Unicorn

by Amrou Al-Kadhi

  As it was the university holidays, my parents were visiting me in London (they did this every summer that I was a student). When I went to visit them, entering the house felt like enrolling in an army school for disobedient children. I walked in, and tried to watch the TV – the remote was snatched from me, and the TV was turned off. My father, now completely white in the hair and aged in the face, didn’t look me in the eye. My mother’s eyes were puffy from crying. They retreated to their room. I went into mine and decided to change into something more comfortable. When I opened my wardrobe, my favourite red cape was nowhere to be seen. Soon, I realised – none of my clothes were. Everything with a trace of flamboyance was missing. Feeling as if a limb had been cut off, I had to ask my parents where my clothes from Cambridge had suddenly disappeared to. ‘We threw away all your silly clothes, Amrou. Enough is enough,’ my mother said, more sorrow in her voice than anything malicious, as if she were a pet owner announcing that they had to put down a dog that they loved. ‘It’s time for you to act like a man.’ Having my prized garments tossed away felt like an act of castration – these were all I had to express my queer identity, and each and every one of them had gone. The red cape had become a staple piece of mine at Cambridge, and there was even a month when I wore it with red boots, red trousers and dyed my hair bright red. I similarly did this with a green ensemble, effectively treating the separate academic terms as if I was a different fruit in a Pimm’s drink each time. The immediate concern was superficial – what Pimm’s fruit am I going to impersonate at Cambridge now?! – but beneath that was a deep pain and a feeling of having been neutered.

  The atmosphere in the house was that of a 1920s psychiatric ward. I felt as if I were being forcibly medicated, so that I would emerge a son of whom they were proud. My parents scheduled a family meeting for the end of the week, which I anticipated would be the final assessment of whether the week’s treatment had been curative. It seemed that they had both rehearsed the conversation – my mother even had bullet points to guide her through it (on a pink heart-shaped Post-it, no less). The psychological takedown went something like this (imagine the following text being uttered by either one of them, as it was clearly a rehearsed script written by them both):

  ‘Amrou. You used to be a very special, happy kid.’ Yes, and I miss that time.

  ‘You were our pride and joy.’ Let me guess, I’m not any more?

  ‘But you’ve become a monster.’ Nope, definitely not.

  ‘Ever since coming to the UK, look what happened to you.’ So we’re blaming this on Britain?

  ‘You’ve become angry, rude, selfish.’ Angry – I can’t help it. Rude … you deserve it. But selfish?

  ‘How am I selfish?’ I asked, completely sincerely.

  ‘All you do is what you want. You dress how you want, do what you want, act how you want, and you don’t care that it makes us upset. That is the definition of selfish.’ Not in the Oxford English Dictionary, Mother.

  ‘But … I’m just trying to do what makes me happy … it’s not about you. It’s about me.’

  ‘You see – that’s selfish. You’re selfish.’ Damn. They got me on semantics.

  ‘I’m just trying to be me.’

  ‘You’re not you. Everything you do is a reflection of us. And with all this women’s clothing nonsense you have lost the respect of Majid’ – who parties with drag queens in Barcelona? – ‘and you have made life hell for us. People in Iraq message us with photos of you. It’s bad for business, and it’s bad for the family. Have you no shame?’

  ‘I don’t mean for that to happen! I’m just trying to be me! What’s selfish is you throwing out all my clothes because you don’t want me to be gay. That’s you only thinking about you.’

  ‘Amrou,’ my mother said, in a cat-purring whisper that she knew would tug at my heartstrings. ‘You used to make me so happy. Now, everything that you do … it makes me unhappy. You are the source of my life’s unhappiness.’ I hate that you think I’m responsible for all your hurt. I’m so sorry you’re hurt. ‘The things that you do … this gay stuff … these dresses. They make me unhappy. So if you want me to be happy, stop them, and all will be well. OK?’

  My mother and father were both crying, and it was clear how genuinely they felt what they were saying. As I stared at them, the two people who made me exist but made me want to not exist, the two people who created me but were ashamed of their creation – their queer Frankenstein’s monster – I experienced a sharp duality of emotion. I felt rage and venom that my protectors wanted to hurt the part of me that was really me, but guilt and grief that I had upset two people who had done so much for me. It was hard not to feel remorse. With hindsight I understand how unfair it was of them to place the wealth of their life’s unhappiness onto me, a person only trying to express themselves, but within the very specific context of our family and cultural heritage, I was the person doing the upsetting. Also, they had strength in numbers and the community, with decades of a tried and tested formula to back them up; I had only a very feeble sense of what I was trying to do. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, half meaning it, half not.

  ‘Amrou. You seem so … confused about your life. What do you really want?’ I sat with this question for a long moment, intending to answer it genuinely. ‘I just want to be with someone and for them to love me.’

  Of course they both knew that this ‘someone’ I referred to wouldn’t be a future wife, and after they searched for something to say, my mother came out with: ‘It would be unfair for you to inflict yourself on somebody. You’re impossible to love.’ I already fully believed this, but that didn’t make hearing it any less devastating.

  When I went back to Cambridge for the start of my third year, drag seemed the only way to numb the pain of that brutal familial blow-up – moments in drag made me feel, on even just a superficial level, worthy of love (which I equated only with applause). But it was also the drag that was worsening the dynamic in my family – was it an unsustainable high that made the lows of my life more intense? Drag felt like a glittery Hello Kitty plaster covering up an oozing wound of rejection beneath, and whenever I ripped it off, the wound grew more infected. There was, as a result, a marked contradiction between my external and internal selves. And this led to some surprising and often saddening behaviours.

  During my time at Cambridge, I had become close friends with the most wondrous of boys. Let’s call him Dennis. I first met Dennis out at a nightclub called Cindy’s, which was notorious for having a floor so sticky that you could barely move your feet, and usually hosted the inebriated conclusions of most sporting society escapades. It was shit.

  During my first term, I went with my college drinking society – the college I studied at is called Corpus Christi, and the drinking society was called the Corpus Cossacks. AWFUL. I spent most of the night in the smoking area, hopping from person to person in the hope that one might socially adopt me. As I leant against a wall to smoke a cigarette, trying desperately to imitate James Dean but probably coming across more like a meerkat, I caught sight of a beautiful cherubic boy, with huge, spellbinding eyes that could swallow a galaxy, staring through the crowd at me with a coy, nervous smile. He walked over. ‘I’m Dennis … we have a couple of mutual friends in London. I’ve been wanting to say hey for ages.’ I cannot express to you how utterly enchanting this boy was. He was like the human manifestation of Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the infectiously mischievous grin of, well, Dennis the Menace. At this point in his life, Dennis hadn’t come out of the closet, but I could immediately recognise a queer spirit that gave us an affinity.

  The intensity of the bond Dennis and I shared brought with it an entire world of secret idioms that only we were privy to, and this feeling of coexisting with someone else on a planet out of orbit from everybody else’s was very special. We developed a reputation as a bit of a double act, and I adored this sense of social solidarity we had. Things re
ally cemented when we went on a European drama society tour together. Dennis and I were both performers, and stupidly signed ourselves up to the university’s infamous winter tour of a Shakespeare production around European high schools. In essence, the tour consisted of travelling through ice-cold snow to put on a pathetic production of The Taming of the Shrew to schools that had no interest in watching us, and it was quite, quite, miserable. Dennis and I quickly formed an alliance in our misery, and created our own queer sub-culture. While the majority of the cast attempted to enjoy what is genuinely one of the worst shows I have ever been involved in, Dennis and I decided to camp the fuck out of it, which made performing in the stale production actually quite joyous. During a day off, when the cast rented a chalet and built a snowman as a bonding exercise, Dennis and I decided instead to ski on a nearby slope in just jeans and gilets. During the daily installation and dismantling of the set, where the cast were forced to carry a helter skelter through blizzards, magical Dennis and I would do photoshoots in the snow and pretend to be on a runway as we carried the metal structure, which was so cold that it fused with our fingers. We had developed such a well-constructed reputation for being ‘cast divas’ – as if this is an insult! – that we decided to fulfil everyone’s expectations of us by flying back to the UK instead of enduring the coach ride with everybody else. While the debris of the production was being lugged back into the truck, the cast members looked on in disdain as Dennis and I wheeled our bags through the snow to a waiting cab, both with pink pashminas billowing in the blizzard, victoriously cheeky smiles on our faces.

  Dennis identified as heterosexual in the first year of our friendship, but it was clear how much he looked up to me for being out as gay. I recognised so much of myself in him; how his queer spirit fully took flight when he was on the stage, his anxieties at having upset people or about being found out over absolutely anything, and an at times crippling OCD that really hindered his quality of life. His OCD took a much more poetic form than mine, though; for instance, when I once directed him in a theatre production, he had to watch a scene from Black Beauty every single night before he could get onstage. I was acutely aware of how much was holding him back, and wanted no more than to see him flourish. It became a mission of mine to watch this angel properly spread his wings, and casting him as the lead of a production I directed was a particularly powerful moment. Every night, as he hypnotised the room with his completely unique flair – not a gecko costume in sight – I felt deeply proud of him. But I also felt as if I was watching a manifestation of my child self, and my protective instinct over Dennis was almost as if I were trying to save a version of myself from the onslaught of emotional trauma that I knew was coming.

  The night Dennis came out to me, we had just been to a debate between the Cambridge Footlights and the cast from Made in Chelsea, the motion being: ‘I’d rather be in Cambridge than in Chelsea’. It wasn’t at all compelling (nor all that funny). As my beautiful red cape had been taken from me, I was wearing a new velvet black one, which everyone knew was just not as good; I had searched from vintage shop to vintage shop, attempting to find something similar, and this was the best I could muster. After the ‘debate’ finished, I ran cape-first out of the hall, and Dennis asked if he could speak to me. With my cape acting as a sort of shared picnic blanket, Dennis sat opposite me, full of hope and pride in his eyes. ‘Amrou, I have something to tell you,’ he said, clearly anticipating the significance of this moment, a life milestone he had probably imagined countless times. Before he had a chance to tell me himself, I came out with, ‘Are you gay, Dennis?’ He had the disappointed expression of someone having their own anecdote interrupted at a dinner party. ‘Oh … well … yeah,’ said Dennis. Given how close we were, and how much my externally strong queer identity had done for us both, I think he expected me to lift him up with a sisterly pride. In truth, I had anticipated this kind of reaction for myself too. But all I felt was rage. It was like an allergic reaction. His eyes, which just a moment ago had glowed with hopeful electricity, suddenly dimmed as he registered my coldness. ‘Oh, cool,’ I said, breathing quietly to resist whatever it was that seemed to want to come out of me. I think what was upsetting me the most was the sheer honesty of his coming out. Nothing was forced … it felt completely authentic. And I was unnerved by the way that he did it, as if I were a queer leader who had won over another recruit. How could I tell him I was proud of him for coming out when I could only feel shame for my own sexuality? Surely a flamboyant, public drag queen would feel nothing but warmth and joy for their best friend finding the courage to come out in some part through their friendship? Instead I felt bitter that my queer positivity could help someone else find happiness when that very same queer positivity was ripping me ever further from my family.

  I was a very bad friend during Dennis’s coming out. It is another one of the things I’m ashamed of most in my life, the fact that I couldn’t be a pillar of support and pride for this extraordinary boy who had finally found his voice. He wanted to talk to me about every step of his journey, and each and every moment became a reflection of how unresolved I was on the inside. Every now and then we would see each other, and as he told me about his parents’ reaction to his sexuality, and their promise of unconditional support to him, I couldn’t even muster a smile. Even though I wore ostentatious clothes, dressed in drag, and roamed the university as if I were trying to convert everyone to homosexuality, the growing acceptance Dennis had for himself and from his family only highlighted how constructed my façade was, and how little I really had. The more at ease he became with himself, a fluid, queer person swimming smoothly through the streets, the more I felt like a badly put together puppet in comparison, all the seams starting to tear. I began to avoid him. He had expressed interest in wanting to go out to gay clubs with me, but whenever the weekly LGBT night was on, I ignored his calls. It broke my heart to do this, but it felt essential. My queer identity was something that I had cultivated as a mask; I believed somehow, that my professed queer identity was the only thing that stopped me feeling the decay inside me. I needed to protect the night as something that was definitively mine; I just couldn’t share it with Dennis, even though he had just as much of a right to it as I did.

  When Dennis began exploring sex, I grew even more jealous. He showed me pictures of all the gorgeous boys that he was experimenting with, and, instead of celebrating the pursuit of his desires, I reflected on Mason, and how my sexual history revolved around feelings of worthlessness and punishment. The more empowered Dennis became in his own desirability, the more grotesque I felt by comparison. How is it that he can come out and find so much freedom and validation in his sexuality? Even though I inhabited a drag persona that would suggest I too had freedom and validation, it certainly wasn’t like that for me. My sexual episodes with Mason, along with the fact that I had been equating homosexuality with an eternity in hell for so long, meant that sex was like going on a rollercoaster without a safety belt. As a student, I found it difficult to believe that anybody attractive could actually desire me. Glamrou, on the contrary, was the ultimate seductress – indeed, she performed the role of sexual empowerment, but never actualised it. How is it that Dennis has found so much empowerment with sex, and I have none?

  The relationship between drag and sex is complicated. In drag, you have an innate confidence, and this to others comes across as sexy. You can inhabit tropes and ideas of sexiness, but it is a performance. Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop people from touching you without being invited, as if your inhabited sexiness must mean you’ll be up for anything. Mostly, in drag, I feel utterly asexual, even though I present as highly sexual. A lot of this is down to pure practicality. My penis, for a start, lives taped away between my butt cheeks (essentially, I’m fucking myself). The amount of paint on my face and the sheer heaviness of the fabric and ornaments is also a lot of strain on the body – it’s like being corseted by an image of sexiness. None of this is helped by the fact that g
ay men have a very odd relationship with drag queens. For the most part, they celebrate and whoop for drag queens, but want little to do with them sexually – like we’re there to be enjoyed as abstract entities of queerness, but not as literal, sexual people.

  Many gay men, on finding out I do drag, are turned off. ‘But I’m into guys,’ is something I’ve heard before, or, as one total bonehead I spoke to said, ‘I only date manly men.’ This deification of masculinity in the gay community is an endemic issue that deserves its own book to dismantle, but one of the reasons it’s so pervasive is because a lot of gay men, who have endured or fear familial and social rejections, want no more reminders of their ‘nonconformism’. It’s why body fascism exists so deeply in gay male spaces – the crisis of masculinity that comes from being gay can sometimes manifest in a vigorous over-compensation. So while drag itself was utterly empowering, it made my desirability among gay men dwindle. I was once rejected from a gay club in London for being too feminine, and when I first started drag, I would always make sure to hide my glittery costumes in the closet and scratch off any remaining nail polish for when dates came over. While Dennis embodied and felt his sexiness, becoming truly confident as a queer, sexual male, my drag paradoxically robbed me of this.

  When Dennis found intimacy and started having relationships, I felt as if I really was nothing by comparison. Within the year of his coming out, he won the support of his parents and found the joys of sex. While I held my mother’s belief that ‘it would be unfair to inflict myself on anyone’, here Dennis was, able to negotiate intimacy as if it weren’t some unpredictable home-made bomb device. This was something I had no clue how to do. The idea of being emotionally intimate with somebody felt as alien to me as sci-fi. How do people do this? Do these people just share the things about themselves and get love in return? Surely that’s an impossibility? Intimacy must be some kind of hoax.