Why authorities should prove so keen to arrest men who have sex with men when there is, in fact, no specific article criminalizing such consensual acts is an interesting question, one I put to
several lawyers and their clients. The consensus was that police activity was less a matter of moral objections, closeted homosexual desire, or even blackmail and more to do with the exercise of power, be it a coordinated campaign from on high or individual initiative, in an authoritarian system that encourages the subjugation of those next down the line. But when I presented such theories to one former Cairo police chief, he was simply baffled. “But there is a law criminalizing sodomy and the homosexual,” he insisted. “Not prostitution—specifically sodomy. This law is written down, taught in police college.” He was clear on its value. “They punish these people, because it is in the law. We criminalize things against our religion and it causes AIDS. The best thing is to put them in prison. Yes, I believe it will reduce the number of these incidents and it conforms with shari’a.” His chilling confidence was proof positive of what the lawyers had told me: for those in power, the law is whatever you want it to be. Such impunity was made all the easier by three decades of Emergency Law imposed in 1981, giving authorities the right to arrest, detain, and try with minimal accountability, thereby allowing police to pick up Munir and his friends whenever, wherever, and for whatever reason it suited them.

Munir is a small and gentle man, with Nefertiti cheekbones, large, liquid eyes, and the sort of eyelashes mascara marketers dream of. He told me of his experiences in a soft, good-humored voice, which makes such violence all the more horrifying. On one occasion, Munir was arrested in an apartment he was sharing with six friends; they had been betrayed by a roommate who, in a familiar story, had turned police informant to get off the hook. “When they arrested us, they took us to the doctor to see if we were practicing [sodomy],” Munir explained. “Yes, anal testing,” he replied to my quizzical look, referring to a popular forensic technique. Anal exams are apparently a big hit with “CSI Cairo,” which looks for certain deformities of the anus, among other signs, as proof of sodomy. Foreign experts, however, are singularly unimpressed with such methods, as was Munir, whose objections lay less in the gross human rights violation they represent and more in what he considers
their general uselessness.
⁸
Munir said he tested negative, but no matter: he was sentenced to six months in prison for habitual debauchery all the same.

As the men drew on their shisha and we drank our way through bottles of 7Up, the terrible tales kept on coming: electrocution, beatings, rape, and forced confession in police custody, witnesses and competent legal representation apparently optional extras. Stretches in prison, followed by months of monitoring, again often in police custody, were even worse. “To break his eye” is the Egyptian expression for humiliating someone, and forced sodomy has been a tool of choice for those in power in the Arab region throughout the ages. Munir shook his head at the absurdity of the situation. “Sometimes when we sleep in the station, the police, they do it [have sex with us]. Why do they arrest us for homosexuality and then put us in prison, where it happens again? Are we just entertainment, pleasure for another person?”
⁹

A MAN’S WORLD

In sharing these intimacies, Munir and Nasim regularly referred to themselves as “gay” or
homo
—words borrowed from English and French. There are alternatives in Arabic, but none of them quite hit the mark. Historically, there was no shortage of Arabic words to describe men and women getting it on with their own sex, but these were, as some scholars maintain, related to actions, not orientation—having intercourse with the same or opposite sex, they argue, being more a question of activity than identity. This distinction is reflected in the classical terms
luti
(a man who penetrates a younger male) and
suhaqiyya
(a woman who “grinds against” another woman).

Over the past century, the words people use to talk about same-sex relations have shifted, reflecting changing times—a transformation I have seen in my own family. When my father talks about homosexuality, he uses
khawal
and
‘ilq
, words that refer to the active and passive male partner, often used in insult or jest; a
generation later, my cousins talk about
shadh
(pronounced
shaz
), a term meaning “deviant” that entered use around the middle of the twentieth century.
¹⁰
I, on the other hand, because of my work with civil society and the United Nations, use the Arabic equivalent of international HIV/AIDS-speak—“men who have sex with men,” for example, which is just as much of a mouthful in Arabic as it is in English. This is part of a terminology developed over the past decade or so that borrows from the international LGBT movement:
mithli
and
mithliyya
, masculine and feminine derivatives of the word for “same,” referring to men and women who have relations with their own sex;
ghairi
and
ghairiyya
, from the word for “different,” for heterosexual men and women;
thuna’i
and
thuna’iyya
, from the word for “double,” for male and female bisexuals;
mutahawwil
and
mutahawwila
, from the word for “to change,” for transsexual or transgendered people. In Egypt, these terms are still mainly restricted to specialized circles, and in my experience, words other than
shadh
elicit perplexed looks or bursts of laughter.

But “gay” is not for everyone. At the club, Anwar, who’s an artist, was describing his busy career, dashing between performances and projects in Cairo, Paris, and Amsterdam. I naively assumed that life as a homosexual man must be easier for him in Europe, but that was not his experience. “I find it more liberating here. I’m out—my parents know, my colleagues know I like men. In Europe, my art is seen as ‘gay art.’ But here, I’m a performer who happens to like men. I’m not pigeonholed in the same way.”