Hope

Graphics by: Alexa Marie (@aleexamarie)

CW: suicide mention

I am a gulf Arab and I am queer. In case you have no clue what that entails, it means that I must live my life content in the fact that I will never be able to come out to the people I care most about or risk the dire consequences of letting my sexuality be known. Recently, two queer girls from Qatar were outed to their families through a peer. Those girls killed themselves. Oftentimes, I find myself wondering what it would be like had I been of a different ethnicity. I love my heritage, I love my family, I love my friends, and as hard as I try, I can never truly desire to be any different. This means that when my friends are casually homophobic I must laugh along with them, it means that when my family finds a show depicting harmful stereotypes of the queer community funny, I must stay silent.

Sometimes I feel like a fraud, actually I almost always feel like a fraud. Is it acceptable to partake in derogatory and dehumanizing jargon in order to protect my identity? Can I call myself an activist when my mouth feels sewn shut? Can I truly be queer when everything in my culture and tradition screams against it? Even as the younger, more progressive generation are being heard, they are still violently homophobic. Is there any hope for me to enter into a queer relationship? Knowing that at any given moment we could be exposed and subjected to legal punishment for being who we are? Knowing that there is no hope of a future with my significant other?

I realized my queerness very young, and as sheltered as I was, I never felt ashamed. I still don’t feel ashamed in my queerness, just very afraid. I used to be able to casually be out to people around me but as I grew up I realized things were not as simple as I once thought, and given my interest in my opposite gender, it was relatively simple to pass as straight and as much as I love being queer, I find myself very…grateful that I can live my life “normally” by the standards of my culture. I know people who are not quite so lucky, and I long to be able to grant them the life they deserve but I know in my heart that things will not be changing in my lifetime.

On a more positive note, when I found myself completely convinced that my life would be spent in the closet, in a string of semi-public “straight” relationships, I found people who were true allies. I never thought I’d be able to see any of my straight, cisgender peers defending our community. I’ve come to find out that although they are a (growing) minority, there are still people who will vouch to keep queer people safe in the gulf region.

So although the future seems bleak for us now, there will come a time where we will no longer live in the shadows and outskirts of society, and that is enough to give me hope.

By Anonymous

Edited by Halima Jibril (@h.alimaa)

Graphics by: Alexa Marie (@aleexamarie)