Sex and the Citadel (41 page)

Quite aside from the admirable poetry of the verdict, this is the sort of judicial common sense that LGBT activists across the region would like to encourage—through informal dialogue with, and formal training of, judges and lawyers—as an effective way to mitigate the impact of repressive laws where full-scale legal reform is not yet a realistic prospect. For its part, Helem is running workshops where its beneficiaries can learn their legal rights and how to respond, politely but firmly, to police intervention; it also arranges legal representation for those arrested and informally interacts with police to try to keep arrests to a minimum.

Legal reform is a useful rallying point, but no one is kidding themselves that repealing Article 534 will transform the lives of homosexual men and women without much more work on many more fronts. Nadine shook her head when I asked her if abolishing the law was a priority for her. “Let’s say [the prime minister] gives us gay rights tomorrow, abolishes Law 534. What’s going to happen? Absolutely nothing. Is it going to help my mother accept me?
Is it going to help people not harass me because of the way I look? If [the prime minster] stands up and says, ‘I give you gay marriage, men can marry men and women can marry women,’ then I will have to marry someone of my own sect, right? What does it mean to talk about these things? What does it mean to say there’s a protective law for gay people in this country when women don’t have a protective law?”

These deeper fractures in Lebanese society belie Beirut’s shiny, seemingly tolerant surface. Lebanon’s capital has long had a reputation for glamour and sexiness and is widely regarded—more often with envy than genuine disapproval—as the fleshpot of the Arab world. The city, famous as a “Paris of the East” before its fifteen-year civil war, is today back with a perfectly manicured vengeance. In Solidere, its chichi downtown district, I found myself gawking at designer boutiques with the latest flesh-baring, figure-hugging fashions and transfixed by women tottering past in twin-tower stilettos and the shortest skirts I’ve seen this side of the Bosporus. Beirut’s entertainment industries—talk shows, soap operas, magazines, and music videos—project an image of a society at ease in its sexual skin. But when you look at what research says about sexual lives in this hugely diverse city, you come away with the sense that all this is like a shot of Botox to the public face of sexuality, smoothing out appearances without actually curing the contractions that are furrowing society. In Beirut, and Lebanon more widely, there are wives who are just as sexually trammeled, unmarried women as concerned about virginity, and young people as ill informed about sex as anywhere else in the region.

With Beirut actively marketing itself as the Arab world’s playground, and having become something of a gay tourist destination, it is easy to be seduced by its sparkling nightlife into thinking that homosexuality is no big deal in the wicked city.
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But as residents quickly point out, these spots are largely out of reach for all but moneyed folk, whatever their sexual inclination, and life is tough for homosexual men and women outside this gilded circle. “It’s not all roses and peaches. Homophobia is still available. People still get
kicked out of their homes once their parents find out, get kicked out of their jobs. There’s oppression, and there are people in prison. It’s not a safe place,” Shahira reminded me.

The real measure of Beirut’s willingness to make space for sexual diversity is not Bardo, one of its famous “gay-friendly” venues, but an office two floors above it. This is Marsa, Lebanon’s first sexual health center for those on the far side of socially sanctioned sexuality. Marsa spun out of a project at Helem to offer health-care services to men who have sex with men, a population with plenty of experience with prejudice from the medical profession across the Arab region.
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One study of physicians in Lebanon found that scarcely a tenth considered homosexuality an “acceptable” behavior, the vast majority classifying it as a disease that requires either medical or psychological treatment; half said they’d refuse to treat a homosexual patient.
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Such attitudes hardly attract clients for testing and treatment—more’s the pity, since research shows men who have sex with men at high risk for a number of health problems beyond HIV.

Marsa
means “harbor,” and the center aims to live up to its name by creating a safe space for patients. It has proved popular—and not just because its services are subsidized and therefore a fraction of the cost at other private facilities. The young staff members bubble with enthusiasm as they go through the list, including HIV testing, genital wart treatment, hepatitis C management, psychological counseling, and the other nitty-gritty of sexual health. They showed me around their sparkling facilities, which included a tidy setup for gynecological services—not exactly a pressing need for homosexual men, I thought. But Marsa is casting its net widely, aiming to attract not just men who have sex with men, but also women, no matter their sexual preference. “We are offering a gay-friendly and sex-friendly place so that women can talk about their sexuality,” one of the clinic’s counselors told me. Doing so is not easy for any woman, even those who fall within the magic circle of marriage. “I remember just yesterday [a woman] saying, ‘I never imagined myself talking about sex to a man.… I never imagined myself doing it, and now I can … no discrimination, no judgment.’ ”

Marsa is a concrete example of a wider strategy advocated by many LGBT activists in Lebanon, and across the Arab region, who are couching their needs in the broader struggle for basic human rights. One woman who sees the big picture is Rasha Moumneh, a soft-spoken but fiercely articulate analyst of the emerging LGBT movement in the Arab region. For several years Moumneh looked at these issues for Human Rights Watch, an NGO headquartered in New York. Her position has given her a unique view not only of what is happening at home but of how outside eyes see the situation.

Like many of her peers, Moumneh is a staunch opponent of “identity politics,” in this case rallying around the rainbow flag and pushing for specific LGBT rights. As she points out, the situation facing sexually diverse groups in Lebanon and its Arab neighbors is just part of a spectrum of exclusion, albeit at the far end of the rainbow: “I’m not comfortable with this whole gay double life thing. It really extends beyond that. Even if you’re heterosexual, in most places you’re going to have to live some kind of double life. And so to separate the gay angle and say people have to live a double life is really not looking at the big picture, at the social fabric as a whole and what people in general have to deal with when navigating between personal desire and tradition and family commitments. This is not a gay issue; this is a social issue. And I’m sure you’ve seen it among straight young [unmarried] people in Egypt. Everybody has to deal with this.”

Thanks to the efforts of Helem and Meem, there’s no question in Moumneh’s mind that constraints on same-sex relations have loosened in Beirut. “I remember what the situation was ten years ago, and I can see what the situation is now. And it’s a sea change. The LGBT issues have gone mainstream; things are talked about in various corners of civil society, positively or negatively,” she noted. “Because there is an increasing number of spaces that are open and accepting of homosexuality, whether it’s in the social sphere or wherever it is, people feel more emboldened to—not really to come out to their families, but to carve some space for themselves. There is more space for them to live gay or whatever they want
to do. This is, of course, inside Beirut; nowhere outside of Beirut has this dynamic. The increasing visibility of gay people, the space in Beirut, has had a tremendous effect. Not necessarily a sense of acceptance, but a sort of live-and-let-live atmosphere.”

There are blind spots to this tolerance, however. Lamia is a Lebanese student who grew up in Saudi Arabia and is now studying in Beirut. She realized her sexual attraction to women while a teenager in Riyadh. Unlike many of the other women I’ve met, Lamia did not find loneliness to be a problem—at least not while she was living in Saudi Arabia. “They are lots of gays and lesbians in Riyadh, you know. Some people because they really are lesbians, and some because they can’t sit with men and interact with them openly. There’s a lot of it, a lot, a lot, a lot of it.” And the living is relatively easy, in Lamia’s experience. “They don’t have a problem. They don’t feel discriminated. They’re living normally. Some get married, some don’t,” she went on. “No one would, like, tell you are gay or not because they all pass through that stage. I never felt that I am different there.”
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Far from finding her faith an obstacle, Lamia feels Islam has helped her come to terms with her sexuality. “In the Qur’an, there is a passage about hypocrites. I can simply tell everybody that I’m straight. I can go, get married, have kids, have a happy life. But I would be lying to my husband, I would be lying to my children, I would be lying to God,” she explained. “I would be an awful hypocrite. And I don’t want to do that.” It has also helped her parents to accept her, despite their fears for her future without a husband and children. “My mother is a devout Muslim woman. Her belief in God is so powerful that she surrenders everything to His will. Anything that happens is because God wills it. And so she didn’t question or challenge my homosexuality,” Lamia recalled. “Shortly after, I told my father, and he had the same reaction: ‘We cannot change what is God’s will. If it is meant for you to change, you will change on your own.’ ”

For Lamia, the problems started when she came back to Beirut—because she wears a hijab. “When I’m walking in the street, no one questions me about my sexuality, but they do question me about
my dress. I thought Lebanon is more open-minded than this.” She sighed. “Everything is very underground [in Saudi Arabia]. But here it is open. I’m a human being. I like to party. But people, they don’t understand; all they can see is a veiled person at a party place. They don’t understand you—they just judge you.”

GENDER-BENDING

Randa, an Algerian migrant whom I met in Beirut, knows all about the importance of summary judgments and first appearances. She’s a tall, slim, and attractive thirtysomething, with just a hint of makeup and silky straight black hair loosely brushing her shoulders. Compared with the hyperfemininity and supermasculinity of Beirut’s beautiful people, Randa was decidedly low-key, dressed in a plain black tank top, a demure cardigan, and sensibly scaled brown heels. Randa was trying very hard to fit in because she is, in fact, on the outer edge of the sexual margins of Arab society.

Randa was born a man but is on her way to becoming a woman. Of all the sexual diversity in the Arab region, those who visibly cross the great gender divide—transvestite, transgendered, and transsexual individuals—are in for the roughest ride of all. “The state of transsexuals is worse than homosexuals,” Randa told me, her voice shaking. “Really, it’s serious; really, it’s lamentable.”

Her own story is proof enough. Growing up in a middle-class family in Annaba, on the Algerian coast, Randa appeared to follow much the same path as any young man: army, marriage, children. However, Randa knew from an early age that she was not the same as other kids, and the army proved fertile ground for her to explore that difference, through sexual relationships with other personnel. Algeria’s bloody civil war of the 1990s raised her political awareness, and a decade later she cofounded the country’s first LGBT support network, appropriately named Abu Nawas.
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Along the way, Randa decided she was easier in her skin as a woman. “My transsexuality was open because I started my hormonotherapy when I was in Algeria and the changes happened
fast.” Randa, who trained as a nurse, was lucky enough to begin that transition under medical supervision, but she knows scores of men and women who resort to a DIY approach. “Ninety-nine percent of the [male-to-female] transsexuals I speak with started savage hormonotherapy, without any medical supervision. They don’t know what hormones to take; they latch onto the Pill, which is very toxic for their health.” Randa took me through the consequences in frightening detail: diabetes, heart complications, liver failure, and breast cancer, among them.

Between her political militancy and her sexual nonconformism, Randa had no shortage of enemies at home. She received plenty of hate mail, falling into two broad categories: “official” threats from those claiming to have a police file on her activities and promising to put her away in prison for good, and religious intimidation by those who called her a menace to Muslim morals and promised to slit her throat. Throughout her troubles, Randa got little support from her family; it was, in fact, an ultimatum from her relatives that prompted her flight from Algeria. “Someone came to talk to my brother-in-law who said, ‘[Randa] did this, this, this. You have to tell him to leave the country in ten days; if not, it will be bad for you and your family,’ ” she recalled. “My brother-in-law added his own threat: ‘It’s best you leave. If the scandal bursts because you were militant LGBT or a trans, certainly me and [Randa’s other brother-in-law] will repudiate your sisters.’ Repudiate a woman in Algeria, in the region, it’s the drama—she’s no longer a human being. For my security, for the security of my sisters, for their happiness, I had to leave.”

Randa was fortunate; thanks to Meem, she was able to take refuge in Beirut. But life is far from easy in the Arab region if you don’t toe the gender line. “Transsexuality here and in the Arab world is seen as an extreme case of homosexuality by the society, by everyone. They can’t make the difference between homosexuality and transsexuality. But homosexuality is an issue of sexual behavior, and transsexuality is an issue of gender identity,” Randa explained. This confusion extends to trans people themselves. “They say, ‘I am a girl in the body of a young man.’ They give you the definition
of a transsexual in their own words. But they also say they are gay bottom [passive homosexual partner]. But they are not. They are women. They just don’t know any better.”