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.”
Over at the ahwa, Hisham, one of Munir’s friends, felt similarly constrained by the term “gay.” At first glance, Hisham is a model of middle-class propriety—married for fifteen years, with a couple of kids and a steady job in the ever-popular air-conditioning business. But he also has sex with men, long-term relationships lasting months or years—in one instance with someone who went on to marry one of his cousins. To Hisham, “gay” implies a full-time occupation, with sex at the center of things, whereas he sees his relations with other men as “a small corner of our lives, something we can go to or not go to, but it is not obsessing.” He keeps his social worlds distinct. “My wife doesn’t know; the neighbors don’t know. My character at work or at home is different from my character with my [male] friends,” he told me, adding proudly, “Look at me—I have a mustache, I’m masculine.” Terms like “gay” or “bisexual” simply do not resonate with him. It’s not that Hisham doesn’t understand—through Munir, for example, he is well aware of what the “gay scene” looks like, at home and abroad—it’s just that such labels don’t apply. Yes, he leads a double life, but he finds that perfectly normal, no matter which sex you bed; for him, these are useful compartments, not unwanted closets.
Nasim, Munir, and their friends represent a tiny cosmopolitan fragment of same-sex desire in the vastness of Egypt. But the way they see themselves, and their sexuality, gives a glimpse of the sheer complexity of what it is to break the heterosexual mold in the twenty-first-century Arab world. Part of that complexity comes from history. For all their modern mien, when these men talk about their sex lives, it sometimes sounds like a page out of the great books of Arabic erotica, among them A Promenade of the Hearts, in What Does Not Exist in a Book.11 Its author, Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Tifashi, was a Tunisian scholar who lived and died just across town from us nine centuries before.
Nasim is, in many ways, reminiscent of the la’ita (practitioners of sodomy) of al-Tifashi’s description—a man of some wealth and great refinement, who loves boys with a passionate longing, sometimes for their youth and beauty and sometimes for their intellectual companionship, sometimes unconsummated and sometimes paying for the pleasure. Munir, with his lithe gait and fluttering eyelashes, is the essence of the beardless young men who flit across al-Tifashi’s pages. Hisham’s pride in his vigorous masculinity is an echo of attitudes toward active and passive homosexual activity through the ages, also reflected in Nasim’s father’s response to his son’s disclosure. “I said, ‘Dad, I will never marry. I love men,’ ” Nasim recalled. “My father, who’s a professor, said, ‘Okay, but you must never tell your mother.’ And then he started asking me questions. ‘How do you have sex?’ At that point, I was never negative [passive], so I told him. And he said, ‘Ah, so you are not homo!’ ”12
It’s not all glitter and gold in al-Tifashi’s book. For all its amusing anecdotes, there is a dark side to his account of men who have sex with men. Nasim’s less privileged predecessors were said to need thick skins to survive a lashing should they be hauled in front of a tribunal for their activities, and were at risk of being robbed blind and beaten by pickups—the very same fears expressed by Nasim. At the same time, some of their own activities were less than desirable by today’s standards of human rights, including the practice of “creeping,” essentially raping boys by stealth.
This history of homosexuality in the Arab world is largely forgotten. For example, Nasim, who is extremely well-read, was unaware of al-Tifashi and the vast body of homegrown musings on same-sex relations through the ages.13 “What, there is more than Abu Nuwas?” he asked me, referring to the famous poet of eighth- and ninth-century Baghdad who celebrated sex in all its forms. In the rewriting of Arab sexual history over the past century or so, homosexuality has been buried—to the point that today’s intolerance is now seen as the authentic voice of tradition when it is (as in so many other parts of the Global South) arguably more of an echo of the region’s European colonial masters and is certainly less forgiving, in practice, than at other times in its history.
Going to bed with someone of your own sex seems a lot more complicated these days than in al-Tifashi’s time, as much a matter of geopolitics now as personal pleasure. Attitudes toward homosexual men and women have long been a litmus test, distinguishing the “civilized” from the “backward,” though where you place tolerance or rejection of same-sex relations has shifted East and West over the centuries. The status of same-sex relations has become a hallmark of liberal democracy in recent years—and so the question of how Egypt and its tumultuous neighbors will handle the rights of citizens who depart from the heterosexual norm is politically charged. Long a feature of the fissure between Europe and America, and the Arab world, homosexuality has even been sucked into the conflict between Palestine and Israel.1
4
Because of such international interest, there is more research on the intimate lives of men who have sex with men in Egypt, and in many of its Arab neighbors, than on almost any other group in society. Official surveys, NGO reports, academic dissertations, and popular books are laying bare these lives: in numbers (including population estimates), and the nitty-gritty of sexual behavior (how often, with whom, in which positions, and for how much), and the nuances of how these men see themselves and their relations in society beyond the bedroom. Some extremely rough estimates put the proportion of men having sex with each other in the Middle East and North Africa at a few percentage points of the male population, on a par with global figures, though these rates are considerably higher in certain groups, among them street children or prisoners or students, where relations with the opposite sex can be harder to come by.15
As with other aspects of sexuality in the Arab region, HIV is easing the way to information, opening access and funding in the name of public health. The results, however, are unsettling. In Egypt, for example, surveys of men who have sex with men in Cairo, Alexandria, and Luxor have shown HIV infection rates running around 6 percent, giving them a top spot on the country’s infection charts; elsewhere in the Arab region, rates can be substantially higher.16 Meanwhile, condoms and HIV testing are about as unpopular with men who have sex with men in Egypt and many of its Arab neighbors as they are with anyone else. This information is a boon, in that it has persuaded authorities to allow some outreach by NGOs in the name of HIV prevention (as we saw in the previous chapter with female sex workers), but it is also something of a bane, in that knowing so much about the sex lives of one particular population, without similarly valuable insight into the rest, runs the risk of further marginalizing men who have sex with men and cementing their popular image as a sexed-up, disease-ridden social menace.
Such stereotypes die hard. In Egypt, homosexuality is widely seen as the result of some childhood trauma—sexual abuse or a gross lapse in parenting, for instance. Trying to convince stolidly heterosexual Egyptians otherwise is a tough sell. Nasim, for example, was aware from an early age that his preference lay with men. “I knew I was gay from age six or seven,” he said. “We were living in Iraq. It was in the seventies; men had sideburns and tight trousers. I always admired their trousers.” He dismisses popular notions of the origins of homosexuality. “I have many friends and they all say they knew from when they were children. None of us were abused as children.”
Munir, on the other hand, discovered his love of men a little later in life. “I was twenty-three years old when I was gay. I was having relations with women before, many.” But life changed after one close encounter with a relative with whom he used to cruise for girls. “Suddenly he is in my home one night, and I was taking a shower. He knocked, so I said welcome. He told me, ‘It is too hot. I want to take a shower as well.’ And then he was turned on. I told him, ‘What’s going on?’ ” Munir recalled. “I hated what happened, but from inside me, I liked it. I enjoyed it because it was a weird pleasure, all the feelings were weird, but I wanted to go back to him and check what are these feelings.”
Munir continued his story, a smile dawning. “We stayed together for two years. I didn’t have anyone in my life except for him. We had relations everywhere you can imagine. On the roof, under the stairs, at my place, at his place, at the cinema,” he said. “We loved each other, not as friends or relatives but as men. I have never felt guilty for being gay. For one reason: I made it with love.”
It’s a rare parent who buys such arguments, however. For many a family, discovering a relative’s same-sex activity prompts an immediate visit to the doctor to see if something can be done. Given that medical schools in Egypt largely gloss over basic sexuality, let alone more complex aspects of sexual orientation, the average physician is out of his or her depth on this one. The usual medical response is a round of antidepressants, accompanied by a stern lecture on the evils of homosexuality.
While religious conversion is a matter of life and death in Egypt, sexual conversion—gay to straight, that is—is generally viewed as not just acceptable but strongly advisable. Indeed, Cairo is home to the Arab world’s best-known practitioner of “reorientation” therapy. Awsam Wasfy, a psychiatrist, believes that homosexuality is a developmental disorder. “Homosexuality is not a natural choice in life. It’s not the sin which will not be forgiven, nor is it the stain which cannot be mentioned. But it is a disturbance in the sexual development of children which can be avoided in children and adolescents and can be treated later on, but with serious difficulty,” he argues.17 According to Wasfy, boys who fail to bond with their fathers, and girls with their mothers, in early childhood will later lack identification with their own sex and thus a sense of their own masculinity or femininity.
Children naturally long for same-sex love, Wasfy says, but by puberty this usually changes into an attraction to the opposite sex—a transformation made more difficult in some Arab societies, in his opinion, by a strict segregation of boys and girls. He points to studies that homosexual men suffer higher rates of depression, suicide, drug abuse, and other psychological disturbances than their heterosexual peers. “Is it because homosexuality is a pathology of disconnection with self or is it the persecution of society?” he asks. “My view is that it is a pathology, though societal persecution certainly does not help. You can still have these findings in San Francisco, in any place that has reached a higher degree of tolerance of homosexuality.”
Wasfy uses group therapy, in which he mixes homosexual clients with heterosexual ones. His aim is to help men connect with each other on an emotional, yet nonsexual, level, a link that he says homosexual clients find difficult to forge because of their early childhood experiences. The goal is to reach the “healing moment,” as Wasfy puts it, “when a homosexual talks to a straight guy about his homosexuality and the straight guy would love and accept him.”
These ideas and techniques will sound familiar to many in the West, particularly in the United States, where so-called sexual orientation change efforts find their most enthusiastic proponents. Among them are conservative Christian movements, which promise “freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.”18 Indeed, Wasfy, who’s an evangelical Christian, came to reorientation therapy through his religious connections.
Reparative therapy, as it is also known, is highly controversial in the West. Efforts to treat homosexuality—as opposed to the psychiatric problems homosexual men and women may experience—were commonplace before the 1970s. But in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality as a disorder from its bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). After languishing in the 1970s and 1980s, the treatment of homosexuality made a comeback in the 1990s in the guise of “reorientation therapy,” embraced by psychiatrists who argued that homosexual men and women who want to change their orientation should be helped to do so.
Whether such a thing is possible, however, is another question. Mainstream mental health professionals are highly skeptical. After wading through the peer-reviewed research on reparative therapy, the American Psychological Association recently concluded that “efforts to change sexual orientation are unlikely to be successful and involve some risk of harm”; the American Psychiatric Association is similarly unconvinced.19 Wasfy is well aware of these debates. While sexual rights advocates maintain that reparative therapy can thrive only in a culture of intolerance to homosexuality, he argues the contrary—that it is cultural intolerance in the form of Western political correctness that prevents reparative therapy from getting the resources needed to do the sorts of large-scale, long-term studies that could validate its approach. He also disagrees with the declassification of homosexuality as a disorder and is clear on where the pressure is coming from: “The gay rights movement is prosecuting [denying] the notion of disorder and change. They are practicing a double standard. They want freedom, but they don’t give a say
to others.”
Although inspired by his faith, Wasfy is quick to point out that the therapy he practices is not overtly Christian and that more than three-quarters of his clients are Muslim. He does, however, think it’s easier for Christians to succeed with this approach. “I see that Christian theology has much room for change and miracles, the healing. They believe in change more, and a stronger notion of grace and unconditional acceptance. So I think this helps Christians more,” he told me. “This in the culture of Christianity makes it easier for Christians to speak out about their problems and find acceptance without being judgmental.”
Wasfy claims some success with his approach. I met his star patient at Wasfy’s office in an apartment building in a bustling part of Cairo called Madinat Nasr, kitty-corner to a gigantic mosque, whose booming call to prayer punctuated our conversation. Rashad is a tall, good-looking man in his thirties, with an open, engaging manner and a lively sense of humor. You’d never guess that he was troubled by his sexuality. But Rashad had a rough start in life. He was abandoned by his father and grew up in an orphanage, where he was sexually abused by some of the other boys.
For the next couple of years, Rashad had sex with men every few days; he was mainly the passive partner. Finding a man was never a problem, but the insults and the jokes were troubling: “They insult me, abu shakha [son of a shit], multi [sodomizer]. All these insults were stamps of shame put inside me. When somebody tells me I’m good, I thought they wanted sex.”
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