#I know not all skirts have the potential for infinite pocket space but I think septimus would wear ones that do

[septimus-heap]

Septimus wearing skirts is genuinely the most natural thing I can think of. It's just correct. Not all the time definitely but sometimes

[lightinalexandria]

Love, Men, Women, and LGBTQ+ Life in Egypt

August 13, 2021 اغسطس ١٣

A good friend posed the question to me this week of asking “Where are you local?” Instead of “Where are you from?” I might even tweak that slightly to “Where do you feel at home?” For most of us, and in fact for most other places I’ve lived, the equation is a simple line graph. More time, more familiarity, more comfort, more feeling like home. I’m challenged here, at the end of my second summer in Egypt, with a different calculus.

The more I speak with my friends and teachers in their “heart language” of Arabic, the more I see how deep the generosity, sociability, and collective spirit run. Not all my friends are Muslim, but I see these traits represented in the 5 Pillars of Islam beautifully, and I’ve been told so in many different ways.

That’s the part that feels more like home. But of course, if it was all sunshine this would be a different story. This is not a happy post. I don’t have any female friends here who are truly, uncomplicatedly happy. I don’t have any queer friends here who are truly, uncomplicatedly happy.

Of course that doesn’t mean there are no happy females in Egypt; my internationally minded, English speaking group isn’t representative, I know, and I’ve had many conversations with more conservative teachers and friends about the contentment that can come from living inside a more rigid structure.

But…I don’t know everyone in Egypt. I just know my friends. And many of them are desperately, painfully unhappy, stressed, in ways that I understand more fully the longer I’m here. I think “right and wrong” or “good and bad” are wildly unhelpful terms, so when I’m trying to understand how I feel about these societal norms and systems, the right to happiness of my friends is my bellwether. Systems that make more people happier without hurting others are ones I want to support, period, which also means my anecdotal circle can’t be my only data points. I’m a little nervous where those conclusions might lead me, dancing around big questions of class and culture and religion, but more nervous not to draw a line in the sand with the best metric I know and explore from there.

Apparently sexual harassment has decreased a bit since the government put some teeth into a new anti-harassment law a couple years ago and they made an example of a few offenders. That’s nice. The street -especially at night- still does NOT feel like a safe or friendly place, and I just get tiny glimpses of that walking near female friends. Life is lived in the streets here, the pedestrian density like Times Square, always, so the sheer volume of people quickly makes crowd thoughts and judgement evident. Sitting with a female friend at anything but a super upscale cafe, I see the glances and catch bits of the conversation as they pass judgement on her for hanging out with me. What a wild thought, that any conversation I have with an Egyptian women starts with the brave act of her choosing to engage at all, know the subtle pressures that will start in from all sides. One of my friends who wears a hijab told me that when she went to Cairo, she brought extra wide clothes to walk the streets with, and it didn’t matter. She got just as many comments as when she was back in tights clothes.

Who gets the blame? Young men have so few opportunities to interact with young women outside immediate circles, period, but are still somehow supposed to meet a potential bride and move her into the new house that he’ll buy with cash savings from the extended family? Old black and white Egyptian movies show women in skirts and t-shirts, and Egyptian music videos show Western dressed Egyptian women gyrating, but aside from a few pockets of wealth and international society in Alexandria, those images of women don’t exist in the real world here. Men are allowed and encouraged to date casually, but women are called sluts for kissing someone who may not be an eventual husband. Women are supposed to protect their virginity, while men want to fool around with lots of women but settle down with a virgin bride. The math doesn’t work. My heart goes out to the working class men in an impossible, frustrating position, society and politics conspiring against biology, but while they have to worry about their reputation, women here worry about reputation AND safety, always.

And LGBTQ+? First of all, it’s just so difficult to have intimate relations here -every lives with family, you can’t be intimate until you’re married, you can’t be married until you own a house, you can be arrested in public spaces for PDA, and no one will rent rooms to an unmarried couple-. That means there is a SIGNIFICANT percentage of the men here who sleep with other men, feel shame, would never consider themselves gay, and would only consent to being a “top.” Honestly, it reminds me of what I know of the sexual politics in prison culture, except no one’s in a physical prison here.

Sexual health is also a huge challenge; access to STI testing apart from HIV is impossible for unmarried women and hugely expensive for men. Someone in my circle here had complications from a “Plan B” pill and wasn’t able to go to a gynecologist as an unmarried woman. Someone else was hospitalized for an unrelated illness, and jubilant that as part of the hospital stay, insurance would cover the full battery of STI screening before surgery, the first time in a very active sexual life they’d ever had that. Someone else just lost a friend to HIV; they told the family it was cancer, but were too ashamed to seek the HIV treatment pills, and died in a few months.

Mental health has its own obstacles. Someone I know was told by a licensed therapist they were going to hell if they kept sleeping with men, unmarried. I heard that from women and queer friends as well. How do you establish a relationship of trust in the first place if licensed practitioners in the country are able to say things like that in the privacy of their sessions without consequences?

So, full circle to the beginning of the post. “Where do you feel local?” or “Where do you feel at home?”

I feel infinitely more familiar and comfortable here than my first few weeks, no denying that. 95% of the time I can make myself understood in daily life (very different than understanding 95% of what’s being said to ME in daily life, but progress). I can call businesses here to ask questions. I can tell meandering stories. I can cross the comically busy and chaotic streets without an adrenaline spike. I run into friends on the street most days, and my last 100 meters from my neighborhood entrance to apartment involves a dozen different greetings and little conversations. I have my favorite….everything; food carts, Syrian sweets, juice shops, rotisseries, beaches, bars, cafes, and a good rapport with the folks working there. I have a lot of lovely but more surface level relationships, and a few real and intimate friendships. All that DOES feel local, does feel like home.

If feeling local or at home here means giving any kind of tacit acceptance to the norms that make my friends so unhappy, though, I don’t want to claim the label. I also don’t feel like I have any right or power as an outsider to do much more than listen, affirm, connect to resources when I can. I left China after staying in Xinjiang province and seeing the government’s cultural genocide of Uighur society, and I haven’t been back since. (You can read my writings at the time with the link here) What’s my path here in Egypt? Love the player, hate the game? Can I come back next summer and complete my 6 months of study plan, knowing I float through a golden bubble of American male protection I can’t extend to my friends here? I really don’t know yet. No wise or pithy ending sentence here. Just a lot of hurt, a mixed bag of emotions, and a whole lot of people who deserve uncomplicated love and happiness.