Sex and the Citadel (37 page)

Wasfy claims some success with his approach. I met his star patient at Wasfy’s office in an apartment building in a bustling part of Cairo called Madinat Nasr, kitty-corner to a gigantic mosque, whose booming call to prayer punctuated our conversation. Rashad is a tall, good-looking man in his thirties, with an open, engaging manner and a lively sense of humor. You’d never guess that he was troubled by his sexuality. But Rashad had a rough start in life. He was abandoned by his father and grew up in an orphanage, where he was sexually abused by some of the other boys.

For the next couple of years, Rashad had sex with men every few days; he was mainly the passive partner. Finding a man was never a problem, but the insults and the jokes were troubling: “They insult me,
abu shakha
[son of a shit],
multi
[sodomizer]. All these insults were stamps of shame put inside me. When somebody tells me I’m good, I thought they wanted sex.”

At twenty, Rashad says, he began to question his way of life. “I started to feel I need to stop it [sex with men]. At first, I started to look at the people around that they are normal, and I am not normal. I asked myself, Was I created like this and God wanted me like this, or there is a situation where I am between the two?” At first he consulted a string of hostile doctors. Nor did the church offer much relief: “In church I met someone and I told him that I have a problem. He asked me, ‘What is it?’ I wanted to tell him, but I was afraid. He told me that this was coming from Satan and you shouldn’t do that. Next time I met him, it was different. He gave me a bad look, and when he sees me near a small boy, he says, ‘Get away from him!’ ”

Through friends, Rashad reached Wasfy. He was extremely wary of the group sessions at first but eventually found the confidence to talk about his sexual desires. “I started to discover there was something called unconditional love—somebody can accept me as I am. That’s not present in the Egyptian society generally. When they hear somebody is a thief, he is branded as a thief for the rest of
his life. When somebody is branded as an adulterer, he is an adulterer. When he is branded as a homosexual, he is a homosexual for life and nobody will come near him,” he told me.

After building his confidence within the group, Rashad shared his story with friends outside, some homosexual, some heterosexual. They are the family he never had, he says, their bond including simple things like watching TV together to the complex intertwining that comes from sharing secrets. “Some of them said, ‘If you want to have a home meal, my home is always open.’ ” He smiled. “This built a bridge for me and I crossed over it. This is the love I was looking for. That showed me that there is love of a different way apart from same-sex.” Rashad found that these different sorts of interactions with men built up his sense of masculinity, and he says he gradually stopped thinking of men in a sexual way. Critics of reparative therapy argue that those who change their orientation most likely had some heterosexual inclination in the first place, but Rashad denies this outright: “I wasn’t sexually in-between. Before that, I was never interested in girls. But after that, there were girls!”

Rashad was in therapy for more than a decade. He is married to a woman who knows about his past but fought her family to marry him all the same. Rashad admits it wasn’t easy to get used to sex with women, beginning with some basic mechanics: “I never knew you practiced sex with a woman from the front [vaginal intercourse]. In my mind, I thought you take a woman from the back [anal sex]. I didn’t have anybody to correct this information. The only one who corrected me was a doctor, but that was years later. It took some time to get pleasure. I tried several times with women before my wife; I didn’t like it as I liked homosexual sex. I felt that homosexual sex is more pleasurable than heterosexual sex. I’m sure of that.” Today, however, he says he has a good sexual relationship with his wife, and they have a son and a daughter.

While Rashad appears to have found happiness through reparative therapy—so much so that he is now reaching out to men in similar straits as a lay therapist—Wasfy admits that it doesn’t work for everyone, nor do all homosexual men need it. His work attracts fans, but also plenty of critics—from all sides. Muslim conservatives
accuse Wasfy of providing a covert cruising ground for homosexuals at his clinic. On the other hand, I once heard gay men from Tunisia and Lebanon lambast him as an “agent of [President] Bush” before storming out of a presentation in protest at his suggestion that homosexuality is a disorder.

There are professionals in the region who are equally dismissive. Dorra Ben Alaya, a professor of social psychology at the University of Tunis El Manar, has studied the social representation of homosexuality and how its characterization may contribute to the spread of HIV. She is frankly appalled at the idea of trying to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality: “Reparative therapy is an absurdity. In
DSM
, it’s no longer considered a disease. If a doctor says I can change your orientation, that must mean that your orientation is not normal. My problem with all this is that every time someone doesn’t fit with society, we are going to repair them; then the world will not advance. We will be like the men of prehistory. We will all look alike, dress alike, behave alike. If nature created something, it has a function.”

Ben Alaya earned her doctorate in France, and it shows, from her chic attire to the way she talks about sexual orientation. She is a proponent of so-called gay affirmative therapy, in which homosexual men and women are helped to feel more comfortable with their orientation. “If these people are depressed, it’s not because they are homosexual, it’s because they don’t accept that they are homosexual. The work of a psychiatrist is to integrate this into their identity. For example, someone who lacks a hand is depressed, and people stare at him in the street. Is it better that you replace the hand with a plastic one or to integrate it into his head that it doesn’t matter what people think? It is not about changing a person in response to a constraining situation, but to better help them deal with the constraining situation.”

There are psychiatrists in Egypt who practice affirmative therapy. Unlike Wasfy, they tend to keep a low profile because their approach is very much against the grain of society. “I am condemned for this by my colleagues,” says Nabil Elkot, who works with homosexual clients in Cairo. “ ‘They [homosexual men] don’t
deserve your time, how can you stand for this?’ or ‘They are homosexuals, so don’t believe them, they are trying to abuse you,’ ” is how he characterizes prevailing medical attitudes. Elkot got into affirmative therapy by accident when he started working on drug addiction in private practice in the late 1990s. A high proportion of his clients were homosexual, which prompted him to learn more about the subject. Today, he has a handful of patients in regular therapy, and his single biggest challenge is convincing them that they are indeed attracted to other men: “Most of them, they say they do this because they don’t have a chance with women or because they are with friends and they cannot say no. They cannot believe that they desire men; the first step is to convince them that they have this desire.” Without this acknowledgment, says Elkot, it is difficult for clients to overcome their problems, and they remain burdened by anxiety, self-loathing, and intense fear, particularly of an almighty scandal should their activities be discovered by friends or family.

Many clients come to Elkot after trying, and failing, to self-medicate with religious healing. He takes a different approach, one grounded in months of psychotherapy and supplemented by medication, to help patients manage their anxiety, depression, or paranoia. The idea, he says, is not to tell a patient he is homosexual but to “come to the conclusion together.” This realization and its consequences—that patients are not like everyone else and will have to learn to live as a minority—come as a relief to some but hit others hard and necessitate even more therapy to get them to accept the situation. Borrowing a leaf from his work on drug addiction, Elkot says, “It is difficult to control the [homosexual] desire, so the solution is to control the harm”—which means reducing the risks associated with keeping homosexuality under wraps, among them unhappy wives used as cover for their husbands’ homosexuality or furtive, urgent, and generally unsafe sex whenever and wherever one can get it. Elkot urges his clients to accept their desires and to manage them: “I am telling him if you have to do it, do it safely, do it at your home, do it with someone you know, for a long time and
not in the street.… Eventually, I try to get them to move into more stable relationships.”

But that’s not easy in a society that openly acknowledges only one sexual context: man, woman, marriage, children. As we’ve seen, the pressure on single Egyptians to wed is unremitting—all the more so if your family is in a position to afford it. The fact that the age of marriage has risen in recent years, particularly for men, has not brought breathing space to men and women who prefer their own sex—it just means more years of parental nagging. My grandmother, as usual, had a saying that summed up conventional wisdom on this subject, used to write off anyone who failed to live up to the mark: “If there was any good in the
‘ilq
[faggot], he would have had children.”

Nasim, now in his midforties, has been living under this gun for decades. “The pressure to marry is the most difficult part.” He sighed. “Until now, I have this pressure from my mom. Every day she sees me; every day she talks about marriage.” Although Nasim disclosed his sexuality to his father, failure to have a family of his own drove a wedge between them. “Every time the family talked about marriage, my father would become sad and would not say anything. I told myself I had increased my father’s unhappiness. He had hoped, until he died, that I would marry. I told him [about my sexual relations] and it made me feel good, but it did not do any good for him.” With his mother, Nasim eventually took a different tack. “Look Mama, I will never marry. I cannot make a woman happy sexually and this will just end in divorce,” he explained, citing phantom visits to the doctor and medical grounds for his alleged impotence. “I couldn’t tell her the reality. She doesn’t want to believe. I was scared about her having a heart attack,” he told me. “If something happens to her, I will never forgive myself. I have to say it, but in a light way.”

Although Nasim is a successful professional with a place of his own, setting up house with another man has proved difficult. While neighbors pry, it’s orders of magnitude less intrusive than if he were living with a woman and, as Nasim points out, so long as
you’re discreet, living arrangements can be talked away. But that wasn’t enough to convince Walid, his lover of four years, to move in. “Often, I remember, I asked Walid, ‘Come live with me.’ But he could not. His parents would not understand. When he stayed with me one night a week, already that was not easy.”

Nasim talked about Walid in the past tense because he had just been dumped. His lover had decided to marry a young woman he had met a few months earlier, catching Nasim completely off guard. “ ‘I am getting engaged, and I want you to be there. You are so important in my life. I can’t imagine my life without you, [but] I want her differently,’ ” Nasim recalled Walid’s bombshell of an announcement, shaking his head incredulously. It’s a common enough story—I’ve seen a trail of broken hearts from Casablanca to Beirut, men losing their male lovers to heterosexual marriage, some partners moving on because they want to, some under family pressure, and some to prove to themselves and the outside world that they are not homosexual after all.

Whatever the reason for his lover’s decision, it got Nasim thinking. “I will tell you something,
ya
Shereen, Walid has just left me. I don’t have any hope of another, he was the only love of my life,” he said miserably. “I see that it is very hard to live with a man, to have a stable life with a man,” Nasim continued, his midlife crisis unfolding: “I am fed up. I am afraid of getting old alone. This morning I took my mobile and asked myself, Nasim, who are your gay friends? Who are the ones who call you? I only found two. And when I go out, there are forty, but it’s me who calls them, who invites them out. I am the driver. If I didn’t make that effort, the day when I don’t have the energy, I will find myself alone.”

CONDEMN OR CONDONE?

Nasim’s predicament is not helped by religion. When Egyptians and their Arab neighbors come down hard on homosexuality, they bring the full weight of scripture with them. The Qur’an refers on several occasions to the “people of Lot,” annihilated by God for
their infamy. Lot, who also features in the Book of Genesis, was a righteous man visited by divine messengers on a seek-and-destroy mission:

And when Our messengers came to Lot, he was anxious for them, feeling powerless to protect them, and said, “This is a truly terrible day!” His people came rushing towards him; they used to commit foul deeds. He said, “My people, here are my daughters. They are cleaner for you, so have some fear of God and do not disgrace me with my guests. Is there not a single right-minded man among you?” They said, “You know very well that we have no claim whatever to your daughters. You know very well what we want.”
²⁰

According to the Qur’an, those scheduled for annihilation were duly warned to mend their ways. Lot tried time and again: “How can you practise this outrage? No other people has done so before. You lust after men rather than women! You transgress all bounds.”
²¹
This “outrage”—the word in Arabic is
fahisha
—is conventionally interpreted in this context as homosexual anal intercourse. In fact, the classical Arabic words for male sodomy (
liwat
) and the man who commits such an act (
luti
) are derived from Lot’s Arabic name. Other Qur’anic verses that talk about
fahisha
—which can cover a multitude of sins—are also often read as specifically condemning same-sex relations among both men and women: