Sex and the Citadel (40 page)

WOMEN IN LOVE

To understand where the Internet, determination, and a conducive climate might one day take Nasim and company, I took a front-row seat at a theater in downtown Beirut. It was a full house, hundreds of men and women cheering the performance onstage, where two young women were reading from a hot new book,
Bareed Mista3jil (Express Mail)
. An anthology drawn from the lives of more than forty young Lebanese, its stories covered the usual rites of passage—problems with parents, tensions with friends, pressures to marry, struggles with self-image, trouble at school, thoughts about religion, dreams and disappointments of emigration, and that age-old favorite, falling in and out of love. “I get really shy and nervous when I have a crush on someone. I even get shy when I fantasize about someone. I get clumsy when I go out on dates and I never make the first move,” one of the testimonies unfolded, with a final twist in the tale: “I am a lesbian.”
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The crowd went wild. I, meanwhile, was looking around nervously, having brought my Cairo anxieties with me, and half expecting the police to burst in at any moment. But I needn’t have worried. Beirut enjoys a freedom of expression and assembly lacking in Cairo and other capitals before the upheavals of 2011, freedoms that are still more aspirational than actual in the wake of the “Arab Spring.” All the same, the evening was remarkable, even by local standards, not for the sex talk per se, but for its focus on one of sexuality’s largely neglected facets: same-sex relations between women.

While homosexual men in the Arab region are often in the line of
fire, their female counterparts are all but off the radar screen. Time and again, I’ve heard female friends living on their own (moving out, for those with means to do so, being slightly less fraught in Beirut than Cairo) remark on how having male friends or colleagues stay over elicits stern lectures from neighbors, but female lovers can come and go without comment. Generally speaking, people—even in worldly Beirut—just don’t get same-sex relations between women: with Clinton-like logic, if it doesn’t involve a penis and penetration, then it really doesn’t count as sex.

Same-sex relations between women were not always this obscure. In the golden age of Arabic erotica, love and sex between women were well understood: analyzed, anatomized, and very often appreciated.
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Elaborate medical explanations were advanced to explain the phenomenon of “grinding,” and there were debates as to whether it was inborn or acquired. While medieval explanations of vaginal shape or labial irritation are a little out-of-date, the social justifications invoked for same-sex relations are as true for some women today as they were a thousand years ago: preservation of virginity and an avoidance of adultery and illegitimacy.

Al-Tifashi was one of the more sympathetic commentators; although he referred to grinding as a disorder in
A Promenade of the Hearts
, his admiring tone belies his vocabulary. “[These women] love each other as passionately as men do, but with even more intensity,” he wrote. “They seek out the best and most beautiful furniture, food and objects they can afford, no matter the place and time of origin.”
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The women in al-Tifashi’s book appear to have enjoyed considerable economic and social freedom—they are bold, beautiful, independent, and a lot smarter than the men around them, who are generally disdainful of ladies who can get along without their precious “tool.” Warda, one of the famous “grinders” quoted by al-Tifashi, felt sorry for men as she described in arousing detail the journey to mind-blowing orgasm one woman can make with another. “If philosophers could observe our pleasure, they would be baffled. And the people who like fun and music would fly [sky-high],” she observed.
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Warda’s twenty-first-century sisters are a lot less cocky. They are
in a double bind—being both homosexual
and
female, with all the trouble that brings. As we’ve seen, it is a problem for women in the Arab region to admit to any sort of sexual activity before marriage, let alone same-sex relations. And regardless of their sexual preference, women who do not conform to the wife-mother mold cast by patriarchal society are also in a tight spot. Then there is the loneliness of the long-distance lesbian, the sheer difficulty that many women I know face in finding partners because of their social isolation. “It’s more difficult to be a lesbian than a gay man. A gay man can go and come anytime. They can walk at night, they can move out anytime. They can be bachelors when they’re sixty and still be eligible. They can travel. They have a better chance of finding jobs. It’s [being a] man that tips the scale.”

Nadine M. took me through the trials and tribulations of loving women. She should know, having founded Meem, a support group for queer women, in Lebanon in 2007. I’ve struggled throughout this chapter to find the right words in English to describe men and women who do not hold the heterosexual line—sometimes “gay” and “lesbian” cut it, sometimes not. But with Nadine, it’s easy: “queer” fits the bill nicely. “As queer women, we have the part that is gay, and that’s that. But we look at other things that affect us, like our gender expression, including what we wear and how we look and what we look like; the pressure to get married; sexual harassment, including rape; heteronormativity and the family structures; and sectarianism and religions and fundamentalism. Even the politics of this country, even environmentalism affects us,” she explained. “We started realizing this is not about lesbians. This is about something bigger. If we’re going to be queer, we’re going to be politically queer. It’s not enough to be queer in myself or in my friends; I stand against all of these systems that are oppressive.”

Nadine is acutely aware of the difficulty of balancing a sexual identity with all the other affiliations Lebanese carry, including religion, ethnicity, and class. And there is the more fundamental difficulty of reconciling one’s individual sexuality with the demands of, and obligations to, the family. “Our bonds with our
families are so much stronger [than in the West]. It’s not because we love our family more than some American guy loves his family, but because our family are our providers, not the state. The state will not give me money if I don’t have a job; the state will not protect me if someone beats me up on the street. The police, you call them and then they come, like, two hours late,” she said. “We don’t have the sort of protection someone would feel in Britain, for example, that the state protects me. Or in France, if you’re not working for a few months, the state is there for me—I exist as an individual in the state. We don’t have that here because we exist as daughters and sons and wives and husbands of people. This is how we exist. I don’t have a record in the Lebanese government that’s Nadine as an individual. I’m in the record with my father. When I get married, they move me to the record of my husband. What does it mean for me to exist in this country and depend on the state to go against my family?” Nadine’s point is well-taken: it’s hard to hold fast to a sexual identity, of any description, if you don’t have an individual identity in the first place. What this means, in very practical terms, is that your family largely calls the shots, which makes going against their norms all the more difficult.

In dealing with this complexity, the four hundred or so members of Meem can get a helping hand at Womyn House, a cozy apartment in the trendy Gemayze district of Beirut, where fellow travelers from all over Lebanon go to find a room of their own—a place where they can talk about their problems (as detailed in
Bareed Mista3jil
), support each other, and come to terms with their sexuality. It is also a place to simply socialize with other women and overcome their isolation. “I think that a lot of women come into activism not because they want to be activists but because it’s the only way they can see other visible lesbians. I believe that that’s the case because it’s also been my experience,” Shahira, a queer activist in her thirties, told me. The Meems, as members are called, are also extremely well connected online, given the group’s origins as an Internet discussion forum. They tweet, they blog, they post on Facebook and YouTube, and they campaign, organize, and inform
online—including the weekly publication of
Bekhsoos
(
With Reference To
), one of the most informative magazines on sexual diversity in Lebanon and the wider Arab world.
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Meem is one of half a dozen or so organizations that have sprung up over the past decade to offer support to people across the Arab region who identify as LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, queer). Among those out, if only on the Internet, are Kifkif (focused on Morocco), Abu Nawas (Algeria), Bedayaa (Sudan and Egypt), Iraqi LGBT (based in London), and Aswat and Al Qaws (working with Palestinians). And then there are the dozens of NGOs dedicated to HIV, a handful of which also reach out to men who have sex with men, with an emphasis on public health rather than sexual rights per se. Like most of these groups, Meem is not registered as an NGO with the government. In much of the Arab region, official registration of an LGBT group is a long shot, given the current cultural and political climate; although the possibility exists in Lebanon, Meem doesn’t see the point in going the official route, in any case—“using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house,” as Nadine puts it.

Meem’s way of getting its message across is a subtle process of “infiltrating” organizations working on other social issues, such as violence against women or drug addiction. Meem can afford to take a softly-softly approach because women whose sexuality crosses the heterosexual line lack the visibility of, and therefore pressure on, their male counterparts. That pressure is enshrined in law. Lebanon (along with Syria, Bahrain, and Morocco) penalizes “sexual intercourse against nature,” which can result in imprisonment of up to one year; other laws, such as those against loitering or “offending public morals,” can also be invoked. What exactly constitutes a sexual act, let alone an “unnatural” one, and the evidence needed to prove this, is largely in the eye of the beholder: according to one study of the Lebanese law, while homosexual men are picked up and prosecuted, other potential infractions, among them same-sex relations between women and heterosexual sodomy, essentially slip under police radar.
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Repealing this law—Article 534, to be exact—is one of the targets
of Helem, the granddaddy of all LGBT support groups in the Arab world.
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Helem began as a group of people connected by e-mail; it morphed into a social club, then an informal group focused on personal freedoms, from which Helem emerged in 2004 (and from which Meem subsequently budded). Helem is the most visible LGBT group in the region—there aren’t many other organizations there that run public events to mark International Day Against Homophobia—and is involved in a wide array of projects, including advocacy, research on LGBT issues, information and education for LGBT men and women and their families, HIV outreach (in collaboration with the government), weekly discussion groups, and a hotline. Although it aims to serve both men and women, and to reach out beyond the capital, Helem’s core constituency is gay men in Beirut.

Meem and Helem offer an interesting contrast in styles. While it has a strong presence on the Internet, Meem is low-key in the off-line world; membership is confidential, and you need to be in the know to visit the meeting place. (The
Bareed Mista3jil
performance was fronted by Meem’s more public feminist sister organization, Nasawiya.) Helem, on the other hand, is right out there, its voice loud and clear—in part a reflection of general sexual norms, where men can strut and women are expected to keep silent. Helem’s meeting place is Zico House, a rambling old building in central Beirut with butterscotch-colored walls, red shutters, and lush greenery. It welcomes all comers, including officials from Hizbullah, who visited to thank Helem in person for participating in a coalition to support refugees from southern Lebanon during the 2006 conflict with Israel. (“They saw pictures like this one,” a Helem volunteer told me, pointing to a sketch above a doorway of two men kissing. “They were like, ‘What is this place?’ ” He laughed. “We explained about the whole thing, and they were okay.”)

Helem has worked to raise public awareness of Article 534, plastering downtown Beirut with posters and discussing the issue in the media—which, thanks in large part to Helem’s efforts, is now more politically correct and these days talks, more often than not, about “homosexuality” rather than “deviance.” Some journalists
have come out in support of repealing Article 534, various celebrities have made encouraging noises, and a couple of government officials, including one former minister of health, have said they think the law should be scrapped.
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But in the complex social and political mosaic of Lebanon, change takes time. In the meanwhile, people are taking the law into their own hands. In 2009, a judge in Batroun, a coastal town in the north of the country, threw out a case against a homosexual man charged under Article 534, not only because the evidence presented was flimsy but also on the grounds that “unnatural” is a social construct not applicable in this context. “Man is part of nature and one of its elements and one of its cells and no one can say that any act of his acts or behavior is contradicting nature, even if the act is criminal or offending simply because these are the rules of nature,” the judge philosophically observed. “If the sky is raining during summer time or if we have a hot weather during winter or if a tree is giving unusual fruits, all these can be according to and with harmony to nature and are part of its rules themselves.”
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