Unicorn

by Amrou Al-Kadhi

  Drinking and drugs weren’t the only discoveries I made during my time at Eton. It’s also the place where I lost my virginity, and I’m now working incredibly hard to unlearn the things I was taught in that department. To tell you about all this, I’m going to have to be vague, lest my story should inadvertently bring a now married man out of the closet. But what I can tell you was that there was a boy with whom I studied Biology, and he turned sex into a war zone for me. Let’s call him Mason. Mason was a beautiful, well chiselled, sharp-featured teenager with long bright blond hair and a spellbinding gaze. He was an extraordinarily articulate boy, disarmingly charming, and so astute with his description of things that he’d quite frequently have me crying with laughter. His acerbic tongue gave him a status he didn’t get academically or from his extra-curricular CV, and you couldn’t help but want to be around him, partly because you knew that if you weren’t you might be victim to his verbal bite.

  When you were on Mason’s good side, you felt like the most special person in the world. He was aware that he had this talent, and he preyed on the most vulnerable – newbies and younger boys were his favourite – though he also bedded masculine sports deities, holding the knowledge of their emasculation if ever they undermined him. Now this isn’t just self-deprecation, but I wasn’t an attractive teenager. I had the physicality of a broken toothpick, braces, glasses, cystic acne, and long black hair that apparently gave me the unfortunate appearance of a sewer rat whenever I got out of the shower. After the poodle, Mason was my second Mr Darcy at Eton. Mason started courting me because of his academic insecurities; I had clout when it came to my rank in the classroom, while Mason was winning in pretty much all other departments.

  Like an expert groomer, Mason’s initial tactic was to be uncommonly friendly to me, giving me what so few other people offered me at Eton. On the way to and from lessons, he would dazzle me with his takedowns of the other boys in our class, making me feel that it was the two of us against the world. I was the only person of colour in my Biology class, and my sexuality and new-boy status were leverage for Mason. He would give his time in return for me helping him academically. Mason had been watching me like a hawk and was well versed in all my specific insecurities; for instance, he once gifted me with a list of films that I should watch to get ‘cultured’.

  By the end of my second term, he was slowly playing footsie with me during Chapel. With such obliterated self-worth, and no idea that I could ever be attractive, it wasn’t until we were in my room after an evening chapel service and he said, ‘This is the part where we pull,’ that we first had sex. It was as if my homosexual desires had been locked up in solitary confinement for all my life and were suddenly out on day release. Our first kiss was less like a kiss and more like me mopping his face with my tongue. Pretty swiftly I was naked and kneeling on the floor, sucking his penis. It struck me that his arse must have been sitting on the little Quran my mother had given me – and before I knew it, come had erupted out of my penis like magma from a pent-up volcano. When Mason saw what had happened, my knees tremoring on the carpet, he looked down at me and said, with the neutrality of a GP asking if you’d passed urine, ‘You’ve come, haven’t you? That’s a shame.’

  It felt as if my body was guided by an external force that was controlling my ejaculation, shouting at my brain to EJECT because what I was doing was so shameful. As I lay in bed that night, the pleasure of the experience wrestled with the shame of it; I had fully yielded to the temptation of the serpent and eaten the forbidden fruit, and my body had prematurely ejaculated as a way to prohibit further transgressions. But, as of that moment, I knew I was doomed. Because what I felt during the brief sexual episode was the most in touch I had been with something that had long been policed inside of me. There was no way I could resist another bite.

  Mason seized upon my powerlessness. I wasn’t the only boy he was sleeping with. There were many places that we had sex, and one of them was a school society meeting room that had a mattress in it; I would see Mason’s boys come and go, and they included the most influential people in Pop, along with many others who had given me hell. The fact that I could be desired by a boy who was already bedding the elite felt like a privilege to me, and Mason reminded me time and time again of this power structure. Like The Talented Mr Ripley, he was an expert at manipulation. During a lesson, he had once joined in with the other boys who were teasing me for submitting homework the length of War and Peace; but later that evening, when we were hanging out at our secret place, Mason was only a source of comfort, rewarding me with sex. Our sexual transactions were entirely decided by him, of course – often they would entail me rolling over and allowing him to penetrate me. When I was well behaved and on his good side, I might get some kissing, or even a blow job, but those felt like a reward. Mason also enjoyed suddenly punishing me. One night, he was giving me a blow job, and as he rubbed his hands over my skinny frame he suddenly looked up at me, shook his body as if he was trying to shirk the feeling of something ‘icky’, then got up and left me alone in my room, so I could sit with the shame of my undesirability. As though I was suffering Stockholm Syndrome, such episodes only intensified my yearning for him.

  One of the most hurtful incidents took place during a school play at the start of my second year. The school often brought in girls from neighbouring schools for us to act with in productions. In this production, I was quick to befriend one of them – let’s call her Arabella – and we formed what I believed was a true, meaningful connection. Arabella was extraordinarily beautiful and talented, and one couldn’t help but want to be in her orbit. Arabella was creative, and she and I had many a conversation about our shared interests. Mason grew jealous. It wasn’t in our sexual contract that I could make friends without his permission. And so Mason too became friends with Arabella, and offered her something I never could – a sense of entitlement at Eton. This friend I had made was soon enough on the phone to Mason every evening. During rehearsals they began to sit separately from me, effortlessly more attractive and cool than I was. I had told Arabella about my sexual interactions with Mason, because I believed the two of us to be close, and I needed someone to talk to about them. But during one rehearsal, when Arabella and Mason didn’t realise I was sitting behind them – or maybe they did? – Arabella asked, in that way which suggests ‘yes’ would be an impossible answer, ‘You’re not actually attracted to Amrou, are you?’ Mason, who enjoyed being firmly in the same league as Arabella, snorted with laughter. ‘Yuck. Of course not. He’s disgusting. I do it ’cos I pity him.’ The worst thing is that I fully believed him.

  Mason’s actions went from cruel to dangerous. In my final term, I was cast in the most coveted role of a school production (bow down, biatches). Also in the cast was a beautiful and artistic fifteen-year-old boy, with shaggy brown hair and sweetly circular glasses – let’s call him Nicholas – who had once been engaged in sexual activity with Mason. Nicholas and I became extremely close friends (though nothing romantic ensued), and I was dazzled by his sensitive understanding of most social situations.

  Mason also auditioned and secured a part, albeit a much smaller one. As he got wind of my developing friendship with Nicholas, he asked our director if he could be present at every rehearsal, so enraged that I was becoming close with one of his sexual conquests. It was then that he started photographing the rehearsals ‘for fun’. It seemed to me that Mason wanted to observe our every movement, both with his eye and that of his camera’s. People often say that the patriarchy exists in the male gaze, and I felt it acutely during this episode; with the scopophilic obsession of the Robin Williams character in One Hour Photo, Mason used his eyes to remind me that I was his subject, and that I was powerless to escape the prison of our established hierarchy. Throughout every rehearsal, the quiet ticking of his camera shutter ensured I knew that every interaction with Nicholas was being silently policed; it reminded me of home, and how my parents impressed on me that my every instinc
tual desire was being closely monitored.

  The wrap party for the play was held in Bella Italia – Partaaaay! – and Mason made sure he was sitting opposite me and Nicholas. The two of us designed an escape plan, and agreed to run off from the party the second Mason was in the loo. In no more than a millisecond after Mason had excused himself, we snatched a bottle of wine and ran off, finding refuge in one of Eton’s private gardens. We lay entwined in platonic bliss, drank wine, and fantasised about adulthood, and how freeing it would eventually be to have queer lives. With the lawn a carpet for our dreams, we heard Mason in the distance screaming our names, raising the hairs on the back of our necks even though it was a perfect summer evening. As I was making my way back to the house later that night, I walked past the secret location Mason and I used for sex, creeping as quietly as I could. But with the hunting agility of a cheetah, Mason spotted me, grabbed my shoulders, slammed me against the wall, and asked me over and over if Nicholas and I had just had sex. The idea that my friendship with Nicholas was based purely on an emotional, platonic bond seemed utterly impossible to Mason, as if all relationships could only be a constant exchange of power. As Mason’s eyes tore into me, I felt profoundly sorry for him, wondering what had reduced him to a person whose body circulated with such venom in place of blood. That was until the next evening, when Nicholas called me, saying it was urgent we spoke. After that morning’s session at Chapel, Mason sneaked himself into Nicholas’s room and lay on his bed, waiting for his return. ‘I ended up giving him a blow job,’ Nicholas said, more like a question than a statement. ‘Did you want to?’ I asked, in a mixture of anger, sadness, and jealousy. Nicholas, now fighting back tears, eventually replied: ‘It was horrible.’

  You might be questioning why I allowed Mason to treat me this way. I often do myself. But at the age of sixteen, and as someone who had not found true acceptance anywhere I turned, I was willing to accept any crumbs of acceptance that were thrown my way. This, in all honesty, is the condition of being queer in a world that’s not designed for you – your self-worth can take such a beating that it’s impossible not to interpret any kind of affection, even if it’s intermittently violent, as a reward. Even after Mason repeatedly demeaned me, I still felt lucky that any guy FULL STOP was willing to have sex with me. That’s how low my self-esteem was. I had come to Eton to build a powerful new me, and while I was there, I constructed a feeble new avatar. So far away from who I was – feeling rotten even in my bones – I allowed myself to be treated in a way I felt I deserved.

  Eton, which I’d envisioned as my salvation, the place to elevate me out of my past, was a dizzying whirlwind of torment and confusion. My sexual experiences there have left residual habits that get in the way of my experiencing intimacy even today; my search for a new self revealed that it was even more elusive than I had ever anticipated; and the narration of my parents as Islamist-child-abusers left me feeling at odds with my own reality. By the time I left Eton, I was nothing more than an unarmoured unicorn, with a blunt, weathered horn, wandering alone once again.

  ME, MYSELF, AND LIES: THE MANY FACES OF BEING A DRAG QUEEN

  During my final year of university, I went to Paris with the queens from my drag troupe, Denim. Denim is a drag night that I started while at Cambridge, and by my final year, there were five queens who regularly performed. We became a very tight friendship group. As its creator, I was the automatic mother of the group, making sure that everything and everyone was organised, and I prided myself for my dependability and for being a pillar of support to my sisters.

  As we walked through the Parisian streets on a crisp winter evening, I unexpectedly saw Mason, standing across the road from me, kissing a girl. This was the first time since graduating from Eton that I had seen him (I had actually forced myself never to think about him). My body sprinted towards a cab without consulting my brain, and before I knew it I was pulling the queens into the taxi with me. I was shaking during the journey, shouted quite a few times, burst into an emotional rage over a five-euro hat that I had bought and lost earlier that day, and as soon as I got home, I had to take a nap. Once I had arisen, I went out for margaritas with the queens, calmer and wearing a cosmic-themed cape that one of them had lent me that trip (another item I later lost). When they asked me about what had happened, I made it perfectly clear that I had no intention of ever talking about it. Among the chorus of concerns and questions came, ‘I’ve never seen you like that’, ‘You never get that upset’, ‘Glamrou – what was that? What’s going on?’

  The queens, who had become a true queer family to me, seemed deeply concerned, even surprised, that I had had such a volatile bodily reaction to seeing a person from my past. I’d never once spoken about Mason. In fact, I’d never really gone into detail about my family problems either. With them, I wanted to be a maternal queer protector who was full of only wisdom, light and positivity. But in that instance, it was clear to all of us that my unresolved past sizzled only millimetres under a brightly made-up surface. As a student, I worked tirelessly to ensure that everyone saw only the illusion of the colourful land of Oz I presented to them. The attempts to disguise my struggling behind this curtain are what characterised my four years at Cambridge University.

  Cambridge was the first place I lived without the policing gaze of my parents or teachers, so I was ‘free’ for the first time. While Cambridge was an open and liberal place, this was more true academically than in any real way on the ground, and there wasn’t a space for queer forms of gender and sexual expression. There were a number of LGBT club-nights and society groups, but the overwhelming number of white male bodies quite frankly intimidated me, and I found myself hiding behind plain T-shirts and jeans to fit in among the normative crowd. It is well known that homophobia exists also in the gay community, and I got wind of this when I joined the gay dating app Grindr as a student. When my profile picture showed me in a more feminine light, I’d receive significantly fewer matches, and common femme-phobic remarks, including ‘Are you straight-acting?’ and ‘No Femmes’. Every now and then I even got ‘No Asians’. Even gay male spaces seemed to limit any forms of femininity or non-conformism, and this was an untapped part of myself that was screaming to be let out. So in the second term of my second year, I made the decision to start a drag night.

  Besides my efforts as period drama dames in Eton farces, I had no experience of drag, so in a way I’m amazed I had the deluded confidence to do this. But the Cambridge terms were short, and always in the back of my head was the idea that everything was suddenly going to implode on me – it felt like there was little time to waste. If I was going to express myself properly in an authentic, liberated way, then I had to do it now. The first port of call was to put out a Facebook post to see if anybody else wanted to try drag with me. I thought I might get the odd like/insult/fatwa, but it soon became abundantly clear that a whole cohort of my peers also felt they needed a space to experiment with gender. By the time the night started, there were about fifteen signed-up drag queens, kings, and gender-aliens in lycra who looked neither male nor female, and even pirates. As there had never been a drag club-night before this, and since it was taking place in a building that seemed designed to induce an asthma attack, I wasn’t sure how many people might turn up. But after only a few days on Facebook, the number of people who had clicked attending was close to 400. Fuck. I don’t even know what I’m doing. To make the night a reality, I had to go to Barclays Bank and drain the remaining pounds from my student loan for that term (which reminds me – I still need to pay this back). I used the government credit to rent out the underground crypt and some microphones, and printed embarrassingly clichéd images of Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli and Lady Gaga to plaster over the damp walls. With the rest of the cash, almost as if on autopilot, I went on eBay and ordered myself a pair of heels and a giant blonde wig (which looked a bit like an electrocuted guinea pig). I hadn’t worked out what my drag aesthetic might be at this point in my life, but th
ese objects just spoke to me, like glittery queer horcruxes that would make me indestructible.

  In the two weeks leading up to the first Denim, I met up with each of the performers, to talk with them about what they were going to perform and to offer my advice. Odd, this, as I genuinely had no advice to offer them. Absolutely nothing. I was like a character in Bugsy Malone, a kid dressed in the adult costume of a gangster, pretending to run shit while secretly peeing nervously down their leg. I was shambolically dismal when it came to make-up; I hopscotched in heels more than I walked in them; I had the sartorial instincts of a confused Amish person in Primark; and I knew nearly nothing about singing live in drag. It felt as if everyone had been fooled into thinking I was some queer missionary – and I was more than happy to go along with the charade. For the first time ever in my life, I had power because I was queer.

  To cement my position as a drag mother hen, I did what any misguided drag queen does at the start of their career – I sang a song from a famous musical. My chosen number was ‘When You’re Good to Mama’ from Chicago. CRINGE. The day itself was utterly chaotic. At one point I had to schlep all the decorations from one side of Cambridge to the other in a wheelie bin. Every single performer was a bundle of nerves, not one of us having ever done this before. But it fell on me to provide the words of comfort – I was mother after all – and while everyone got ready, I watched as each of them had a partner or a friend to help them with their make-up and costume. They all probably thought I didn’t need any help, but in truth I needed the most out of all of them. As I retreated to the corner, trying to figure out a way to stop my wig obeying the laws of gravity, I went over the lyrics to ‘When You’re Good to Mama’, and started thinking about my own. If she found out about tonight, she’d be so ashamed of me … whatever I do, there’s no way she or Dad can know about this. I started to take in the crumbling brown walls of the mouldy crypt, the condensation coating its ceiling, and the general mess and chaos around me. I felt an intense pang of anguish, as if a capsule of sorrow had suddenly dissolved in my gut and was spreading rapidly around my bloodstream. I couldn’t help but equate the filth of the room with the image my mother had of me – a skinny, broke Arab son in a dress, wheezing because of the disgusting room they now found themselves in. It was as though the dirt of the surroundings was a mirror to the person I really was, and I sat immobilised, unable to do anything, locked in a limbo of heartache.