The Rites of Passage
In the same way that you can not call yourself a homo until you go through a certain sexual rite, i.e. someone pops your cherry, you can not call yourself gay, in a Middle Eastern context, without going through a similar social/cultural rite of passage, that is the rite of exodus.
The gay equivalent of the institution of marriage and procreation.
Every bitch in one of those incredibly oppressive countries (yes they are still oppressive even if they are undergoing the so-called 'Arab Spring', it should be more of the 'Arab Shitstorm') and backwards, patriarchal, sexist societies has to suffer the politics of displacement and departure.
Like any vilified minority, we (all of us: rich, poor, tall, short, top, bottom, even versatiles) have to suffer the same fate.
We have limited choices.
And we face a formidable foe, a society that refuses to acknowledge our freedom to chose whatever social arrangements we want to establish, whatever career choices we want to make (mediocre entertainer, cheap drag, events planner,..etc), whatever socialization spaces we want to create (bars, sex clubs, saunas, bathouses,..etc).
Regardless of the moral ramifications of such choices, whether I personally agree with any of them or not, the fact stands: We (for once unified by our plight and miserable condition) do not have this freedom of choice, to be who we might want to be.
What scenarios does that leave us?
None actually.
Very few of us are very very very lucky and are able to escape this miserable existence, but most of us are stuck.
We end up being old bitter, shrivelled, vicious queens whom everyone despises and very few pity.
Unable to pursue any meaningful existence or a relationship through which we psychological grow as human beings.
To add insult to injury, all of us have to face this rite of passage, having a friend, a lover, an acquaintance, a dear friend, a former lover, a sister, leave at some point.
And it becomes a ritual mourning. One is always losing someone.
The ensuing amount of venom and bitterness is unfathomable.
I can not begin to describe how dark and hateful it is. Horrid is a kind word.
It fills one with such nausea and rage, moral outrage as a matter of fact.
And as Neurda once said, 'Love is short, but forgetfulness is long'. Short-timed happiness with congenial fellow beings, is outlived by years of abysmal sense of loss.
A sense of loss that does not go.
You wake up: it is there, you sleep: it is there, you eat: it is there, you go on with the mundane, dreary existence: and it is still there.
Imagine if some people whose lifestyles are sanctioned by religion and society and yet they still want to escape our miserable existence, i.e. heterosexuals, where does that leave an underground minority?
I sometimes wonder at the poverty of studying human emotions in Western academia. Aside from technical neuroscience experiments, the whole range of human emotion is still completely in the dark.
Yet even the very little that we have, is in itself in awe at the choices people make that might be life-threatening on a conscious, rational level, but is emotionally consistent with how they feel.
It is in this context that I myself am at complete loss at how and under what understanding, if any, do we still even consider any form of relationality in this harrowing reality of gay people in the Middle East?
I am the one who always believed in the supreme value of human emotion and the capacity for feeling as an intrinsic human capacity without which we lose our humanity, am now at odds with this very same capacity.
I want to slap it across the face and punch it in the gut and wrench its heart out and set it on fire.
And stand and watch in frightful ecstasy.
The psychological cost is unbearable.
I remember watching Transamerica (in an Anthropology class, unsurprisingly) and there was a scene when Felicity Hoffman finally underwent a surgery to have her penis transformed into a vagina, and after her surgery she meets with her therapist and she is in trauma over the change she went through. Not just the physical pain, but she kept pointing to her heart, saying 'it hurts, it hurts', her therapist's answer to that was, 'that is what hearts do, they hurt'.
The poetics of it though no longer seduce me in being blind to the excruciating consequences that hearts and feelings leave.
I can't ignore how terrible it is to attempt to form meaningful attachments with others only to have to face their dissolving in time, and when I say 'time', I don't mean existentially as the omnipotent, limitless concept, but 'time' as in 6 months at best!
The endless, futile attempts at creating kinship systems and temporary social networks in the gay community in Egypt is heartbreaking.
You are either a bunch of eccentric, has-been, queens in pale shadow of your youthful glory or a bunch of steroid bunnies with pitiful attempts at having a sex life, desperate in acquiring status, thinking of sexual prowess as currency.
Both scenarios are hardly appealing.
And they only reflect the fundamental problems plaguing the gay community. Its an ageist, exclusive, classist community where sex is the basic mode of exchange and status.
Trying to create social groups or kinship systems was a way to alleviate some of those grievances and ugliness.
But even that seems to elude us.
We are not even half as competent as other minorities (i.e. Jewish communities) in integrating this never-ending state of loss and mourning into a tradition and develop it into the politics of memory and remembrance and imbuing it with meaning or spiritual wisdom.
It remains an unhappy consequence of an oppressed minority that seems to endlessly suffer from a rite so violent and so heartbreaking, and just inevitable.
In the end, I will quote the Queen of them All, Wilde, 'But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning'.
The gay equivalent of the institution of marriage and procreation.
Every bitch in one of those incredibly oppressive countries (yes they are still oppressive even if they are undergoing the so-called 'Arab Spring', it should be more of the 'Arab Shitstorm') and backwards, patriarchal, sexist societies has to suffer the politics of displacement and departure.
Like any vilified minority, we (all of us: rich, poor, tall, short, top, bottom, even versatiles) have to suffer the same fate.
We have limited choices.
And we face a formidable foe, a society that refuses to acknowledge our freedom to chose whatever social arrangements we want to establish, whatever career choices we want to make (mediocre entertainer, cheap drag, events planner,..etc), whatever socialization spaces we want to create (bars, sex clubs, saunas, bathouses,..etc).
Regardless of the moral ramifications of such choices, whether I personally agree with any of them or not, the fact stands: We (for once unified by our plight and miserable condition) do not have this freedom of choice, to be who we might want to be.
What scenarios does that leave us?
None actually.
Very few of us are very very very lucky and are able to escape this miserable existence, but most of us are stuck.
We end up being old bitter, shrivelled, vicious queens whom everyone despises and very few pity.
Unable to pursue any meaningful existence or a relationship through which we psychological grow as human beings.
To add insult to injury, all of us have to face this rite of passage, having a friend, a lover, an acquaintance, a dear friend, a former lover, a sister, leave at some point.
And it becomes a ritual mourning. One is always losing someone.
The ensuing amount of venom and bitterness is unfathomable.
I can not begin to describe how dark and hateful it is. Horrid is a kind word.
It fills one with such nausea and rage, moral outrage as a matter of fact.
And as Neurda once said, 'Love is short, but forgetfulness is long'. Short-timed happiness with congenial fellow beings, is outlived by years of abysmal sense of loss.
A sense of loss that does not go.
You wake up: it is there, you sleep: it is there, you eat: it is there, you go on with the mundane, dreary existence: and it is still there.
Imagine if some people whose lifestyles are sanctioned by religion and society and yet they still want to escape our miserable existence, i.e. heterosexuals, where does that leave an underground minority?
I sometimes wonder at the poverty of studying human emotions in Western academia. Aside from technical neuroscience experiments, the whole range of human emotion is still completely in the dark.
Yet even the very little that we have, is in itself in awe at the choices people make that might be life-threatening on a conscious, rational level, but is emotionally consistent with how they feel.
It is in this context that I myself am at complete loss at how and under what understanding, if any, do we still even consider any form of relationality in this harrowing reality of gay people in the Middle East?
I am the one who always believed in the supreme value of human emotion and the capacity for feeling as an intrinsic human capacity without which we lose our humanity, am now at odds with this very same capacity.
I want to slap it across the face and punch it in the gut and wrench its heart out and set it on fire.
And stand and watch in frightful ecstasy.
The psychological cost is unbearable.
I remember watching Transamerica (in an Anthropology class, unsurprisingly) and there was a scene when Felicity Hoffman finally underwent a surgery to have her penis transformed into a vagina, and after her surgery she meets with her therapist and she is in trauma over the change she went through. Not just the physical pain, but she kept pointing to her heart, saying 'it hurts, it hurts', her therapist's answer to that was, 'that is what hearts do, they hurt'.
The poetics of it though no longer seduce me in being blind to the excruciating consequences that hearts and feelings leave.
I can't ignore how terrible it is to attempt to form meaningful attachments with others only to have to face their dissolving in time, and when I say 'time', I don't mean existentially as the omnipotent, limitless concept, but 'time' as in 6 months at best!
The endless, futile attempts at creating kinship systems and temporary social networks in the gay community in Egypt is heartbreaking.
You are either a bunch of eccentric, has-been, queens in pale shadow of your youthful glory or a bunch of steroid bunnies with pitiful attempts at having a sex life, desperate in acquiring status, thinking of sexual prowess as currency.
Both scenarios are hardly appealing.
And they only reflect the fundamental problems plaguing the gay community. Its an ageist, exclusive, classist community where sex is the basic mode of exchange and status.
Trying to create social groups or kinship systems was a way to alleviate some of those grievances and ugliness.
But even that seems to elude us.
We are not even half as competent as other minorities (i.e. Jewish communities) in integrating this never-ending state of loss and mourning into a tradition and develop it into the politics of memory and remembrance and imbuing it with meaning or spiritual wisdom.
It remains an unhappy consequence of an oppressed minority that seems to endlessly suffer from a rite so violent and so heartbreaking, and just inevitable.
In the end, I will quote the Queen of them All, Wilde, 'But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning'.
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