Sex and the Citadel (43 page)

Trans people in the Arab region have been largely overlooked by organizations supporting other sexually diverse groups, although there are a few initiatives now springing up to better understand and to address their needs. But it’s not easy to bring many of them into the fold. “The transsexuals are so despairing of society, tired of everything, they don’t want any more,” Randa told me. “ ‘What are you saying? You want to bring us here, you want to give us rights?’ They don’t believe that.” But she also appreciates why society is reluctant to engage with them. “That is partially the responsibility of some transsexuals themselves. When you go overboard into extreme vulgarity, extravagance, and all that, what are you expecting in the way of respect? It is the question of the chicken and the egg. If you treat me as a slut, okay, I will be a slut, a slut to the extreme. You only have to dig a little to see the suffering that has engendered this extravagance.”

FUTURE TENSE

Experiences like these underscore calls by LGBT activists in the region to fight their fight in a broader context. This strategy is prompted in part by fears of a conservative backlash if the focus is on the bogeyman of “gay rights” but more so by an understanding that nonconformism and diversity in general—ethnic, religious, racial, and sexual—make people uneasy, and not just in Beirut, a city built, broken, and reborn along sectarian lines. Moumneh is very much in the broader-is-better camp. “I think the best-case scenario for LGBT individuals in our region is [to] stop thinking in terms of LGBT. I think it just limits so much. I think it would be
better if people looked at the underlying causes of the problems that we’re facing, and looked at connections between these problems and the wider problems in society. Because if not, we are going to end up with a situation that any progress that we do achieve will be progress for a privileged few.”

She continued in this vein: “I find it very difficult to see how far an LGBT rights discourse would go in a culture that places so much emphasis on the family, for example. I don’t see how far that could go without work on women’s bodily autonomy and women’s bodily integrity. And LGBT organizations have historically never worked on these issues because they are primarily headed by gay men. I generally don’t think this is an appropriate model for the region. No one is going to decriminalize homosexuality while women are still being punished for adultery. It’s absurd; it’s not going to happen. Without tackling the issue of sexual autonomy as a whole, nothing is going to move forward.”

Shahira echoed these sentiments. “As a starting point to rally communities, we have to find something other than ‘We’re all gay,’ and that’s partly my issue with identity politics. Just looking at the realities of the region, LGBT individuals are not as visible as we think they are. But everyone in the region is suffering from the repression of morality—whether it comes from the state, from religion, from society—everybody. So why would I work on liberating a subgroup, for just a very small subset, when I can invest in doing the real work which needs to get done, which is a very long-term strategy?” she asked me, with quiet determination. “When I was younger, I didn’t identify with L or B or G or T.… I was just someone who was repressed because I was a woman. Injustice was on me not because I’m queer, but because I’m a woman—an Arab woman, a single woman.” For Shahira, the grand plan of social justice, at the end of the day, comes down to the personal. “I want to go and be able to rent an apartment without being called a whore. I want to be able to walk down the street without my ass being touched. It doesn’t matter what I do in my bed—because I can close my door.”

In many ways, Lebanon is an outlier in the Arab region. I asked Moumneh what lessons might be drawn, if any, from the experience
of Meem and Helem in carving out space for sexual diversity. Without skipping a beat, she gave me her prescription. “I think the key issue to look at here is freedom of association. In countries where you have a more relaxed freedom of association law, you will have more space for people to organize over whatever issue, including sexuality or LGBT issues. So that was why Lebanon was in the vanguard, because, however flawed it is, it has the institutions of a democratic state. So you have multiple political parties, you have an active civil society, and you have a very, very liberal law of association that basically does not require the consent of the state—it just requires that you inform the state. Without those factors, you would not have what you have today in Lebanon in terms of work on sexuality and sexual rights. And I think that’s the key factor to look at in other countries.” Her advice to Nasim, Munir, and their peers is to go slow. “Now is not the time to say in Egypt, ‘I want to establish an LGBT organization.’ There are foundational things that need to be laid first. You’re talking about a society in a huge sway of transition, and the building blocks of a more open and democratic society need to be laid down first.”

Just as the uprisings, and their aftermaths, are playing out differently from country to country, the strategies of the region’s LGBT groups are also diverging—some advocating full-throttle legal reform to seize a moment of change, and others taking a slower approach. None of this strategizing is occurring in isolation, however; compared with the fragmentation of, and competition among, civil society groups that I’ve seen in other domains—old school women’s rights organizations, for example—the region’s LGBT activists are remarkably well organized and well connected, both online and off. A steady stream of workshops and conferences on HIV across the Arab region, like the one described earlier, are bringing them together on a regular basis to swap stories and compare strategies. Turkey, in particular, has proved a handy incubator for budding sexual rights activists across the Arab region, hosting workshops and networks to help them hone their skills and learn from its particular model of social and sexual change in an Islamic context.
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The most prominent activists in the region are booked months in
advance with invitations to international meetings on sexuality, and the rising tide of conferences on the “Arab Spring,” in which the status of homosexual men and women in the new order increasingly features, means the air miles are adding up.

These men and women, mostly under forty, are impressive—educated, thoughtful, and articulate. They’re not into hierarchies, and their networks and organizations are run on refreshingly meritocratic grounds. Their numbers are still small—a minority within a minority—but not their ambitions. They know exactly how the world turns and can tell you with devastating precision what they think has worked abroad and what will work back home. “The Global South has numerous examples to learn from, whether it’s from Africa and the religious fundamentalists or from Latin America and the trans [transsexual] movement there, what’s happened in India and the decriminalization of the [sodomy] law. The Global South is extremely rich in examples, successful ones and not successful ones,” said Shahira, giving me a wide-ranging view of international developments in sexual rights. “To say that the West has these perfect solutions, it’s extremely imperialist and extremely condescending, and it’s just another form of colonization, and it’s problematic.” She went on: “If we want help, we have voices, we have computers, we have brains, we know how to ask the questions. If the solutions are not local, they are not going to work. If we need help, we know where and how to ask for it. There are enough of us who have studied, learned, and been in the field for so long.”

One of the most interesting opportunities for the region’s LGBT activists to network, and a measure of their progress in recent years, is Mantiqitna Qamb (Our Region’s Camp).
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Since 2010, LGBT individuals from across the region have been meeting once a year in a “secret” location for workshops on sexuality, gender, and activism, as well training on life skills and advice on the personal front. As Shahira, a regular at the event, pointed out, the key to Mantiqitna is connecting “not just through our gay identity, but through our Arab identity.”

It is already yielding results. Hassan, an LGBT activist from Tunisia, was there from the beginning. “It’s an initiative I really
appreciate. I got experience and I learned how to coordinate and create a small regional network [called Khomsa]. It was the 2010 camp, on the last day, we had a meeting of LGBT activist groups from Greater Maghreb—Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria. We have experience, but we don’t know each other. It was the moment when we saw we have common objectives. We work together, exchange experience, conference-call by Skype.”

This solidarity is invaluable for Hassan as an activist and as a gay man. “What is really important for us as LGBT? We are not safe. We lived like this for years, being discriminated against, stigmatized, ignored and no one wants to talk to you, refused by the family, isolated, excluded,” he said. “The fact of having a network that supports you, that you are not alone in this world, it’s moral support. Plus technical support, to have experience, to have had activities which achieved their objectives and others that did not work, so we can learn from these failures.”

Hassan is clear on his goals: for starters, a repeal of Tunisia’s article in the penal code criminalizing same-sex relations (with up to three years in prison) and the creation of a new NGO to advance the rights of minorities and marginalized groups, across the board. Like Meem’s, the strategy of his nascent group is to join other organizations working on women’s rights, children’s welfare—any human rights issue, really—to mainstream its interests and subtly introduce its message into the broader debate on social justice. “We try, wherever there is a chance, to raise the issue of LGBT, so [the other groups] sympathize. If you find a heterosexual woman, married, who speaks openly against the stigmatization, or [putting] men in prison simply because they had [same-sex] relations, or punished, that is less of a risk [of a backlash] than if you came out directly [and said], ‘I’m gay and proud of it.’ We don’t do that—it’s provoking. Our work is to advocate, do meetings, unite with others who can carry the torch to convince others.”

Like his counterparts in many other parts of the region, Hassan also knows exactly what he doesn’t want. “I know Tunisian society. We will never ask for gay marriage, that’s for sure, because most don’t want the classic frame of relationship, marriage; we don’t
think of that. No, not having children, no, no, no. Most [of the men] are young; they want to live their lives normally, correct, without stigmatization or discrimination. That’s our objective for the next five years, and even after.”

Hassan sounds cautiously confident that the uprising will eventually pave the way for change. “The revolution lets us open discussions of sexual liberty, but we could make a walk back of five years too. It’s a difficult moment,” he said. “And we have to be very vigilant. We watch 24/24 and 7/7—in a second, everything could change. There are many Tunisians who are pleading for liberty of expression, sexuality, et cetera, and others who want us to return to society ruled by shari’a and Islam. There are two forces, and a balance between them,” he continued. “As LGBT, we know exactly what we want: to create a democratic life. I’m not against the Islamists; I am not against anyone. I want to create a real debate, respecting each other’s views, not to change one another. We live in one country—Tunisia for you, for me, for us all.”

Over in Cairo, calculated steps have succeeded the revolutionary rush. For Munir, who camped out in Tahrir Square from start to finish, those eighteen days were transformative. “I could not imagine Egyptians would be so brave. It was beautiful, beautiful,” he says, his voice warming at the memory. And for a time, divisions were forgotten—along all lines. “There were many gays in the revolution, but nobody was focusing on this. Honestly, I forgot I was gay. I was an Egyptian only. People were wounded, were dying, were only Egyptians, nothing else. No difference between gays and straights; nobody was feeling any difference.”

The immediate wake of the uprising was for Munir a “paradise,” in part because of newfound respect from friends and neighbors; though he was once despised for his effeminacy, a stretch on the square proved his manhood to detractors. More dramatic, however, was the melting away of police and security forces, turning downtown Cairo into something of a playground. Private parties were flourishing, creating a pink pound economy in certain bars and clubs. “Gay men feel a little freer now,” Munir remarked as we sat at a packed sidewalk café in Borsa, humming with life. As if
on cue, two impeccably groomed, sexily dressed twentysomething men walked by hand in hand, whispering in each other’s ears. “If I go among these people”—Munir swept his hand down the length of the café—“they are all gay.”

The question is how to sustain, and diffuse, this fleeting sense of freedom. It’s an issue that preoccupies Hossam Bahgat, whose NGO, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, has been fighting for legal recognition of personal freedoms in all domains—including the bedroom—for years. EIPR is one of the few NGOs in Egypt to go to bat for sexuality, arranging legal counsel for homosexual men caught up in police sweeps, for instance, or taking the government to task on forced virginity testing.

For Bahgat, Tahrir Square was a realization of all that EIPR has fought for. “It was a moment when it seemed so matter-of-fact that we are a diverse society and people are entitled to do what makes them happy so long as they are not assaulting, invading others’ spaces,” he told me. “[But] it’s not as if this was the true essence of Egyptians that was uncovered,” he cautioned. “No, this was a moment, a good moment—we just need to keep it alive.”

Human rights are a hot topic in Egypt these days, and Bahgat’s phone is ringing off the hook with groups from Europe and America looking to work with him. While foreign interest, and funding, are potentially welcome, Bahgat is worried that “gay rights”—a preoccupation of Western groups—may undermine the bigger prize of building a society that recognizes and respects personal freedoms across the board. “There is a global fight for gay equality. That global movement is extremely interested in the Arab world. They are much more powerful and well resourced than the small group of activists that believe we should work for respect for personal autonomy and social diversity,” he noted. “I am increasingly convinced that the more they spend, the more they allocate resources and execute interventions here, the less space we have for the discussion on sexual rights as part of personal autonomy and diversity in a pluralistic society.”