Band of Thebes

Born June 3: Wilfred Thesiger

A leading figure of the golden age of exploration, it's appropriate that Sir Wilfred Thesiger was awarded the Lawrence Medal and the Burton Medal, not least because they were all gay. Born in 1910 to a British diplomat in Abssynia, Thesiger was educated at Eton and Oxford where his only happy times were vacations (and beating Cambridge as captain of the boxing team). On his first college break he worked for his passage on a steamer to Constantinople. Returning, he found a personal invitation from Haile Selassie to attend his coronation as Emperor. On his second summer break, he worked a fishing trawler off Iceland. At 23 he went back to Africa, became assistant district commissioner in the Sudan, and learned to fast ride camels with the local men, adopting their clothes and diet. Said to call any invention more modern than the steam engine "an abomination," he hated the first world's intrusion on remote wilderness and peoples. In WWII, he fought with the Sudan defense force against Mussolini's Italians and with the Syrians against the Vichy French. A job with what became the United Nation's anti-locust program took him to the Arabia's famed Empty Quarter prompting his best work, Arabian Sands (now with an introduction by Rory Stewart), which the Guardian recently called "probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever." Thesiger's other masterpiece, The Marsh Arabs [and Kindle] (introduced by Jon Lee Anderson), covers the seven years he lived off and on with the people of southern Iraq. His travels in Asia with the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Pamirs, are recounted in Among the Mountains. Chances are his autobiography Life Of My Choice avoids his homosexuality, but his gay side is somewhat integrated in Alexander Maitland's Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Thesiger died at 93 in 2003, leaving 23,000 negatives of his photographs to the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. See fifty-nine of his images here and one below.

The Homoerotics of Orientalism

Continually, for centuries, white Westerners have projected their gay fantasies on the Arab, Persian, and Ottoman other. In The Homoerotics of Orientalism [Kindle] USC professor Joseph A. Boone examines books, art, photography, and film to consider why. His second chapter covers "Beautiful Boys, Sodomy, and Hamams," with sections on The Hypervirile Male Other, The Cruel Pasha, and The Dancing Boy. His thousand-year survey of literature spans the Rubbiyat to many favorites like Flaubert, Gide, Maugham, and Lawrence Durrell, to a few non-favorites like Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings and the stereotypes in al-Aswany. His final chapter looks at movies, gay images in pop culture, and porn. The 500-page book is heavily illustrated throughout with 250 b&w images and 22 color plates.

Boone's previous books include Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations and Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction.

US Premiere of Abdellah Taïa's Debut Film, Salvation Army

Even in France, financiers wouldn't back producer Claude Kunetz's plan to let Abdellah Taïa adapt and direct his novel Salvation Army, possibly out of anti-Arab, anti-North African prejudice or possibly because the first 40 minutes are about a fifteen-year-old boy who has sex with older men. Finally they received modest funding, and got Claire Denis's star cinematographer Agnes Godard, and finished the 80-minute movie in time to screen at Venice and Toronto. Thursday night it had its US premiere at the Palm Springs Film Festival (with one more screening tomorrow at the Regal 9 at 12:30pm.) The Hollywood Reporter liked the "authentic" first half and disliked the confusing second half in Geneva. Variety complained of the entire movie's "airlessness," saying, Taïa "botches his adaptation of his own excellent novel, translated here with a distancing coldness not helped by emotionless perfs." But the critic does steer viewers seeking gay Arab films to Maher Sabry’s All My Life and Samer Daboul’s Out Loud.

Salvation Army will be released in France later this year and will screen at festivals in Reykjavik, Namur, Sao Paulo, Geneva, and beyond. The novelist says his "dream was always to become one day a filmmaker" and he will continue to make movies.

Born August 16: T.E. Lawrence, Wolfgang Tillmans

The conventional story about the private life of the dashing T.E. Lawrence is that he was a lifelong celibate who could not bear to be touched. Yet undisputedly, his greatest love was for Selim Ahmed, called Dahoum (“little dark one”) and the S.A. to whom Seven Pillars of Wisdom [Kindle] is dedicated. In 1911, when Lawrence was at Carchemish doing archeology work, Dahoum was a self-supporting youth of fourteen working as a waterboy. Lawrence taught him English and math, he taught Lawrence Arabic. They traveled together. Lawrence hired him as his assistant. When Dahoum was sixteen and Lawrence twenty-five, they moved in together. Lawrence carved a limestone gargoyle in the Notre Dame style using Dahoum’s full-body likeness, naked. It was all a bit much for the Brits in charge of the archeological dig, but the Arabs working on the site were merely “tolerantly scandalized.” That summer Dahoum traveled to England with Lawrence as he spoke at a series of public lectures to highlight the dire plight of the Arabs. The following summer, 1914, Lawrence made Dahoum custodian at the Carchemish site and departed for Britain in order to join the war effort. Upon his return in 1918 he learned Dahoum had recently contracted typhus and died. Lawrence lived seventeen more years, never as happy or as at home in the world as he had been in Carchemish before the war, and died of injuries from a motorcycle accident when he was forty-six.
      Early biographers indignantly “defend” Lawrence against the “charges” of homosexuality, while more current historians assume their relationship was also a sexual one. Two poems Lawrence wrote about Dahoum may help to decide your opinion. The first is very public, Lawrence’s dedication to S.A. in his most famous book, and the second is private, from his diary about Dahoum sometime after his death.

                To S. A.

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.
Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near
and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me
and took you apart:
Into his quietness...

     A Photograph from Carchemish

I gaze at you now, my darling, my brother
the pistol asleep in your young groin,
your lips pulled back in a mighty grin.
My little Hittite, after you there can be no other.

In your dark eyes, my darling, my brother,
The world was created from the waters of Chaos;
now black waves of tears
crash upon the beaches of my sleep
and drown my dreams forever.

Last week Doubleday published Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East [Kindle] by Scott Anderson, the war and adventure writer who is brother to The New Yorker's war and adventure writer Jon Lee Anderson.

Born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968, photog phenom Wolfgang Tillmans made it to England as an exchange student when he was fifteen in 1983, just in time for the queerish alt rock explosion led by Depeche Mode, the Smiths, the Cure. After stints in Hamburg, and a year in New York where he met his German partner Jochen Klein, they settled in London in 1995. Two years later Klein died of aids. Three years after that, in 2000, Tillmans became the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win the UK's prestigious Turner Prize. Two years later he filmed the video for Pet Shop Boys' "Home and Dry." In 2006, he opened Between Bridges gallery space in London to promote overlooked political art. But what's his own style? All over the map. New York mag tried to nail it with: "A Tillmans has slackerlike beauty and nonchalance; a color sense that is more like that of a monochrome painter who works in large or otherwise unbroken fields; an accidental and uncontrived appearance; an attraction to the abstract and fragmented; and a sense of the photograph as an object that (usually unframed) occupies wall space more like a sheet than like a piece of art." Taschen has a three-volume, 556-page retrospective of his images. Last fall they added Wolfgang Tillmans. Neue Welt.

(Gay) Sex and the Citadel

 "In the rewriting of Arab sexual history over the past century or so, homosexuality has been buried -- to the point that today's intolerance is now seen as the authentic voice of tradition when it is (as in so many other parts of the Global South) arguably more of an echo of the region's European colonial masters and is certainly less forgiving, in practice, than at other times in its history." p.224

A former Economist reporter and co-vice chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and Law, Shereen El Feki devotes a meaty 60-page chapter of her book out this week, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World [Kindle], to profiles of gay men in the Middle East, especially Egypt. No surprise, their experiences differ drastically by class. Nasim "an immensely charming and cultured man in his forties" is careful, disapproves of excess camp in his friends, and says "When the police see me, they see my social identity, so they don't arrest me. It's about power." Working class Munir "a small and gentle man, with Nefertiti cheekbones, large, lquid eyes, and the sort of eyelashes mascara marketers dream of" has been jailed for "habitual debauchery." He says "We are not safe. We are afraid to go to this place, or that place. I will never linger in any place where there are many gays. It is very dangerous. Most of the gays, they are young, they are still hyper, they are not very safe."

Other men "felt constrained by the term gay... To [married, father] Hisham, 'gay' implies a full-time occupation, with sex at the center of things, whereas he sees his relations with other men as 'a small corner of our lives, something we can go to or not go to, but it is not obsessing... Look at me--I have a mustasche, I'm masculine.'" The author summarizes, "for him, these are useful compartments, not unwanted closets." 

One quasi surprise in the heavly mustached, masculine culture is that when a guy comes out to his father, the man's response is "Okay, but you must never tell your mother." Another half-surprise is they are aware of the gay love in the 9th century Baghdad poet Abu Nuwas but not of the queer doings in Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Tifashi's The Delight of Hearts: Or What You Will Not Find in Any Book replete with happy same-sex couplings and the stray bad tricks who beat or rob their pickups.

Depressingly, today's literature is more narrow. Nasim recounts going to see the movie of Alaa al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building with its cliched gay newspaper editor who is murdered by a lover, "much to the delight of audiences." Nasim says at every screening, audiences cheered the murder.

For more, follow Gay Middle East or get Michael Luongo's Gay Travels in the Muslim World.

Two Years After Tahrir, LGBT Egyptians Have It Worse

Pink News reports on the second anniversary of the Tahrir Square revolution, after the overthrow of the government and holding free elections, for LGBT Egyptians "life has gotten worse." The article says "The visibility of the gay men and women who took to the streets during the revolution in 2011 has caused a backlash against them, instead of clinching them the greater freedom they had hoped for." LGBT campaigners fear the new Muslim Brotherhood government will enact more draconian antigay laws more specific than the broad statutes with which queers are currently charged for 'practicing debauchery.'

The only upside, according to activist Kholoud Bilak, is that groups like Egyptian Iniative for Personal Rights now monitor antigay oppression and advocate for LGBT rights, though as with Amnesty, it's not their priority. She said, "They are finally starting to acknowledge LGBTs: 'oh, they were in the revolution since day one very, very effectively.’ I thought that is very positive."

Photo: Flashback to the Cairo 52 in November 2001 when men arrested at a floating gay boat party were found guilty of "obscene behavior" and "contempt of religion." Many had been tortured during five months in prison awating trial. Egyptian media vilified the accused printing their full names and addresses. Trials and retrials lasted until March 2003 when twenty-one men were sentenced to three years in prison.

In October 2012, seven gay men were arrested in a police raid of private apartment and charged with debauchery. They were imprisoned, tried, and sentenced to fifteen days in jail.

Born November 22: André Gide

On December 10, 1947, at City Hall in Stockholm, a Swedish man spoke to France's ambassador about "the venerable master of French literature whose genius has so profoundly influenced our time." Of course, that was André Gide and he was, at seventy-eight, too ill to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature in person. (Read the full citation here.) The award capped a rollercoaster career that began with the publication of a novella when Gide was twenty-two in 1891, reached successive peaks with The Immoralist(1902), Strait Is the Gate (1909), and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914); plummeted with the publication of Corydon (1920), his nonfiction book in praise of homosexuality'; soared again with his best novel, The Counterfeiters (1925); and immediately shocked certain segments of the public again with his  autobiography, If It Die (1926) with his joyful memories of teenage masturbating under the dining room table with the concierge's son or his adult lovemaking with an Arab youth on a sand dune in Algeria. While in North Africa, Gide also befriended Oscar Wilde. The following year he published Travels in the Congo, his greatly influential attack on French colonialism. That trip marked the end of his eleven year relationship with Marc Allégret, who had eloped with him when he was fifteen or sixteen and Gide was forty-seven. (Allégret's father had been the best man at Gide's never-consummated wedding and wasn't bothered at all by their affair; Gide's wife, however, didn't like being left behind and she burned all of his letters in retaliation. Marc Allégret went on to direct more than fifty films.) After spending the war and post-war years in Tunis, Gide returned to Paris where he died in 1951. In 1952, the Catholic church put all of his works on their Index of Forbidden Books.

August 1920: William Butler Yeats, Marc Allégret, and Gide photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell

Lesbian Novel Set in the Golden Age of Islam, 9th Century Baghdad

Serious swashbuckle. Professor Samar Habib balances historical detail and sociological insight with a classic tale of starcrossed lovers, injustice, intolerance, exile, death threats, disguises, and swordfights in her new novel, Rughum & Najda. Rughum is a devout Muslim married to a much older man; Nadja is a beautiful agnostic adopted and raised by a Manichean family. A little like One Thousand One Nights or Nobel winner Naguib Mahfouz's The Harafish, the story of their difficult love unfolds in a narrative crowded with other lives, creating a communal portrait of 9th century Baghdad. It may have been the Golden Age of Islam but women risked death for their sexuality. Nevertheless, the author, who is an expert in this area, renders a convincing lesbian subculture of that era.

For more queer Arab studies from then to now, read her anthology of twenty essays Islam and Homosexuality.

Or watch her discuss Queer Representation in Arab Cinema.

 

An Arab Melancholia

As the mainstream notes Omar Sharif Jr.'s [the actor's grandson] coming out as half-Jewish and all gay, literary readers celebrate today's release of An Arab Melancholia. The hotly anticipated novel is the second to appear in English from North African author Abdellah Taïa, "the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco." His debut in translation,  Salvation Army,earned a passionate following in 2009 with acclaim from Edmund White, Alistair McCartney, Kevin Killian, David McConnell, and David Ebershoff who praised it as "a fresh kind of gay story – the young man navigating the complex currents of poverty, Islam, colonialism, and individual vs. national identity." 

The new book is 144 pages and Semiotext(e) says:

"Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he’s out of breath. He’s running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He’s running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who’s out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood--which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco.

"Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa’s identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery."

Born January 6: Juan Goytisolo

Praised by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edmund White, and according to the Guardian, "widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer," Juan Goytisolo has lived in self-imposed exile in Marrakech since the 1960s. (He is 81 today and now spends part of each year in Paris.) His more than thirty books make clear why he left his native land: Franco, the post-Franco government, the Catholic church, middle class bourgeois attitudes, and homophobia. Also, he loves Arabs, particularly illiterate or uneducated men whose gayness is not marked by effeminate behavior but a hyper virility. Depending on which critics you ask, his masterpiece is either his two-volume memoir, groundbreaking for among other things its frankness about gay sex, or his trilogy comprised of Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. Goytisolo's most recent novel, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, recounts in his typically subversive style the ribald sexual antics of a gay priest.

Met's Renovated Galleries Dazzle with Art of the Arab Lands

How high on your list of time travel destinations is Iran in the 16th century? It should leap several ranks after you see the Metropolitan Museum's spectacularly renovated galleries of Art of the Arab Lands. (Make what you will of the switch away from the former term "Islamic Art.") The 15 rooms contain 1,200 objects spanning 1,000 years. Highlights are the ravishing textiles; the unfortunately placed Moroccan court [below] constructed on site by workers flown in from Fez; the 16th-century Moorish ceiling above (previously owned by William Randolph Hearst); and a large reception room from Damascus circa 1707. Lost in the critical gushing is the recurrent sense of humor or whimsy in many of the intricate folio illustrations or artifacts, like a vase spout in the shape of a rooster or a chair leg carved like a griffin. Other images are open to homoerotic interpretation. New to me was a version of the seven men of Ephesus, who slept together in a cave for 309 years, getting rescued by the bisexual Alexander the Great riding a white stallion. For a more recent take on gay whites discovering Arab men, read the long-delayed biography Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer, just released here last week, or his classics Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs.

Related nonfiction of note:

The anthology Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature

Scott Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam

Afdhere Jama, Illegal Citizens: Queer Lives in the Muslim World

Michael Luongo, Gay Travels in the Muslim World

Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs

Brian Whitaker, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East

and

The documentary film A Jihad for Love

 

The museum somehow spent $40 million on construction alone for a project that took 8.5 years.