Hummus Queen
Michael gives the dips!
(Interview with writer Michael T. Luongo writer of Gay Travels in the Muslim World)
By: Bradley Heinz
Photo by: Ingrid Breyer
A rallying cry in the United States of the 1980s was “Silence = Death.” This slogan spread to t-shirts, protest banners, and to the lips of activists. The phrase is laden with layers of meaning. First, silence is representative of the closeted queer individual, he who chose to keep his private life strictly private from family, co-workers, select friends, neighbors, and the like. Death, in this instance, does not represent loss of life so much as a lack of a public life, a lack of an existence where those who identify as queer can simply be respected and loved fully for who they are in all facets of life, in addition to using their identity as a political platform to fight for equal legal rights.
In a more real sense, silence equaled death during the AIDS crisis. The advent of life-saving anti retro-viral drugs promised to arrest the progress of HIV and grant those lucky enough to obtain the drugs a longer, fuller life. Unfortunately, these drugs were prohibitively expensive and therefore out of reach for most. As the numbers of death notices started to add up, activists rallied closeted individuals to come out, to come out to everyone they knew, to bring fellow queers and straight allies into the fight for access to these life-saving drugs. To be silent, closeted, and afraid, they charged, was to remain unrecognized, and to die or have large members of their communities die due to homophobic policies and a government that refused to intervene on behalf of an epidemic viewed largely at the time as an issue only involving gay men. “Good,” we imagined our policy makers thinking, “this'll take care of the 'gay problem' once and for all.” Only with enough noise from the collective voice of an increasingly Out demographic, and unfortunately with enough deaths, did the US government finally respond to the needs of the epidemic. The silence was eventually broken, and survival became a hope for many.
But that was the United States, and this magazine is about queers in the Middle East. However, the issues are related, since the world is watching as another silence is broken. For better or worse, words like gay are being uttered across the Muslim world. Sometimes, the presence of gay individuals is denied, such as when Ahmadinejad claimed at Columbia University in 2007 that gays do not exist in Iran. Sometimes newspapers publicly shame the names and faces of gay “perverts” caught dancing and mingling together in a manner “threatening public decency,” such as with the Queen Boat 52 incident in Cairo in 2001. On the other hand, gay Muslim groups exist to project a positive voice into the discussion, such as Lebanon's Helem organization, and a number of Gay Muslim organizations in the United States and Western Europe. My.Kali.mag, while not specifically a Muslim publication, presents another platform for queer expression in the Middle East, contributing to an increasing diversity of self-identifying queer brothers, sisters and transgendered individuals who share a common bond.
Photo by: Ingrid Breyer
A rallying cry in the United States of the 1980s was “Silence = Death.” This slogan spread to t-shirts, protest banners, and to the lips of activists. The phrase is laden with layers of meaning. First, silence is representative of the closeted queer individual, he who chose to keep his private life strictly private from family, co-workers, select friends, neighbors, and the like. Death, in this instance, does not represent loss of life so much as a lack of a public life, a lack of an existence where those who identify as queer can simply be respected and loved fully for who they are in all facets of life, in addition to using their identity as a political platform to fight for equal legal rights.
In a more real sense, silence equaled death during the AIDS crisis. The advent of life-saving anti retro-viral drugs promised to arrest the progress of HIV and grant those lucky enough to obtain the drugs a longer, fuller life. Unfortunately, these drugs were prohibitively expensive and therefore out of reach for most. As the numbers of death notices started to add up, activists rallied closeted individuals to come out, to come out to everyone they knew, to bring fellow queers and straight allies into the fight for access to these life-saving drugs. To be silent, closeted, and afraid, they charged, was to remain unrecognized, and to die or have large members of their communities die due to homophobic policies and a government that refused to intervene on behalf of an epidemic viewed largely at the time as an issue only involving gay men. “Good,” we imagined our policy makers thinking, “this'll take care of the 'gay problem' once and for all.” Only with enough noise from the collective voice of an increasingly Out demographic, and unfortunately with enough deaths, did the US government finally respond to the needs of the epidemic. The silence was eventually broken, and survival became a hope for many.
But that was the United States, and this magazine is about queers in the Middle East. However, the issues are related, since the world is watching as another silence is broken. For better or worse, words like gay are being uttered across the Muslim world. Sometimes, the presence of gay individuals is denied, such as when Ahmadinejad claimed at Columbia University in 2007 that gays do not exist in Iran. Sometimes newspapers publicly shame the names and faces of gay “perverts” caught dancing and mingling together in a manner “threatening public decency,” such as with the Queen Boat 52 incident in Cairo in 2001. On the other hand, gay Muslim groups exist to project a positive voice into the discussion, such as Lebanon's Helem organization, and a number of Gay Muslim organizations in the United States and Western Europe. My.Kali.mag, while not specifically a Muslim publication, presents another platform for queer expression in the Middle East, contributing to an increasing diversity of self-identifying queer brothers, sisters and transgendered individuals who share a common bond.
"I think we were taught terrible things about Muslims growing up. We don't even realize it..."
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In the Western academic realm, scholars have recently begun to research and write about comparative sexual and identity politics, framing a burgeoning Middle Eastern queer movement in the context of new solidarities and conceptions of International Queer Brotherhoods and its bilateral interactions with local, homegrown movements across the globe. In addition to scholarly articles and dissertations written on the topic, journalists have written books on the subject aimed at a more general audience. Of note is Brian Whittaker's Forbidden Love and Michael T. Luongo's Gay Travels in the Muslim World. My.Kali.mag was granted the opportunity to interview this last author after his presentation and book reading in Amman mid January.
My.Kali: Thanks so much for meeting with us and welcome back to Amman. My.Kali.mag is very excited to make your acquaintance. First of all, we'd like to hear what your goal was in compiling a book like Gay Travels in the Muslim World.
Michael Luongo (ML): Well first I'm a travel writer, so this is a travel book. So many people don't travel to the Middle East because they're afraid of it. This is in part due to the United States' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fear of the Muslim world that arose after 9/11. Another issue for the gay press in particular is that so many people write about the Middle East who have never traveled there. As somebody who had been all over the region, I wanted to put together a book about the nuances of experiences in the Middle East. It's not simply a book about Arabian men being hot, or about Iranian men being hanged, or about the Taliban pushing walls over on people, it's about the homoerotic and homosocial, all blended into the context of the politics and clearly the wars that the US is involved in. It bothers me tremendously when people write about places they haven't been to. So my goal was to convey my own experiences, and also the experiences of writers I knew who had been in and out of these regions to write more about this misunderstood part of the world.
My.Kali: And do you believe this book works to help dispel Western fear of Muslims and Arabs? You talk delicately about your own experience growing up, when you heard only negative things about Muslims.
ML: I think we were taught terrible things about Muslims growing up. We don't even realize it, but for example, racism is taught inherently in southern schools and children grow up accepting this. Then when you look back and think of what you were taught, and are amazed at the fear and racism inherent in it. I went to grade school in the 70s, which reflected in the oil embargoes and the hostage crisis. Plus Israeli policy was extremely important in my school district, so you don't even think about how this impacts you as a child until you're older. This was part of the book.
If you look at the stories, even if you don't look at them as gay stories, but just as stories about the region, they are wonderful stories on their own without having anything to do with gay culture or gay life (“gay” for want of a better word). From these stories you can know what it's like to travel to these regions, to walk on the cornice, to be an expat, or be a filmmaker, or trying to work in these regions and how hard it is. So apart from being gay stories, they're also just wonderful stories describing the region and the culture. That's what we wanted, strong stories that stand alone separate from the gay aspects.
My.Kali: Thanks so much for meeting with us and welcome back to Amman. My.Kali.mag is very excited to make your acquaintance. First of all, we'd like to hear what your goal was in compiling a book like Gay Travels in the Muslim World.
Michael Luongo (ML): Well first I'm a travel writer, so this is a travel book. So many people don't travel to the Middle East because they're afraid of it. This is in part due to the United States' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fear of the Muslim world that arose after 9/11. Another issue for the gay press in particular is that so many people write about the Middle East who have never traveled there. As somebody who had been all over the region, I wanted to put together a book about the nuances of experiences in the Middle East. It's not simply a book about Arabian men being hot, or about Iranian men being hanged, or about the Taliban pushing walls over on people, it's about the homoerotic and homosocial, all blended into the context of the politics and clearly the wars that the US is involved in. It bothers me tremendously when people write about places they haven't been to. So my goal was to convey my own experiences, and also the experiences of writers I knew who had been in and out of these regions to write more about this misunderstood part of the world.
My.Kali: And do you believe this book works to help dispel Western fear of Muslims and Arabs? You talk delicately about your own experience growing up, when you heard only negative things about Muslims.
ML: I think we were taught terrible things about Muslims growing up. We don't even realize it, but for example, racism is taught inherently in southern schools and children grow up accepting this. Then when you look back and think of what you were taught, and are amazed at the fear and racism inherent in it. I went to grade school in the 70s, which reflected in the oil embargoes and the hostage crisis. Plus Israeli policy was extremely important in my school district, so you don't even think about how this impacts you as a child until you're older. This was part of the book.
If you look at the stories, even if you don't look at them as gay stories, but just as stories about the region, they are wonderful stories on their own without having anything to do with gay culture or gay life (“gay” for want of a better word). From these stories you can know what it's like to travel to these regions, to walk on the cornice, to be an expat, or be a filmmaker, or trying to work in these regions and how hard it is. So apart from being gay stories, they're also just wonderful stories describing the region and the culture. That's what we wanted, strong stories that stand alone separate from the gay aspects.