“HALFWAY OUT OF THE DARK”: ON BEING A GAY GIRL IN DAMASCUS

Almost every time I speak or write to other LGBT people outside the Middle East, they always seem to wonder what it’s like to be a lesbian here in Damascus. Well, I always find myself answering, it’s not as easy as I’d like it to be but it’s probably easier than you might think. And that, of course, opens up a whole endless stream of questions. To answer fully, I suppose, I almost have to give a little autobiographical detail.

I’m a dual-national and I grew up between Damascus, Syria and the American South, neither of which was exactly the easiest place to be struggling with what I considered inapporpriate desires. When I was fifteen, I realized I was gay and the thought absolutely terrified me. I was suicidal and self-destructive until, I thought, I found a way out of sinful desires; I became what might be described by some people as an ‘Islamic extremist’, by others as simply a devout Muslim. At the time, I certainly thought I was sincere and became as religious as I could be. No longer, I thought, did I need to worry about unlawful desire but, instead, I could be free. I began covering my hair (which on the day that I started was dyed a brilliant shade of blue) and suddenly found an easier reason to turn aside male attention; I was religious, not uninterested because of my orientation.

I joined an Islamic women’s devotional group and had an older girl as a mentor. I was crazy about her. When we travelled, we would share a bed and we’d walk hand in hand together. I was utterly devoted to her. I cried myself to sleep the day she told me she was getting married.

I got older and, one day, I was introduced to a suitable man and agreed to marry him; I still worried that there was something deeply wrong with me as I knew that I had never had desire for him or any man but, surely, marriage would ‘cure’ me. It didn’t and the marriage failed. And a few months later, I realized I was falling in love with a woman.

I came out just before my twenty-sixth birthday, first to myself, then to the woman I had fallen for. I was liberated at last from my fear. Yet, at that time, I was living as an Arab and a Muslim in the USA. I struggled slowly with coming out to friends and family; those who knew me best tended to be the least surprised. I was far less subtle than I had imagined.

And, after a few years, I decided to come back to Syria. I would try as hard as I could to be an out lesbian woman in a repressive Arab state. And it hasn’t been easy. Certainly, it isn’t easy to be out in a society where very few women are willing to identify themselves as gay … yet, we are here, just as we are everywhere.

I went into a hair salon one day and, not long after I arrived, I picked up on something between the women working there; I spoke around in circles and so did they … and finally learned that the women there were all gay. We relaxed, we talked; two of them were married to two men who are gay and live together in Saudi Arabia. They slip under the radar. Other women came in … and I realized I’d found an underground outpost of ‘our kind’. I found a café where women held hands …. Slowly, my eyes opened up … but so much was so much more furtive and repressed than in the USA or in Europe. I realized too how thick with repressed lesbianism that devotional group I had joined really was. We were. Literally, everywhere.

Ours is a funny country when it comes to women’s rights; our vice president is a woman, women sit in the cabinet, women here are far from chattel. We are not Saudi Arabia. Many of the lesbians I know here cover when they go out; it deters men after all; others are among the most adamant opponents of Islamic dress. All of us though want more freedom.

We tried just a little while ago to get a pro-democracy movement going; so far, we have failed. But we are prominent in the ranks of those striving for freedom. And, though it may sound crazy, I think things are changing. I chat with younger women online; more and more are comfortable in their sexuality far younger than I ever was. We are still a generation behind the west, but we are catching up; they no longer execute gays here, though men caught trysting in the parks are still jailed. We’re pre-Stonewall … but we are at least halfway out of the dark.

Our culture has historically been far more at ease with homoeroticism than most western cultures; I walk more easily hand in hand with a woman here than I ever would in the USA. Affection between women is normal – and sometimes almost preferred. I know that many of my own relatives are happier that I’m lesbian than if I were a sexually active unmarried heterosexual.

Our culture is changing; maybe not as fast as I’d like but I would expect within the decade that the first Pride march is held in Damascus and, not so long after that, that we gain full legal equality here.

Maybe I’m a dreamer but that is why I came back here; I want to be a part of the change that is coming.

IS THIS DAWN OR DUSK? What can Arab LGBT people expect with the changes underway?

The winds of change are blowing hard through the Middle East.  In just a few short weeks, regimes that have seemed immune from change have been toppled by mass uprisings first in Tunisia, then in Egypt.  While the name ‘tahrir’ – liberation in Arabic – has suddenly become familiar, new mass risings clamor for our attention: Libya, Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, even Iraq are suddenly in the news with, instead of the usual depressing stories, examples of bravery and commitment to freedom and democracy flash around the world.

From where I sit – in Damascus, Syria, suddenly one of the few ‘quiet’ and ‘stable’ places – it seems like a fresh wind of freedom is sweeping away the tired old dictatorships.  We are, we feel, sitting in the middle of a revolution.  Maybe, we can hope, these changes will mean a real blossoming of freedom.  We are ready, we’ve been waiting …

But we hear voices from beyond our region telling us that, instead of freedom, we should be scared.  Those kings and dictators might be bad … but the alternative is worse, they tell us.  Instead of these tired and compromised despots, they say, we will have new dictators who are harsher.  They warn us of Islamic fundamentalists and Muslim brothers waiting to seize power and deny us any freedom.
Maybe, or maybe it is a risk we are willing to take.  We’ve lived for decades without democracy, without freedom at all.  Some of us, like our brothers and sisters in Iraq or Palestine, find themselves not just struggling for our dignity as a sexual minority nor just as women but also as human beings.
As recently commented on another website

Queer Palestinians, like Afghan and Iraqi women, have consistently found their discourse co-opted by neo-conservative hawks and progressives alike in order to justify war and occupation under the assumption that such actions will ‘liberate’ the oppressed. It is this cynical manipulation that the forum’s speakers work to disparage. Claiming their own voices and movement, queer Palestinian activists are clamoring to be heard and wish for their American brothers and sisters to spread their message. So what is it they have to say?
The clearest message resounding from all three speakers was that if one actually cares about LGBT rights within Palestine, one should be working to end the occupation. That Israel has cultivated a vibrant and open gay enclave is laudable, yet such accomplishments do not give the ‘Jewish State’ a free pass to violate human rights, including the rights of the gay Palestinians they allegedly care for. As Haneen dryly explained, “It doesn’t matter what the sexual orientation of the Soldier at a checkpoint is, whether he can serve openly or not. What matters is that he’s there at all.” Sami echoed the same sentiment, jibing that “the apartheid wall was not created to keep Palestinian homophobes out of Gay Israel, and there is no magic door for gay Palestinians to pass through.”

Others of us have had to deal with secret police and brutal courts; in Iraq, not only do gay women have the American armed and funded state to worry about, but also its opponents.
Yet, we persevere.  There are millions of us, yearning to be free and jealous of the freedom of our sisters in the west.  We want what they want; the freedom to live as we choose, to love whom we choose, to live without fear or discrimination.

We know there are risks but we also know that the way we are living can’t last.  This lack of freedom slowly suffocates us; I do not know a gay woman here who does not dreaming of living in the west.
We aren’t supporting the idea of replacing secular dictatorship with religious dictatorships; we hope that the religious parties do keep their word if elections come and they win and govern as an elected party.  It can’t be much worse.

And we also know that many have used religion as a means of oppression for people like us, whether it is in the name of Islam, Judaism, or Christianity.  But, even then, maybe there is hope.  In actual Islamic legal thinking, as opposed to in that version practiced by oppressive cultures, the ‘sin’ of lesbianism is just that it is sex outside <http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/Pages/femalehomosexuality.htmlmarriage.


But a revolution is underway and all of us want to see it revolutionize every aspect of our societies, rethinking not just how the states are governed but also the role of women in these societies, the rights of sexual autonomy, and, yes, the right to marry who we love.