What It's Like to be Gay in Egypt

Egypt, Abdo's home of 47 years, is a hostile climate for its LGBTQ citizens. As the BBC reports, "Egyptian law does not criminalize homosexual acts, but they remain taboo. Adults suspected of engaging in consensual homosexual conduct are frequently arrested on charges of debauchery, immorality or blasphemy." Late last year 26 men were arrested in a televised raid on a downtown Cairo bathhouse — an alleged "homosexuality network" and "den of illegal gay sex workers" — and were thereafter subjected to forensic anal examinations ordered by the prosecution for evidence of "debauchery." The men were later acquitted in what Human Rights Watch (HRW) describes as "a rare success in protecting the rights to privacy and nondiscrimination." Since 2013, HRW notes, "Authorities have arrested roughly 150 people on 'debauchery.'"

Eleven men were arrested across Cairo this past September in what one local newspaper called "pre-Eid morality raids." The men are now facing prosecution on "debauchery" or "undermining public morality" charges. Such criminal cases communicate a glaring message to society: straight is normal, and normal is both moral and legal.

"But I've found myself to be very, well, normal," Abdo says. "I was born like any other baby, and I didn't choose to be gay. It's something inside of me … I feel it, and I love myself. I don't find that I'm being or doing something bad, but people in this life tell me that I'm bad because I'm gay. I think the meaning of human rights, which includes gay rights, is: 'I'll be who I am inside, I'll hurt no one, and no one will punish me.'"

Some of the effects of state-sponsored and religiously-motivated homophobia are encapsulated in three standout chapters in Abdo's life. Since his teenage years, he's been advised to internalize, to grasp in the deepest reaches of his consciousness, the idea that gay people are fadiha (meaning "a public embarrassment"). Although he's never wanted to give his life a heteronormative spin, in the past Abdo's made concentrated efforts to hide his true identity with the Quran in one hand, and the hand of his pregnant wife in the other.

The same year that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated during a parade in Cairo, 15-year-old Abdo was attending high school. One of his teachers, a "lighthearted" middle-age man hailing from outside the capital, was the first person in whom Abdo confided his sexuality. "You're like Dracula," the teacher replied. "You live in the dark, seduce the people on the street, scaring them all!" Abdo remembers trying to understand what he found to be the man's peculiar analogy: "Gay men are like Dracula. Vampires get blood from the people and gay men do the same… but vampires swallow blood and gay men swallow semen."

Abdo laughs about his teacher's derisive comparison now. "I try to take it as fun," he says, but at the time he was stunned and demoralized. And as he's grown older, he's had to navigate around the mentality at the core of this analogy. "If neighbors in your building found out you're gay, they'll no longer say, 'Hi, how are you?' Instead, they'd throw you out like they throw garbage on the street. They'd sneer at you, avoid you, fear you, even report you to the police, because now you're garbage, a disease, a stranger, a criminal, a monster like Dracula, or the Devil."

Seven years later, 22-year-old Abdo explained his sexuality to his father. "Why don't you deal with the girls? Why don't you have a girlfriend?" his father responded. Abdo tried to further explain himself, saying, "I feel for men what you feel for women." That evidently disturbed his father, who shot back with utter refusal: "You have to get married to a woman because everyone says you're gay." Abdo was swiftly cast into an arranged marriage with a young Egyptian woman and, consequentially, his family became practicing Muslims, in his assessment, to prop up an appearance of devotion to morality. "Their shame is my pain," he says.

Three years into his marriage, and after the birth of his first child, Abdo was working as a flyer distributor in Cairo when he was approached by two men on the street, who asked him to come to a mosque with them. "I was lost and tired, even more than I am now," Abdo notes, and so he followed them that day. Inside the mosque, he met other members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest and now-outlawed opposition movement. "I told them I was gay, married to a woman and was a father. They said, 'You're not going to be gay anymore, you'll be with Allah and the Quran. You'll pray with us and forget everything about gay.'"

Over the next five years his wife gave birth to two more children and he attended daily Quran lessons at the mosque. But in his fifth year as a Brother, he terminated his membership due to what he perceived as its glaring hypocrisy. After praying at the home of a fellow Brother, who had invited Abdo over to "ask Allah for good things," and who was also married to a woman, the two men had consensual sex. The following week outside the mosque, the man unleashed a familiar chill on Abdo when he said, "We did something bad, we have to pray to Allah and he will help us to forget it. We'll never do that again, it was because of the Devil." Soon after Abdo also left his wife, children and home. "I didn't want anything from this life," he said. "I felt like I was going to die."

Today he isn't interested in totalizing the Brotherhood and its members — he certainly would not welcome the same upon the LGBTQ community. However, he's been haunted by his fellow Brother's hypocrisy. "If someone religious tells you that homosexuality is not permissible, in Islam or Christianity or whatever, aren't they not going to do homosexual acts?" he asks. "'I acted with the Devil, now I'm with Allah once again'? Human beings do good and bad — I know I should need forgiveness for cheating on my wife, but why for being gay?"

After Abdo ended his marriage, his father, sister, aunts, and uncles either virtually or absolutely disowned him, he says. "They told me, 'Gays are the Devil.'" His mother, though, whose health is currently withering, chose to continue voicing her love for Abdo. "The people want you to live like they want, not like you want," she tells us from her apartment in a Cairo suburb. "Their eyes are always on you, but they don't know everything, they can't see what you have inside."

Abdo's access to his children has been explicitly blocked for nearly two decades. His own sister, with whom he was close to before making his sexuality known, offered his wife financial compensation for their estrangement. "Your husband is not a good man. He's dangerous because he could make the children gay too," she told her, according to Abdo. And to his children? "She says, 'Never go to your father — what if you find him with a man? How will you feel?'"

In December 2014, the Cairo-based human rights organization the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) released a report condemning the violation of the civil liberties of "homosexuals or others with socially unacceptable sexual preferences." It reads, "EIPR condemns police practices during the arrest campaigns targeting citizens suspected of questionable sexual preferences." The report goes on to list such practices as "spying on individuals, establishing fake social media accounts and using them to entrap and arrest individuals, detaining persons for their demeanor or clothing in public places, searching the phone contacts of arrested individuals to find friends and acquaintances, and using physical and sexual violence against detainees, most of which alleged they were subjected to violent beatings and forced haircuts as well as threats of sexual violence, which in some cases were carried out."

Abdo anxiously recalls a scene that he's experienced repeatedly over the years around various neighborhoods in Cairo. "I'm walking down the street, and a man or two come at me. They steal my mobile, money or anything else that I have on me," he says. "They would say, 'I know you're gay, someone told me about you. If you go to the police, I will tell them you're gay.'" When choosing between being robbed and a having a potential charge of "debauchery" against him, Abdo says, he'd far prefer to lose his possessions. "The government, its laws and officers, are hurting [the LGBTQ community]," Abdo says, "and I think most of the people here accept and even support that."

There's another choice, one that he appeals for our own consideration: "As a gay person, my problem is love, not hate. For those who are against gays, their problem is hate." He adds, asking, "Why would Allah hate me? He created me. Why did my father hate me? He created me. Why does society have to punish me for this feeling?"

* Name has been changed