The collective result of my anthologizing is a bit of a bildungsroman, a book of my adventures as much as of the planet where I had them. I could never have written it if I were not infatuated with the notion of elsewhere, an ingenuous exuberance that goes all the way back to that long-ago Kleenex box. I’ve made it to 83 of the 196 recognized countries in the world. I plan a future book of profiles of people to supplement this book of places. But in some profound sense, people are places and vice versa. I have never written about one without the other.
* * *
In the quarter century or so covered in this book, the status of gay people has changed dramatically in a surprising variety of countries. Twenty have approved gay marriage as of this writing. Additional countries have passed legislation that provides other protections to gay men and women. In many societies, homosexuality remains a pulsating subculture; like art, it is a window through which to interpret a place.
I used to travel with my sexual orientation incognito, but have been increasingly open about being gay, a mark not just of my own maturation but also of the world’s. In some instances, my identity has been more obvious than I realized; in Ulaanbaatar in 1999, I saw a young Mongolian shepherd coming down the street where my hotel was located, leading a flock of fat-tailed, carpet-wool sheep. I stared inquisitively at this spectacle and was astonished when he crossed over and said in serviceable English, “You are gayboy? I am gayboy, too.” Then he added in an insinuating voice, “Maybe I leave sheep in hotel parking lot and come inside with you?” In Ilulissat, my guide sighed that it was not easy being the only gay dogsled-driver in western Greenland (a reflection I remember whenever existential loneliness strikes). At a formal dinner in Delhi, when I asked whether the city had a gay culture, given how many Indians disparaged homosexuality as a “Western import,” my host looked at me as though I had dropped in from outer space and said, “What do you think this party is?” And in Cartagena de Indias in Colombia in the question session that followed a lecture I gave, an elegantly dressed woman said she’d heard that children of gay parents were better adjusted than children of straight parents and suggested, “I suppose it is because men and women argue so much.” I revel in the notion that gay couples are above contentiousness. Sexual identity is at the forefront in a wide range of societies; it has become an unavoidable conversation.
My husband and I wed in England in 2007 in a ceremony then called civil partnership, but offering all the benefits afforded to married people in Great Britain. This gave John UK immigration rights. I wanted to be sure that he had someplace to go, too. A marriage in Massachusetts (the only US state that had legalized it at that time) would have been called marriage, but would have granted us no legal protection. Though liberal society in the coastal United States was more accepting of gay people than was its British equivalent, the law advanced more rapidly in the UK, reflecting the relative absence of religion from British politics. Two years later, we married, that elusive word marriage finally in hand, in Connecticut, where the law now afforded us a new wave of rights to go with it.
Progress on gay rights has hardly been universal. The United Nations Security Council had its first session on LGBT issues in August 2015 to address abuses committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh). This terrorist group has posted videos of the executions of homosexuals, mostly in Syria and Iraq. In June 2015, ISIL posted photos of a gay man in northern Iraq being dangled, then dropped from a high building in front of a crowd of onlookers. In Iran, homosexual acts are punishable by death; Makwan Moloudzadeh, accused of having committed sodomy when he was thirteen, was executed there at the age of twenty-one even after his alleged victims had withdrawn their accusations. In Egypt, a raid on a bathhouse was staged for television; twenty-six people were imprisoned. In another episode, several Egyptian men were jailed merely for having attended a gay wedding. In Saudi Arabia, gay people are subject to capital punishment; two men found to have had sex there in 2007 were sentenced to seven thousand lashes each and are permanently disabled as a result.
Russia’s law against “gay propaganda” has led to gay men and lesbians being beaten in the streets; many have fled the country. In Kyrgyzstan, police entrap gay men on Internet dating sites and subject them to blackmail and extortion; those found guilty of “propagating nontraditional sexual relations” are subject to a year’s imprisonment. In late 2013, India’s highest court upheld the colonial-era criminalization of homosexual behavior. And twenty-seven African countries have passed antisodomy laws. In Nigeria, gay people can legally be stoned to death, and extrajudicial lynchings of gay people have become common. A Cameroonian was sentenced to three years in jail in 2011 for sending an affectionate text message to another man. Cameroon incarcerates more people for homosexual acts than does any other country, often “proving” the sexuality of purportedly gay men by having court-ordered medical “exams” to check the elasticity of their anus, despite the fact that such procedures are illegal under international law and have no basis in science. The president of Zimbabwe refers to gay people as “filth” and has threatened to behead them. Uganda made homosexual acts a capital offense in 2014, though that law was eventually overturned.
Hasan Agili, a student whom I met in Libya, wrote to me after he had left the country. A friend had borrowed his laptop, called up his search history, then outed him at his medical school. He was bullied so mercilessly that he abandoned his studies and moved to another city. But the threats continued unabated. “I watched public videos of friends beheaded for being homosexual,” he wrote to me. “It’s just done for me there. I can’t go back. I am known and I would be hunted. I can’t even tell my family what happened or why I left.” He is now in hiding in a neighboring country where homosexual acts are illegal, without papers that would allow him to get a legitimate job, in continual fear of being found out, harassed, and deported to a country where his life would be under threat.
I have spent considerable time in countries where I was advised to keep my sexual identity secret. My husband-to-be first accompanied me on assignment on a 2002 trip to the Solomon Islands. I was surprised by how difficult John found the situation, but he had devoted many years and much psychic energy to coming out and did not welcome a return to the closet. While we were not facing potential execution in the Solomons, we were repeatedly discouraged from booking a room with a shared bed, or from any overt expression of affection that might be “misinterpreted”—which actually meant “correctly interpreted.” John’s outrage initially annoyed me. How much of a problem was it to accommodate this nicety of the place we were visiting? Over subsequent years, I came to feel that while observing local standards of privacy was an appropriate adaptation, retreating into dishonesty was not. The line often remains unclear. As I grow older, I have grown angrier at visa forms that ask whether I am married, on which I have to negotiate the reality that at home I am, and in the place I wish to go, I will not be. It feels like having multiple personality disorder. When my book on depression was translated into Chinese, references to my sexuality were removed without my consent. As a mental health advocate, I was glad to be helping depressed Chinese people, but it was disquieting to find my story bowdlerized. Full disclosure would have rendered it impossible for many Chinese people to hear what I had to say, but expurgation meant that others I might have helped were forsaken.
* * *
Censorship is hardly restricted to issues of sexual orientation. In 2015, I became president of PEN American Center, an organization devoted to American and global literature and free expression at home and abroad. PEN champions writers silenced by censorship or oppression, including many who are jailed for the open declaration of views that contradict those of the people in power. Since assuming this office, I receive word daily of violence against writers abroad who are pushing recalcitrant societies toward transition. PEN also monitors restrictions in the United States on writers who feel stymied by surveillance, by racism or other forms
of silencing prejudice, by fear of losing jobs or housing, or by those who would close down speech in the name of some ostensibly higher ideal. “Words are no deeds,” says Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, but I would disagree. Hate speech is dangerous: Holocaust deniers or the Ku Klux Klan, for example, sow great darkness, and my time in Rwanda brought home to me how easily propaganda can drive ordinary people to appalling acts. Conversely, the suppression of provocative ideas does not result in social justice, nor is it a constituent of freedom. Open discourse leads to righteousness more readily than enforced control does, no matter how well intentioned. There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements, and a radical brilliance in saying what is forbidden to make it sayable.
A common moral value is to seek for others the advantages one enjoys, but we fight for global free expression out of more than noblesse oblige. “Until we are all free,” the American poet Emma Lazarus wrote, “we are none of us free.” The embrace of human diversity implied in Lazarus’s words is part of my purpose as a reporter, as evidenced in this book. Every voice that is muzzled deprives those who might have heard it, and detracts from the collective intelligence upon which all of us draw. In 1997, the Burmese Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi asked the American people, “Please use your liberty to promote ours.” Our liberty is contingent on everyone else’s. In fighting to sustain the freest possible expression here and abroad, PEN is engaged not in two separate projects, but in a single campaign for the open exchange of ideas.
I started off as a voyager to ensure I would always have someplace to go and I came to understand that I had to give others a place to go, too. I felt a dramatic sense of disconnection when the first of my Soviet friends came to New York and stayed at my family’s apartment (I was living in England, but was home on a visit). The world of the Moscow vanguard had seemed so removed from my bourgeois New York existence, and finding the radical performance poet and artist Dima Prigov enjoying a drink with my parents in our living room seemed like a scene out of Buñuel. It took me some time to recognize that you do not learn the world by compartmentalizing. Nowadays, friends from abroad are always staying at our house; it’s a constant cultural exchange program.
When I met Farouq Samim my first day in Kabul, I was prepared for a working relationship with him as my translator and fixer, but it rapidly became clear that we might be friends. We were together for fourteen hours a day every day that I was in his country. It was a frightening time to be in that part of the world; the abduction and ultimate decapitation of the journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan was unfolding as I transited through Islamabad and Peshawar on my way across the border. To my surprise, however, I loved Afghanistan, in part because Farouq so loved Afghanistan and communicated his passion so compellingly. Farouq had studied medicine in Kabul under the Taliban, which meant that each day contained many hours of religious instruction and only a few of medical training. He wanted to understand how doctors worked in a developed society, so after I came home, I spoke to administrators at New York Hospital, who said they would welcome him for a two-month visit to observe procedures.
Then he filed a visa application, with which I attempted to help. We were repeatedly told that the chance of an unmarried, young Afghan man getting into the United States in 2002 was virtually nil. Farouq eventually gave up medicine because he had no chance to broaden his insufficient education in Kabul and had found his engagement with foreign journalists deeply rewarding. He won a media fellowship to study in Canada. Nearly a decade after my visit to Afghanistan, we succeeded in getting him into the United States.
American policy is focused on security, and the 9/11 hijackers were Muslims to whom visas had been granted, perhaps recklessly. I know why Farouq’s profile scared consular officers. But I also know that Farouq had helped many Americans in his homeland, and that a visit to the United States in 2002 would have strengthened his positive impression of our country. He would have returned home with that gospel. He didn’t want to emigrate here and he didn’t want to blow up a building. He wanted to be part of the cultural exchange through which peoples come to know one another. I have more recently tried to get my gay, Libyan friend Hasan Agili a visa to come to the United States, where he could finish his medical education and help the sick and the desperate, rather than be deported to face the murderous gangs who await him at home. Such procedures have become no easier. When I was in Libya, the people I met who had an essentially pro-American stance had all studied in the United States, whereas those who were vehemently anti-American had not. This is not to say that a proliferation of student visas issued at the behest of Iowa State or UCLA will solve the world’s problems, but only that it’s hard to love a place you’ve never visited. A blanket policy of excluding visitors from “suspect” countries may ultimately damage our security, by preventing the people who would have spoken the best of us from finding out what there is to admire here beyond Baywatch.
After the Paris attacks of November 2015, cultural exclusion was put forward as our best defense, an argument that reached its nadir in American and European attempts to disenfranchise refugees from Syria and Iraq. Leading Republican presidential contender Donald Trump proposed that all foreign Muslims should be barred entry to the United States and that even American Muslims should carry special ID cards. This cruel demagoguery is contrary to our interests. Walling ourselves off from everyone else renders us odious to those who are excluded, providing incentive for them to become radicalized. Quarantining otherness breeds in those others an ignorance of us that engenders hatred, which soon becomes dangerous. It awakens an equally dangerous hatred in us. The central proposition of this book is that circling the wagons is not only impossible in a globalized world, but finally perilous. “Seek and ye shall find,” the biblical adage holds, but seeking is an early casualty of xenophobia. We sequester ourselves not in the well-guarded, imperial palace that American isolationists fantasize but in a festering prison.
My last book, Far from the Tree, deals with the nature of difference within families: how parents learn to cherish children who aren’t what they had in mind when they set out to have kids. This book is in some measure about a similar process: embracing alien points of view and ways of doing things. I wouldn’t undersell the effort involved. If accepting unlike children is tough, this is tougher. Natural instincts propel parents toward their children; natural instincts propel us away from strangers who are different from ourselves. But that doesn’t mean that we have to go down the rabbit hole of affinity groups and “safe spaces,” where people who already share opinions “protect” one another from the intrusion of other points of view. In forestalling intimacy with the vast and bewildering world, we disenfranchise ourselves, no matter how our might proliferates.
Diplomacy is more often a skill than an instinct. We both engage with other countries because they are our allies and make them our allies through engagement. A capitalist society often defines that engagement in terms of money and military prowess, but those are inadequate models. Like all engagements, internationalism must be a rendezvous of human beings. The import of Japanese technology and Italian fashion has been gratifying; the ubiquity of Coca-Cola speaks on our behalf; and boots on the ground have increased American sway in some beleaguered nations. Yet it is in transnational civilian-to-civilian interactions that we find solutions to our disaffection. “If one does not understand a person,” Carl Jung wrote in his Mysterium Coniunctionis, “one tends to regard him as a fool.” Both parties lose in that scenario. In national as in personal relationships, it is easier to resolve tensions when you can figure out what the other is thinking. The art and culture and even the cuisines and monuments of other places can help us to do so; the people of those places help us most of all. America uses such soft power for suasion abroad, but often we do not allow ourselves the luxury of being persuaded by others. Travel is not merely a pleasant diversion for the well-to-do, but the necessary remedy to our perilously frightened times. At a moment when many politicians
are stoking anxiety, telling people that it’s too perilous even to leave the house, there is new urgency to the arguments for going out and recognizing that we are all in the game together. The quest for freedom and adventure reflects the imperative of internationalism in these paranoiac times.
I am not suggesting that we can or should eliminate borders or nations, nor that we will one day crossbreed into a single, encompassing citizenry, nor that some Rosetta stone of cultural values will quell innate antipathies. Enemies often come from abroad, and both early and recent history are marked by plunder and conquest. Belligerence is wired into us, and utopian idylls of nonviolence have never brokered sustainable harmony on a grand scale. Equanimity is not a default trait from which we deviate only by circumstance. Having spent considerable time on the ground with members of the US military, I am grateful to the people who have developed armaments and the people who wield them on our behalf. More than that, I have seen how violence mediates compassion. Peace is most often achieved through intervention, not through ennobled passivity. Concord exists in contrast to aggression, but seldom obviates it.
How, then, to balance these contrary needs: to define an other, to recognize the threat that other might pose, to learn about that other as deeply as possible, and then to welcome that other as much as we safely can? People flee even when they have nowhere to go. As Justin Trudeau in Canada and Angela Merkel in Germany extend a hand of friendship to refugees, we are reminded how foolish it is to presume that those who come from a land full of enemies are themselves necessarily enemies. Having nowhere to go can be fatal; having somewhere to go is a precondition of dignity; providing somewhere to go is often a canny generosity that benefits both sides.
Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change Page 5