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.

Born February 26: Robert Byron

Upon his debut in 2006, critics rightly hailed Rory Stewart’s book about his walk across Afghanistan, The Places In Between [Kindle], a “flat out masterpiece” but too few explored the full extent of his debt to gay travel writer Robert Byron. The book’s tone, observations, humor, sketches, and history lessons follow the template established by Byron’s classic The Road to Oxiana (reissued with a preface by Stewart). Bruce Chatwin considered Byron's book "a sacred text," and Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing also reflects Byron's tremendous influence. At Eton and Oxford he nurtured the love of architecture so evident in his work, but at university he was perhaps more known for his impersonation of Queen Victoria. His “hedonistic” life ultimately got him expelled. Undaunted, he traveled. His first great trip was to Mount Athos in Greece, scene of the pig tickling above. Five years after his Greek book,Byron wrote First Russia, Then Tibet: Travels through a Changing World. In Peking, he lived with Desmond Parsons and developed a terrific crush on him before Desmond was stricken with Hodgkin’s Disease and left for a Swiss clinic where he died at twenty-six in July 1937. Devastated, Byron published his magnum opus that year and never wrote another major work. In 1941 he set sail for Egypt, where he was to work for the Times, and his ship sank in a torpedo attack by a German U-Boat. His body was never found. He was thirty-five.

An excerpt after the jump.

 

Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman

Fifteen years on from The Perv and six years after his gay favorite and bestselling The Hakawati [Kindle] -- NYT: "stunning," Washington Post: "delightful," Boston Globe: "wonderful" -- Rabih Alameddine yesterday released his fourth novel, An Unnecessary Woman [Kindle]. Although the story is not outwardly lgbt, it was one of Sarah Schulman's favorite queer reads of 2013. Yiyun Li says, "No words can express my gratitude for this book."

And Colm Toibin writes, "An Unnecessary Woman dramatizes a wonderful mind at play. The mind belongs to the protagonist, and it is filled with intelligence, sharpness and strange memories and regrets. But, as in the work of Calvino and Borges, the mind is also that of the writer, the arch-creator. His tone is ironic and knowing; he is fascinated by the relationship between life and books. He is a great phrase-maker and a brilliant writer of sentences. And over all this fiercely original act of creation is the sky of Beirut throwing down a light which is both comic and tragic, alert to its own history and to its mythology, guarding over human frailty and the idea of the written word with love and wit and understanding and a rare sort of wisdom."

But what's it about? Grove says, "Aaliya lives alone in her apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family’s “unnecessary appendage.” Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been read—by anyone."

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 [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 Oxford. See 59 of his images here and one below.

(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.

Born July 18: Michael Luongo

What's the only gay American book ever translated and published in Arabic? The collection of eighteen essays Gay Travels in the Muslim World edited by Michael Luongo. Again and again your assumptions will be shattered as the writers take you beyond the simplistic shortcuts of Western media. Gay author actor playwright Marine antiwar peace activist Jeff Key writes about being cruised by local Iraqis while on duty. In other chapters, Arab writers tell their own stories. Michael's essay is about Afghanistan, which he finds welcoming even during war, and he also maintains a separate site called Photos of Afghanistan. In a terrific interview from 2008, he says the most gay-friendly countries are Lebannon, Israel, and sort of Jordan and Morocco, while reiterating this is a book of cultural experience not a travel guide. He has also written a novel called The Voyeur and compiled two other travel anthologies: thirteen adventures in Looking for Love in Faraway Places: Tales of Gay Men's Romance Overseas and eighteen quick shots in Between the Palms: A Collection of Gay Travel Erotica.

Rory Stewart on Bruce Chatwin

Rory Stewart, who turned his solo walk across Afghanistan into the recent travel masterpiece The Places In Between [Kindle], has written the introduction to complicated closet case Bruce Chatwin's classic book blending fiction and nonfiction covering his (few) treks in the Outback and his (many) thoughts on Aboriginal culture, The Songlines. Much of the essay can be found at the NYRB blog:

"Today, however, Chatwin’s fictions seem more transparent. We may not be too surprised to discover the journeys with nomads for which he “quit his job,” and which John Lanchester admired, were brief interludes in a period more accurately described as Chatwin getting married and becoming an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. And the passages, suffused with symbolic and literary resonances, that once seemed most impressive, no longer seem the most satisfying. His personality, his learning, his myths, and even his prose, are less hypnotizing. And yet he remains a great writer, of deep and enduring importance.

"The magic of The Songlines lies for me today in the central section, which records what Chatwin observed on February 8, 9, and 10 in 1982 with Toly Sawenko in Ti-Tree, Stirling, and Osborne Bore. The account is precise, understated, beautifully written, and, in an important sense, truthful. Someone as mythically inclined as Chatwin must have been tempted to portray Aborigines either as tragic victims or noble savages. But in his first glimpse of an Aboriginal settlement, he immediately shows us that he is better than that—much better than that. This is not an idyllic grove..."

Both Stewart and Chatwin are champions of another gay, pioneering travel memoirist Robert Byron, whose marvelous The Road to Oxiana greatly influenced their own work.

At a formative age I loved Chatwin's novel On the Black Hill. Some literary types may be inclined to read the story of two Welsh brothers who share a bed for forty-two years as a more acceptable stand-in for the kind of domestic male-male relationship Chatwin could not bring himself to create.

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 (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 it 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 Oxford. See 59 of his images here and one below.

Born February 26: Robert Byron

Upon his debut in 2006, critics rightly hailed Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between [Kindle] a “flat out masterpiece” but too few explored the full extent of his debt to gay travel writer Robert Byron. The book’s tone, observations, humor, and history lessons follow the template established by Byron’s classic The Road to Oxiana (reissued with a preface by Stewart). Bruce Chatwin considered Byron's book "a sacred text," and Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing also reflects Byron's tremendous influence. At Eton and Oxford he nurtured the love of architecture so evident in his work, but at university he was perhaps more known for his impersonation of Queen Victoria. His “hedonistic” life ultimately got him expelled. Undaunted, he traveled. His first great trip was to Mount Athos in Greece, scene of the pig tickling above. Five years after his Greek book,Byron wrote First Russia, Then Tibet: Travels through a Changing World. In Peking, he lived with Desmond Parsons and developed a terrific crush on him before Desmond was stricken with Hodgkin’s Disease and left for a Swiss clinic where he died at twenty-six in July 1937. Devastated, Byron published his magnum opus that year and never wrote another major work. In 1941 he set sail for Egypt, where he was to work for the Times, and his ship sank in a torpedo attack by a German U-Boat. His body was never found. He was thirty-five.

Internet reading is so often a quick skim leaping from link to photo. Slow down, clear your mind, and read with care the excerpt I’ve typed just for you after the jump.

 

Gay Egyptian Blogger on Queer Life in Cairo

Last week, a 22 year-old gay Egyptian Moroccan medical intern who blogs anonymously under the name Ice Queer gave an interview to the excellent website Gay Middle East. This week, Michelangelo Signorile interviewed him using a vocal scrambler to help protect his identity. It turns out that on normal days, when hundreds of thousands of people aren't demanding freedom, Tahrir Square is a somewhat skeezy gay cruising area -- not sure if Anderson Cooper mentioned that. Some highlights of Dan Littauer's Q&A:

GME: Can you be out and gay in Egypt?

IQ: It depends on your personality, your social class, your friends and your family. For me, I'm openly gay to my parents and all of my close straight friends.

GME: How do people meet each other?

IQ: Mostly through dating website on the internet but you can also meet guys in private house gay parties and gatherings.

GME: Tell us about the legal situation… We understand that although there are no direct laws prohibiting same sex acts, we understand that other laws are enacted, like Public Order & Public Morals (as in the infamous case of Cairo52), and quite a few cases of people arrested through speaking with agents on chat rooms and gay dating websites… Can you elaborate on that?

IQ: Exactly, there is no direct laws prohibiting same sex acts or relationship but they usually affiliate it with Debauchery, Public Morals & Order.
The thing is that most of policemen play around a lot with words and the bugs in Egyptian law, they usually trap suspects by using words like debauchery when they ask them whether they practice same-sex sex or not, so they make suspects admit that they practice "debauchery" even though the suspect may only meant that he practice same-sex sex.
Also the emergency law gives the ability to policemen to check ur apartment without a warranty if they wanted.

GME: Any specific changes, relating to these two issues mentioned above, that Egyptian lesbian, gay, and transgender people hoping to see?

IQ: We're hoping that Egypt would become a real Secular country one day, that's when people learn to accept their differences then they would start accept people who r sexually different than they are.

(Illustration from Ice Queer's FB page.)