Life as a Unicorn

Copyright

Dedication

For Queer People

of Colour everywhere

&

Chet & Lois,

my favourite unicorns

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  INTRODUCTION

7  FEAR AND LOVING IN THE MIDDLE EAST

8 THE IRAQI COMES TO LONDON: A STRANGE CASE OF JEKYLL AND HYDE

9  I DON’T WANT TO BE WHERE THE PEOPLE ARE

10  A SEAT AT THE WRONG TABLE: MY TWO-YEAR STINT AS A BRITISH ARISTOCRAT

11  ME, MYSELF, AND LIES: THE MANY FACES OF BEING A DRAG QUEEN

12  THE QUEER QURAN, AND OTHER QUANTUM CONTRADICTIONS

13  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

14  About the Author

15  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

List of Pagesiiiivv12468101113141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152535455575859606162636465666768697071727374757677787980818283848586878889909192939495969799100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119121123124125126127128129130131132133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171173175176177178179180181182183184185186187188189190191192193194195196197198199200201202203204205206207208209210211212213214215216217219221222223224225226227228229230231232233234235236237238239240241242243244245246247248249250251252253254255256257258259260261262263264265266267268269270271272273274275276277278279280281282283284285286287289290291292293294295

INTRODUCTION

For the twenty-fourth night that August, I found myself crossed-legged on the floor of a damp, pungent dressing room. As the rumblings of an Edinburgh crowd reverberated from the venue next door – I say venue, it was more like a cave – I used my little finger to apply gold pigment to my emerald-painted lips. Denim, the drag troupe that I set up seven years earlier, had survived the gruelling Fringe Festival, and we were one show away from crossing our scratched heels over the finish line.

A month of performances, often two a day, had taken its toll. My skin was at war with the industrial quantity of make-up it was being suffocated in (a two-hour procedure each time); I had obliterated my left kneecap because of a wannabe-rockstar ‘jump-and-slam-onto-the-ground’ move I felt impelled to perform each show; and a boy I was seeing had suddenly disappeared on me (I secretly hoped that death, instead of rejection, would be the explanation, but it turned out he was a ghost of a different sort: he had indeed stopped fancying me).

Despite feeling so weathered, I was itching to get onstage again. I always feel empowered when I’m in drag and entertaining a crowd – it’s my sanctuary, a space where I invite the audience into my own reality, where I don’t need to adhere to the rules of anybody else’s. No matter how low I’m feeling, the transformative power of make-up and costume is galvanising; for most of my life I’ve felt like a failure by male standards, and drag allows me to convert my exterior into an image of defiant femininity. This particular show was always exhilarating to perform, because it was the first time I honestly articulated my tumultuous relationship with Islam onstage, trying to mine humour in the unexpected parallels between being queer and being Muslim. How I haven’t been hit with a fatwa yet, I do not know.

A student volunteer usher told us we were moments away from the start of the show, and I did my pre-show ritual where I box with the air and shout ‘IT’S GLAMROU, MOTHERFUCKERS’. It comforts me to imagine my haters as the punch bag ‘motherfuckers’. Then I formed a circle with my other queens, our hands all joined at the centre in a moment of communion. The synth chords burst through the speakers, and the audience whooped as we strutted through a blackout onto the stage, our backs facing the crowd, pretending that the actual sight of our faces would be some sort of reward. A suspended beat, then lights pummelled the stage. I thrust my arms above me as if it were Wembley (I won’t lie; it usually is in my mind), and eyed the dripping condensation coating the cave ceiling, one drop a moment away from plopping on my face. After a prolonged and hyperbolic musical introduction – allow a queen her fifteen minutes – the show began with each of us turning to face the crowd one by one, until I pivoted around last. The next part was supposed to be me proclaiming ‘I AM ISLAM’, followed by the Muslim call to prayer remixed with Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’.

But on this final night, as I opened my mouth to start the show, I felt a little bit of sick at the back of my throat, and I found I couldn’t make a sound. Six Muslim women, the majority wearing hijabs, were sitting in the front row. There, looking directly up at me, were multiple avatars of my disapproving mother, about to remind me how shameful I was.

The ensuing performance was about as fun as your parents walking in on you having sex, and then staying to watch until you come. For a section in the show I sang a parodic ‘Why-Do-You-Hate-Me’ type number to my ex-boyfriend – but the boyfriend I was singing to was Allah. Throughout the routine, the women in front of me were using Allah’s name in a more God-fearing way – ‘Allah have mercy’ (in Arabic) seemed to be the most common refrain. Another highlight included a sketch in which I compare men praying in mosques to gay chemsex orgies. When I dared glance out in front of me, the mother of the group seemed to be repenting in prayer on my behalf. I started to ricochet around a mental labyrinth of paranoia, the censorious voices from my childhood chattering loudly in my mind. As my past enveloped me, the empowering armour of my drag began to dissolve rapidly. I stumbled over my lines, tripped on my heels – more than once – and even welled up onstage (which caused the eyelash glue to incinerate my cornea). The rest of the drag queens – as well as the audience – were white, so it felt as if the Muslim women and I were operating on a different plane of reality from everyone else, one where only we knew the laws.

Once the show finished, I sprinted backstage and threw up in a bin. My agent knew something was up and ran to the dressing room. I trembled as she hugged me, distressed at the offence I knew I’d caused. I felt like I was fourteen again, when my parents would tell me on a daily basis that my flamboyance was the root of their unhappiness. I’d worked so hard to create my drag utopia, and until that night, it had been my haven.

And then came the news I was dreading. The women, waiting outside the stage door, passed on a message to the usher: they wanted to see me.

Like a reincarnation of my teen-self, I shuffled off outside, with all the strength of a young seahorse adrift on an ocean current. Seven years after drag had liberated me, I was about to relearn that my liberated new identity required disciplinary action.

There they were, all lined up. The mother of the group, who was dressed head to toe in Islamic robes, stared down at the floor, refusing even to look at me. Great, I thought, she thinks I’m Satan. She whispered something in Arabic to her daughter that I couldn’t make out. As her daughter began speaking, I twitched with terror, like a defendant in court about to learn the jury’s verdict.

‘My mom’s super Muslim, yeah, so she’s a bit uneasy, but she wanted me to tell you that she thought you were amazing, and that you should be really proud.’ Not guilty. In my dumbfounded jubilation, I went to hug her mother, who quickly shifted, like a pigeon does when you suddenly kick the pavement.

‘Easy, my mom’s from Saudi Arabia and really Muslim, so she can’t hug you, but she thought it was so cool seeing a gay Muslim on a stage like that. She said she feels really proud to have been here.’

I explained how I believed they were cursing me throughout the show. It turns out their expressions were akin to a colloquial ‘Oh my God!’ uttered out of enjoyment. The young woman then held my hand, stared honestly into my eyes, and said: ‘But your song to Allah …’ Fuck. Guilty on some counts. ‘… it broke my heart. I’ve been there. Trust me, I’ve been there – I’m a woman living in Saudi Arabia. But the thing is, Glamrou – Allah loves you.’

And with that, the women said their goodbyes, their Muslim drapery billowing in the Scottish wind, floating away from me like a mystical collective of apparitions, as if the entire encounter might have been a hallucination. Now, in general these days, I find it very difficult to sob – my body rarely gives in to the urge (the only exception being when I watch families in whom I have no investment celebrate their loved ones on X Factor, which always gets me). But as the women disappeared from the stage door and into the alleyway leading out to the Edinburgh night, I stepped after them and collapsed against the wall, convulsing so hard that I gave myself a splitting headache. Once the sobbing subsided and I was back out of the matrix, I felt as if I’d emerged from some combination of an exorcism and a K-hole.

I’ll forever remember that night as the precise moment when, for the first time, all the different parts of my identity collided. I’ve spent my whole life feeling like I don’t belong. As a queer boy in Islam class, the threat of going to hell because of who I was inside was a very real and perpetual anxiety. Despite being able to leave the Middle East for a liberal Western education that afforded me numerous privileges and opportunities, I faced constant discrimination and prejudice when I won a place at Eton for two years (two of the worst of my life). I’ve lived between the Middle East and London, and have felt too gay for Iraqis, and too Iraqi for gays. My non-binary gender identity has meant that I don’t feel comfortable in most gendered spaces – gay male clubs, for instance – and I regularly feel out of place in my own male body, as though it doesn’t match up to who I am internally. For a long time, I felt as if I belonged under water, in a marine world with colours to rival the outfits of any RuPaul drag queen, where things flow freely, formlessly and without judgement, where difference is revealed to be the very fabric of this universe. On land I’ve felt like a suffocating beached whale, unable to swim to anyone or anywhere.

But that Edinburgh night, as the beautiful girl in the hijab held my hand and reassured me of Allah’s unconditional love and I stood in front of her in a sequin leotard and a melting face of sapphire glitter, I finally felt as if I belonged.

The December before that Edinburgh summer, I decided to get a unicorn tattooed across my chest. Christmas is one of the hardest periods for me every year; the months leading up to it are saturated with pictures of united families in green paper crowns beaming around the dinner table, and the dominant cultural narrative tells us that it’s the time to be with the real people who know and love us the most. Most friends of mine retreat to the houses they were raised in for cosy, Hallmark-worthy reunions, acquaintances post gifts from partners on Instagram, and it is the time I feel most divorced from Britain, the Middle East, my family, and, well, the world. So to keep me company for the holiday season, I invited a permanent-ink unicorn to live above my sternum.

I feel a great affinity with unicorns. They are the ultimate outsiders, destined to gallop alone. They share the body of a horse and are similar in form, but are of a different nature, almost able to belong in an equine herd, but utterly conspicuous and irrefutably other. For, no matter what, their fantastical horn cannot be concealed, signifying that they are of a different order entirely. In some medieval renderings of unicorns, the horns bring with them the sense of the pathetic; they are a deformity that invites the outside world to taunt the special being, almost like a dunce. As someone who has felt displaced for so long, I’ve harboured resentment for my own obtrusive horn, which has made it impossible for me to assimilate anywhere.

But as much as the horn is an unwelcome protrusion, perhaps even a social inconvenience, it is also a symbol of pride, of a creature flaunting its difference without shame. For the horn also tells us that the unicorn is a survivor, a rare and tenacious creature, ready to fight should its difference bring it in the way of violence. For me, the multiple meanings of unicorns encapsulate the very essence of being queer. Their identity challenges the status quo and is violated by the normative. They long to gallop in a herd, but struggle to ride to the rhythm of others. They can almost hide in plain sight, and yet are also unquestionably unique.

Like a unicorn, I’ve never been able to escape my difference from others. As someone who’s always existed between cultures, classes, genders, and racial groups, I have what society deems an ‘intersectional’ identity. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ refers to the fact that we cannot study the issues surrounding one oppressed social group without understanding its intersections with many others; for instance, it is superficial to have a feminism that dismantles systems of misogyny without also understanding how this intersects with structures of racism (when examining the wage gap for instance, it’s critical to consider not only the disparity between men and women, but the one between white women and women of colour). And, though mine is an extreme example of this, every person’s identity contains multiple facets that intersect with each other internally, and which are represented by intersecting political and social arguments in the outside world. Sometimes these intersections coexist peacefully; sometimes they are in conflict, and tear us into pieces.

My intersectional identity has never felt stable. The best way I can describe it is to say that it’s like playing a really exhausting game of Twister with yourself all day every day, a key part of your identity choke-holding you on one end of the flimsy plastic sheet, while you wrap your legs around its opponent on the other. All the various facets of my identity have pulled each other in polarising directions, leading at times to absurd contradictions, episodes of severe disorientation, and deep internal fractures.

The tattoo artist who gave me my unicorn is a wonderful queer practitioner called Jose Vigers. With an empathetic ear and unreserved generosity of spirit, Jose listened as I explained over Skype what unicorns meant to me. After some wonderfully collaborative discussions, we settled on the design that now armours my heart: a unicorn, being attacked with arrows, on the cusp of collapsing, but strengthened by a BDSM harness and its enduring fighting horn. I wanted a picture that relayed both fragility and strength: an image of a being whose very power and ability to survive derive from the pain they have suffered.

I hope that the story I am about to tell will paint a similar picture.

FEAR AND LOVING IN THE MIDDLE EAST

‘Mama, should I get us a condom?’ I was eight years old when I asked her this. We were taking our regular joint evening nap. I lay entangled in her embrace – my father, as usual, was travelling with work – and my fingers swam through her silky golden locks, as if their depths were infinite. At that age, my mother had convinced me that eating roast chicken would result in jewel-tinted hair, but I know now that she had what we call ‘highlights’.

I had heard the word condom a few times by the age of eight – not in my school’s daily Islam lessons, nor at Iftar, the nightly family meal we shared to break our fast during Ramadan, but from the American sitcoms that occasionally sneaked their way through to Bahraini TV networks. I had ascertained that condoms were used between husbands and wives, or boyfriends and girlfriends. Not understanding what sex was, I presumed a condom was a gift shared between people who love each other, only to be bestowed in a bed (it was as a gay adult that I learnt what an apotropaic gift a condom truly was). And so, after a process of logical deduction, I was confident that I fully understood the true definition of condoms.

And here was the perfect opportunity: I was tightly wrapped in the person I loved most on this earth, and in the designated location for this American gifting ritual. I detached myself partially from her maternal clutch, and looked up at her with the earnest expression of a dog expecting a treat for not shitting inside. ‘Mama, should I get us a condom?’

My mother’s eyes, which I had only ever known to be a source of unending nourishment and affection, changed from their comforting almond shape to a severe angular squint, as if a demon possessed her, an enraged serpent imprisoned behind her glassy pupils. We were gridlocked in this glare of purgatory for what felt like the length of my entire childhood thus far.

‘WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT, AMROU?’ The severity of her interrogation caused an unsettling warble in her voice. ‘WHY ARE YOU SAYING THIS?’ This horrified woman was not one I had ever encountered before, and I felt, for the first time in my life, genuinely scared of her. My strategy was to revert to our tried-and-tested form of interaction, and so I responded with: ‘But Mama, it’s because I love you.’

My mother leapt up off the bed, my fingers ripped from her halo of golden hair, and she chanted in Arabic, praying to Allah for guidance. If I had known what drag was at the time, I’d probably have enjoyed the melodrama; my mother’s white silk dressing gown floated around her as if she were a deity carried by clouds (albeit ones crackling with lightning), and she had all the fiery passion of an Almodóvar heroine. Her thunderous roar eventually subsided as she came to realise that I had no clue what the true function of a condom was, and she sat on the bed in a funerary pose, huddling away from me like someone who had just suffered a Dementor’s kiss. I tried to nuzzle my way back into the nest, but as I lay my head on her lap, she brushed me off, and told me to go to my room.

It was at this moment that I had the tragic realisation that the bond between us was not sacred. I became aware of my capacity to transgress; until this point, the idea of anything restricting our love was utterly alien. Something I said had revealed boundaries to what I believed was a boundless love. As I lay in my bed that evening – my twin brother Ramy sleeping soundly on the bed next to me – the weight of this overwhelmed me, and I wept so hard that I was eventually exhausted.

How could anything I do upset Mama? Are there things happening in my brain and body that might cause her to reject me? It felt like the purity of our bond was stained for ever. My mother was the light and love of my life, so the idea that there could be something other than love between us filled me with a terror that has endured till this day. In all honesty, I think it governs pretty much everything I do.

Following ‘Mama-condom-gate’, I made it my immediate mission to repair any fissures between us. My strategies ranged from the sweet and charming to the dangerous and really quite alarming.

The first tactic was to remind my mother how cherubic I was, to eradicate any notion of me as at all transgressive. Mama always lay my and Ramy’s pyjamas on our beds following our evening showers – here was the perfect opportunity to intervene. And so, every night for the week that followed, I beat her to this, as a way to dazzle her with the sanctity of my little heart. And I was victorious. When Mama witnessed my act of complete ‘selflessness’, she was so moved that she cried with joy, and rewarded me with one of my favourite activities – the aeroplane game. This involved Mama lying on the floor and putting her feet up in the air so my tummy could rest on them, allowing me to fly above her while gazing into her mahogany eyes. RESULT. But as the week dragged on, the novelty wore off (on her side, anyway), and Mama grew frustrated with the number of creases caused by my unfolding techniques. Mama, you see, was an aesthetic perfectionist – you might even say an aesthetic dictator. My parents’ finances were precarious during my early childhood, and so the need to maintain an external image of aesthetic perfection was paramount. Mama has an odd sense of priority; she was more upset when I once wore socks that had holes in them to school than the time I got attacked by a neighbour’s very toothy dog. And so, when Mama realised that our expensive pyjamas had developed wrinkles, she told me to stop putting out the clothes because I kept getting it wrong. POOP. Wrong. I’m wrong. Will she ever see me as right again?

Playing Mama at her own game was a poor tactic – why attempt to do something that she could always do better than me? If ‘Mama-condom-gate’ had robbed me of my childhood innocence, then I needed to remind her that I was still only a child.

Early one night, I was playing in the pool that we shared with all the houses in our compound. It was a characteristically unremarkable evening. My brother and I were sinking toy ships in the water – probably inspired by the same early-millennium morbidity that led to the murder of millions of Sims on PCs – and our new nanny was supervising us nearby, so relaxed in the autumn Bahrani heat that she was snoring. Knowing that my mother would be arriving home at any second, I decided to scream for her. I can’t with clarity remember my precise thought process, but something about the embryonic feeling of being submerged in water stimulated my idea. I knew what I had to do. And so I screamed ‘Mama!’ at the top of my lungs, over and over and over again. My brother watched me, totally bemused, and soon enough, behind the corrugated-iron fence surrounding the pool, I saw the legs of my mother, restricted by the mauve pencil skirt she wore to the hospital where she worked as a translator, sprinting towards the gate, until she burst through, panting in front of me with the frail regality of a Hitchcock victim. When my mother saw me treading water, smiling widely because she was home from work, she slumped onto a deckchair and bundled me up, kissing me all over my face, even though I was soaking wet.

Later that evening, I went to find Mama in her bedroom, hoping to rekindle the lost innocence of our evening nap, but she was in a deep sleep. The mascara stains down her face told me she had been crying. When our nanny saw that I had sneaked myself in, she escorted me out, explaining that my mother needed to rest. ‘You made her think you were drowning earlier, Amrou. She was terrified. You need to let her rest now.’

And so for the second time that week, I stayed up all night and cried in a frenzy of self-loathing. I was certain I hadn’t intended my mother to think I was on the edge of death – or did I? Am I that cruel? No, I’m just a kid! But I had engineered a scenario that would result in her running to me. I was just excited to see her, that’s all. I miss Mama all the time.

In the weeks that followed, I interpreted any evasiveness from my mother as her thinking I was fucked-up for my poolside act of emotional manipulation. She felt further away from me than ever, and I yearned for a time before my purity was called into question. One evening after school, a day during which I ached to be reunited with her, Mama spent hours gossiping with friends on the phone. I watched her as she glided around the kitchen, delicately holding out a Marlboro Red cigarette. I was so envious of her friends on the end of the line, who had the privilege of being audience to Mama’s hilarious anecdotes. A few times during the evening, I wrapped my arms around her torso as she stayed glued to the phone. With that anthropologically curious way you can let someone know to stop touching you by squeezing them with a firm, conclusive gesture, Mama fetched a baklava from the counter, put it in my mouth, and definitively detached me. In the living room next door, my brother and father were watching football together – an activity so profoundly unenticing to me that the sheer boredom of it could lead me into an existential ‘what is the point of life?’ spiral, even as a toddler – and so my desire for maternal communion only intensified.

As I went back into the kitchen, where Mama now sipped a Turkish coffee as she laughed infectiously on the phone, I asked her when she would be done – at which she shooed me off, loath to interrupt the flow of what was clearly a banging anecdote. Those lucky women on the other line! The situation was desperate. Mama was slipping away from me, and she urgently needed to remember what we had. My eyes darted around the kitchen, searching for a remedy. Maybe I could spill water on the floor and pretend to slip? My not being a stuntman threw this one off the drawing board. Maybe I could pretend to break a vase? My mother had a passion for expensive tropical flowers – or maybe just things that were expensive, period – so I decided this would do more damage than good. And then I spotted the steaming bronze Turkish coffee pot on the cooker, the shimmer of its Arabesque metallic belly beckoning me towards it. Like a cunning magpie, I made a beeline, and picked it up with my bare hands, incinerating my right palm until I screamed in agony. When Mama saw what had happened, she dropped the phone, grabbed my hand and put it under cold running water as I sobbed into her arms. She was mine again.

She was mine for the rest of the night. Because my hand was so badly blistered from the ‘accident’, she stayed with me as I slept. I lay on the couch, with her on the floor next to me, holding up my hand so that I didn’t hurt it during my sleep. And she sat like this until I woke up the next morning – my beautiful, generous mother. Now I realise these were extreme measures to take for a moment of maternal comfort. But believe me when I tell you: there was no other option besides Mama.

Dubai was my home until the age of seven, Bahrain till I was eleven. Where I was raised, there was a marked distinction between the masculine and the feminine. I grew accustomed to binaries from a very early age, even though I had no awareness of the concept of them. The earliest recollection I have of a strict division between the sexes was when my mother drove to the border of Saudi Arabia (my brother and I were curious to see it). My mother edged to the border and drove away again. ‘But Mama, we want to go in,’ I implored, confused about what was stopping her. ‘Women aren’t allowed to drive in Saudi,’ my mother said with a remarkable calm, as if the patriarchy lived harmoniously inside her, at one with her brain and mouth. ‘Oh, OK,’ I said, mirroring my mother’s breezy tone. But this was only one incident among many that erected a strict scaffolding of gender rules inside me. Gender segregation was so embedded into the fabric of life that it was impossible not to internalise it and believe it was utterly normal. In mosques, men and women prayed in separate areas; in many Muslim countries, even the form and methods of prayer change depending on your gender. And when it comes to secular activities, the Middle East can be remarkably homosocial (you could say ironically so).

Like schoolchildren separated into queues of girls and boys before PE, my parents always split up when entertaining guests at home. My mother drank tea and smoked with the other wives in one room – all of them trampling over each other to show off the most recent designer pieces, as though it was some label-obsessed Lord of the Flies – while my dad and the husbands claimed the larger room, where they puffed on cigars and gambled. When my brother and I were ‘lucky’, we were invited to the pews of masculinity, giving us an insight into the cunning rules of poker – ‘lying to make money’ I called it – and tuning our ears to conversations about business (also lying to make money). Ramy clearly felt privileged to have access to this space, and wherever possible would initiate poker games with his own friends in a classic case of social reproduction, all of them future Arab homeboys in the making.

One night, when the whisky-scented card game was drawing to a close, I excused myself to go to bed. As I made my way, I hovered by the corner of the women’s quarter, peering in to get a glimpse of a world with which my heart felt more aligned. This was a room to which I needed the key; each guest was decked in enough jewellery to make the collective room feel like a vault at Gringotts (yes, I like Harry Potter), and textured fabrics of the richest emerald, sapphire, and ruby hues. The conversational mannerisms were dynamic and poetic. I watched with wonder as my mother entertained her guests, how she conducted their laughter as if the room were an orchestral pit, channelling an energy diametrically opposed to the square masculinity next door.

My mother’s Middle East was the one I felt safe in; this was especially the case the more Islam dominated my life. As a child, I was taught to be extremely God-fearing, and Allah, in my head, was a paternalistic punisher. He could have been another man at the poker table, but one much mightier, more severe than the ones I knew, one who might put his cigar out on my little head.

From as early as I can remember, I was forced to attend Islam class every week at school. When I got to Bahrain, the lessons went from warm and fuzzy – where Allah was a source of unending generosity and love – to terrifying, forcing open a Pandora’s box I’ll never be able to close completely.