One of my touchstone moments for understanding the relations of the US and the Arab world was an exchange at a crowded outdoor restaurant five years ago in Aleppo, Syria. My wife and I were out to dinner with someone we’d met there and grown to like, a Tunisian woman who worked in Dubai. Very modern. And we were talking all about American policy in the region when I said to her, “Hey what’s the deal with the role of women in the Arab world?” She said in a quiet voice, “Let’s talk about this when we get back to the hotel.”
I was surprised that she felt a need to censor herself in a public place. And then on our way back to the hotel, I thought, Well there are subjects we censor ourselves about publicly in the U.S. I wouldn’t go into a restaurant in New York and launch into the Israel lobby.
Then later I thought, Well, I’m going to deal with the U.S. censorship issues– we gotta fight the powers that be!– and let the Arabs deal with their censorship issues.
And that is why I fell hook line and sinker for A Gay Girl in Damascus. I thought, here at last is the strong voice of an Arab woman openly taking on the oppressive traditions in her society. I am on her side, I celebrate her presence.
I posted from A Gay Girl a few times. I completely bought her story in February that her father had faced down thugs who had come to arrest her, and that he embraced her sexuality at the family’s front door. And when the blog said she had been arrested a week back, I said I was praying for her and urged my government to jump in.
What a fool. Today, thanks to the energies of people like Ali Abunimah, Andy Carvin of NPR, and our contributor Seham, I know that A Gay Girl was a hoax. She was the fabrication of Tom MacMaster, an American writer in Scotland. You can hear him talking on BBC about his confection, an interview in which he doesn’t show much awareness. I think he must be spinning emotionally like Anthony Weiner. Apparently he’s apologized at the Gay Girl site, which I’m allergic to visit right now. On BBC, he explained that people dismissed him when he tried to talk about the issues as an American. So he invented a name to get “real facts and opinions” discussed, the “actual issues.” The facts he provided about Islam are “true.”
I feel angry today that I was punked, and doubly angry that MacMaster played on my credulity about the Arab world. I was the perfect mark. I wanted what Gay Girl was saying to be true: I wanted to believe that an out lesbian woman could be so empowered and vocal inside Syrian society.
And maybe it’s unfair to Syria and all the gay people there, but the fact that a movement person lied to me about a key fact, who he was, in order to tell me a politically-correct story about Syria, well it makes me question the other claims he made. I recoil angrily against his lessons. I think, Why was A Gay Girl so prominent? What are the actual conditions of gay people in that traditional society? Can you be an out lesbian in Damascus and have your sexuality embraced by your family?
I recognize that it was Palestinians in the Diaspora who played an important role in unmasking Gay Girl (Seham and Abunimah) but I am afraid that in recoiling on MacMaster I am thrown back on those impressions of traditional culture that I’ve had in Syria, in Egypt, in Jordan, in Morocco, in Gaza, in Qatar. The overwhelming public presence of men, at the wheels of cars, in restaurants… the comment from an Egyptian woman in public life that it was hard to be married and have a public role in Egypt…. the fact that at New Year’s celebration in Palmyra, Syria, there were only men at the restaurant…. the fact that in Qatar I was told by a man that married men shouldn’t go out publicly with their wives, it was a dishonor… The extent of sexual harassment in Egypt (from anecdote and friends’ reports)…
Yes the blame for my punking goes on MacMaster (and me), but in my rage, I do wonder what the “actual issues” and truth are about women and gays in the Arab countries I’ve visited.
And I would note that when the 92d Street Y held a panel on the Arab spring recently with some wonderful Arab writers, Abdellah Taia and Abdelkader Benali and Rula Jebreal spoke about relishing western freedoms– yes until 9/11 caused Benali to feel afraid in Holland. But bottom line, the west (Europe and the U.S.) is better at free speech and gay rights than the Arab countries I’ve visited.
You can call me an orientalist, and you can say that occupation and ethnic cleansing and massacres and imprisonment are more important issues than gay rights, and you can say that America is still a traditional society in some places, and fine, I won’t quarrel with you. I know I’m seeing surfaces; I’m a universalist in my (gullible) heart; I can tell you that on my last visit to Egypt a covered and apparently-traditional woman I shared a car with through the Sinai on New Year’s 2010 turned out to be a free spirit, who brought me to a sybaritic party on the Red Sea, and I thought I don’t know the half of it. But again: Can an out lesbian be embraced by her family in Syria? I don’t know.
My wise friend James North likes to say that we all have conservative and radical and liberal and militant elements in our political hearts, and different circumstances call on the different aspects, and this fraud calls on the conservative in me. We’re in a global conversation, and I think the east has something to learn from the west about these freedoms.
And I have a lot to learn about the internet.
