This Arab Is Queer

My 9 highlights

• I disliked singing in church because white people always wanted an explanation for my presence, both as a child and an adult. A church music director in Massachusetts once tittered at how my name ‘sounded like a sneeze’; people would brag about my Arabness and my Muslim father as though their churches had saved me from myself.

• Another piece of writing that has helped me understand and articulate queer theory is an essay by Susan Song titled ‘Polyamory and Queer Anarchism: Infinite Possibilities for Resistance’.4 ‘The term “queer” implies resistance to the “normal”, where “normal” is what seems natural and intrinsic,’ writes Song. The essay discusses queer theory, compulsory monogamy (emphasis hers) and why anarchists in particular might critique it as a relationship form. Song defines polyamory (in a way that I agree with) as ‘the practice of openly and honestly having more than one intimate relationship simultaneously with the awareness and knowledge of all participants’. She goes on to say how ‘The open and honest aspect of polyamory points to anarchist conceptions of voluntary association and mutual aid. Polyamory also allows for free love in a way that monogamous state conceptions of sexuality don’t allow.’

• Because the cisgender binary is an invention of white supremacy, white bodies are the only ‘correctly’ gendered bodies within the logic of whiteness – all other bodies are foils. I’ve discovered on my skin that the trappings of Western masculinity invoke whiteness by design. Button-down shirts; boots once worn by the British to colonise my ancestors; expectations of a certain kind of corporate-friendly haircut. Power structures and their gatekeepers so often conceive of transness, as Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah put it in the introduction to the ‘Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary’ issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, as ‘points on a map whose prime meridian runs through the United States, whose road signs are in English, whose background color is white,’4 with damaging and deadly results for trans people who do not conform to this strict grid.

• Withheld conversations about queer identity are an integral, load-bearing part of Arab culture. And for many queer Arabs, these withheld conversations serve us.

• The absence of conversations about queerness are the best-case scenario for those who are unable to offer their acceptance; the most they can do is clear a blank space on a map and stand at the edges, looking the other way.

• Silence is an incomplete metaphor. It can’t capture frustration and complicity, its function as retreat and a burrow. It holds a place for concealment, secrecy and deception. It holds a place for reverence. Living with a profound layer of silence wedged between yourself and your family can be such a source of sorrow, even when it is necessary.

• We construct our queerness, don’t we? Mine doesn’t look like yours. My friend explains that a queer space is one where you don’t have to explain yourself. But I find myself explaining myself to myself. Is my mind not a queer space? Is my body?

• While I was not ready to say I was bisexual, I did start to call myself queer – I considered my polyamory to be a form of rebellion and resistance to heteronormativity.

• When I was twenty-eight, I became – finally – sexually intimate with a person other than myself. That sounds like an awful lot of words to say, ‘lost my virginity’ or, ‘had sex for the first time’ but I lost nothing – it was fucking wonderful – as I had already been masturbating and enjoying the orgasms I gave myself. To say ‘had sex for the first time’ sounds like Christopher Columbus ‘discovering’ a country that existed long before he set sail. I have determined to retire those phrases I used to use once and for all.