Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (6 page)

I have revised some of these articles a bit, a few significantly, and others not at all. I have used longer versions of a few articles that were cut for length. When I went on assignment to write travel articles on Brazil and Myanmar, I had this book in mind and so did the reporting for longer essays than I’d been commissioned to write. I have eliminated outdated travel recommendations from stories that included them. The articles appear largely chronologically, though I have attempted to prioritize the chronology of reporting over the chronology of publication. I have moved around a few stories because I did additional reporting after a story was published and wanted to include the newer information. (My comments about the Qianlong Garden, however, are placed in keeping with my visit there, even though I learned more about it in the years that followed.) For each article, I’ve written a few new paragraphs to provide context both within my experience and in light of ensuing events. I have not annotated
the previously published articles, which were fact-checked at the time of publication. I have, however, put together end notes for new material, both to explain where I got the information and to provide resources for those who may wish to pursue these topics further.

I am interested in beauty as well as truth. I started writing for
Travel + Leisure
in 1996 and soon discovered that writing frequently about travel is work, but doing so once a year amounts to a paid holiday. I also realized that most journalists for the magazine wanted to write about a spa hotel in Positano or a resort in Nevis, but that such articles require a visit of only a day or two, while articles on more obscure destinations demand much longer stays and much deeper research. Sometimes, I simply loved these countries and took pleasure in saying why; indeed, saying why often helped me love the places. Vacations without reporting now feel weird to me; they lack the excuse for asking questions. It can be unsettling to shift rapidly from reporting on wars and desolation to reporting on restaurants and touristic sights, but both are elements in the larger project of engaging with the world and so ultimately feed a single truth.

In my two most recent books,
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
and
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
, I included reports from far-flung locations: I wanted to understand how narrative changed when context changed. I tailored what I wrote to the books I was working on; here, I’ve included versions of those sojourns that are of a slightly different shape. When I went on tour to promote my book about depression, I was struck by the variety of attitudes I encountered. In Spain, almost every journalist who came to interview me began the conversation by saying, “I have never been depressed myself, but . . . ,” and off we went, as I quietly wondered why these allegedly cheerful people had chosen to interview me in so much detail about mental illness. In Japan, every interviewer commented on his or her own depression but asked me not to mention it to anyone else. On the leading morning TV program in Finland, a gorgeous blonde woman leaned forward and asked in a mildly offended tone, “So, Mr. Solomon. What can you, an American, have to tell Finnish people about depression?” I felt as though I had written a book about hot peppers and gone to promote it in Sichuan.

This book is contiguous with my work on psychology and family dynamics. I have written two recent books about the inner determinants of difference and identity, but I am equally interested in the outer ones. I grew up in a household in which there was a preferable approach to everything—and I quested after the strength to choose among my childhood principles rather than be obligated to them. Travel taught me how to relate to disparate people with incongruent values, and, thereby, how to be contradictory myself. If I came subsequently to report on mental illness, disability, and the formation of character, that was an extension of my mission to break loose from the presumption that there is a single best way to be. I continue to move between the internal abroad and the external abroad. Each enhances my relationship to the other.

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.