While direct outreach to clients remains tricky, teaching the women how to negotiate condom use is key. “The woman, when she has confidence in herself, she wants to protect herself and to save her health. In this case, she can transmit the message to her clients,” Rima explained. There are other techniques of persuasion as well. Back at base I was shown an array of brightly colored plastic penises that sex workers use to practice putting on condoms with their mouths—one way to encourage clients to comply. But such advanced skills can fall foul of conservatives: when one ALCS instructor—in a hijab, no less—was broadcast on French satellite TV demonstrating oral delivery of condoms, outrage erupted at home and she was temporarily run out of her neighborhood. The resulting publicity, however, raised public awareness, and, says ALCS, there has been a slight uptick in condom sales ever since.
Quiet efforts are being made to transplant the Moroccan experience elsewhere in the region, including Cairo. More than sixty years after my father took that tram down Clot Bey Street, I found myself in the very same spot, watching Cairo’s working girls go about their business. In a café up a narrow flight of stairs, a couple of women seated on divans were wrapped in close conversation; across the room, a pair of clients whiled away the time, smoking shisha and playing backgammon. It was a classic scene—one of Cairo through the ages—but for the ring of mobile phones and the subject of conversation: how the women could protect themselves against HIV and other occupational hazards.
This outreach program, sending “peers” (that is, former sex workers) to spread the good word, is even harder in Cairo than it is in Casablanca. There are scarcely a handful of NGOs in Cairo and Alexandria reaching out to female sex workers, and funding is forever tight. Most of the work is done behind closed doors, in drop-in centers offering legal, medical, and psychological support. For a time, the uprising made their job even tougher than usual. Before the events of 2011, Egypt’s vast security apparatus was a major headache for NGOs working with groups on the margins of society. Not only were sex workers regularly apprehended, and sexually exploited, by police, but the arrests often included outreach workers as well, whom government ministries were willing to have do the work in the shadows, but reluctant to publicly acknowledge with written authorization. “The police were dealing in a very rough way with all the people—sex workers, ordinary citizens, anyone,” one of the outreach workers told me, describing her various arrests. “I was supposed to be afraid and weep and beg ‘Please forgive me,’ but I didn’t do anything wrong, so I didn’t do this. He [the policeman] was upset and provoked and so I spent a horrible night at the police station.” This, however, was kid-glove treatment compared with other tales of police brutality, behavior that put Egypt’s law enforcement personnel in front of the firing line when the uprising broke out.
The result, in the months that followed, was a far more passive approach to policing Cairo, which in turn brought new problems for outreach workers. “Before [the revolt], the girls would sit in a place and wait one or two hours for a client, so we would have time to work,” another member of the outreach team explained. “[But afterward] in public places, they sit freely and take clients, many clients, right away; the clients feel freer too. There is no police, no security. It is much easier for the women, but for us it is harder because they have no time for us.” Fewer police raids also meant sex workers could more easily move their operations into private apartments, where baltagiyya (thugs) and pimps make outreach a risky proposition.
Further complicating matters is the rising voice of Islamists. Some of the sex workers who turned up at the drop-in center in the months following the uprising were clearly targets of their more overtly religious neighbors. “One of the beneficiaries came one day wearing niqab, because they are having pressure on them from the wives of Salafis. They say, ‘Unless you believe in your religion, the Christians will be rulers, they will catch the authority in Egypt.’ So they try to convince them on the religious side, but the real target is politics.” There was considerable anxiety among NGOs as to how far this pressure might go and how their work might be affected by the political ascendance of Islamic conservatives. In the months following the uprising, one drop-in center was besieged by both Salafis looking to shut down what they considered an immoral operation and by a group of thugs looking to pick up girls; the result was a punch-up between the two opposing factions—a scene that pretty well sums up the state of post-Mubarak Egypt.
Despite the current climate, some reformers dream of change. “Decriminalization—I do have hope. Because the revolution was based on two pillars—social justice and human rights—this is a very supportive environment for change,” one young lawyer working at an NGO told me. “We can use the cause of HIV, especially if criminalization is affecting outreach.” In global debates on the future of sex work, decriminalization—that is, repealing criminal laws around all aspects of commercial sex and replacing them with regulation under civil codes, like in any other business, with separate criminal penalties to deal with trafficking, coercive sex, and sex with minors—is emerging as the preferred option of those with an interest in the health, safety, and human rights of sex workers. Legalization, in which the state plays a key role in regulating sex work, as it does in Tunisia and a handful of other countries in the Global South, creates as many problems as it solves—even with the refinements Zahaf envisages. In any case, given the rise of Islamic conservatism in Egypt in recent years, neither option is realistically in the cards—and it will take time for the pragmatism that characterized the faith of my forefathers, and that found a way to reconcile the needs of the flesh with the exigencies of the faith, to find its place again.
In the meantime, the most expedient measure would be a de facto decriminalization, in which authorities turn a blind eye to the practice, halting arrests of sex workers and allowing the slow expansion of efforts to provide these women with medical, legal, and social services. For example, a couple of NGOs in Cairo have been trying to soften the law’s impact in practice, training sex workers on their legal rights and what to do if they’re arrested. The hope is to expand such services to other parts of Egypt and to strengthen their voice by bringing in other NGOs—those working on women’s rights, for example—which currently steer clear of such controversial beneficiaries.
There’s nothing exceptional about the situation facing sex workers in Egypt and their colleagues across the Arab region. As a member of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, I heard testimonies from sex workers from around the world, and there is a sobering consistency to their stories: economic insecurity, stigma, discrimination, violence, police harassment and brutality, poor access to health and legal services, and medical and psychological problems are just some of the daily challenges in this line of work. One difference, though, between sex workers in Cairo and, say, Kolkata is that while the latter are organized into vocal groups to fight for members’ rights, sex workers in Egypt, and indeed across the Arab world, are still in the shadows. Of course, before the uprising, it was hard to establish an NGO in Egypt around any rights-based issue, let alone sex work. But now that possibilities for change, however long-term, are in the air, the ability of sex workers to organize, mobilize, and connect to the wider world of sex work activism will be key to them getting a piece of the promised gains of the new order—employment, education, and prosperity among them.
In Egypt, however, all this seems a distant prospect. “You can’t change the culture of a whole nation in five to ten years,” one outreach worker told me as we sat on Clot Bey Street. “It’s the upbringing, how we are raised. [For example], the girl who is not covered is not a good girl, but it’s all about appearance.” At that very moment, a sex worker in a Saudi-style black hijab and abaya got up and walked past us to the door, with a much younger client in tow. The outreach worker looked to her, then straight at me when I asked if he expected any improvement in the situation of sex workers in the new scheme of things. “Not [in] five years, not fifty years,”
he said matter-of-factly. “All this work will stay under the table.”
6
Dare to Be Different
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, clos
eted 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.
B005X0JS14 EBOK Page 26