Unicorn

Because Bahrain was so bereft of theatre, Mama turned into Miss Marple in her quest to find me a stage – no doubt my midnight impersonation of Umm Kulthum had convinced her of my chops. Her investigative efforts led her to discover that the British Council often held a Christmas pantomime as a way to preserve the cultural tradition. She called them up and explained that her young son was desperate for a part – but they said this was more a production for British citizens living in the Middle East. My brother and I had British passports; when we were yet unborn in our mother’s tummy, she and my dad had left Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq and we were born in Camden, thus granting us immediate British citizenship (Theresa May wasn’t in the Home Office yet). But then they told Mama that there were no roles for children in the pantomime. Undeterred, with the might of Umm Kulthum, and the tenacity of Erin Brockovich, Mama marched me into the British Council building the next day, and demanded they give me a part. But in this amateur production of Cinderella, there just wasn’t a part for a child. And so we were forced to drive home, tears running down my face, in a melodramatic tableau I wish had been filmed for posterity.

The next evening, as I mourned my non-existent pantomime career on the sofa in front of the TV, Mama came running from the kitchen, excitement all over her face as if she’d just won the lottery. ‘Amoura! Pick up the house phone – there’s someone on the line.’ Was it Baba, wanting to know if I’d join him and Ramy at the kebab shop for the umpteenth time? I had an excuse pursed on my lips, but I was caught completely by surprise – it was the director of the pantomime! He said he was so impressed with my determination to have a role in his production, that he had written one into the script for me – yes, you heard me: a role created specially for me.

To my knowledge, this character existed in no version of Cinderella throughout history, but I was ecstatic nonetheless. For I was going to be premiering the never-before-seen role of … the Fairy Godmother’s gecko. You heard it. A gecko. In Cinderella. My first foray into show business was to play a GECKO in a story that had nothing to do with geckos. Who knows, maybe the casting of a brown boy as an exotic reptile was rooted in systemic colonial structures – this was the British Council after all – but at the time, I felt nothing but victorious.

Rehearsals were after school every evening. I was the only child in the production, and because the gecko was – surprise! – not exactly integral to the plot, I really wasn’t needed much. However, I told Mama that I needed to be at every single rehearsal if I was going to do the part any justice. What is the world this gecko is inhabiting? Is this gecko scared of the Ugly Sisters too? Has the gecko been watching Cinderella’s abuse their whole life? – there were many urgent things to interrogate. In reality, all I had to do was stand in front of Cinderella as she got changed from rags to riches in the ball sequence. Effectively, I was a shield – a role so perfunctory that at the last minute they roped in my twin brother so that he could provide extra blockage. Despite my role as a wall divide, Mama sat with me in every single rehearsal as I soaked up the colourful world of pantomime and its diverse cast of performers.

Remember how, as a kid, a lot of your time was spent looking up at adults with a fiery curiosity? Remember how BIG every grown-up seemed? How each grown-up was like a speculative mirror to your future self, and you imagined yourself living the incredible lives you presumed they had? And there were some grown-ups who seemed different to any other grown-up you’d seen before – who took on a prophetic status, as if your paths crossing was an act of divine intervention? There were two such adults in the pantomime – and they were the grown men playing the Ugly Sisters. Both were from England, in their late thirties/early forties, and with hindsight I think they were a couple, but at the time I believed them to be best friends. From my minuscule height they seemed to have imposing, manly frames, yet they gestured with their hands as if they were flicking wands, oozing wit and comic flare – what we might term ‘camp’. ‘Were you in CATS?’ I asked them one evening with complete sincerity, at which they laughed from the belly, one of them commenting: ‘Darling, I wish.’ Yes, I wish too. We get each other.

During one dress rehearsal, I was completely blown away when both men came onto the stage in women’s clothing. I remember their costumes vividly; one of them had bright orange pigtails, radio-active fuchsia lips, and freckles dotted all over his face, while the other had a plum-toned up-do of a shape not dissimilar to Umm Kulthum’s. The former had what looked like a pink chequered apron flowing down his body, while the other was strapped into a purple corset and black thigh-high boots. With little conception of my gender or sexuality at this point, I can’t remember processing my own dysphoria or sexual orientation within what I was seeing – the overarching feeling I had was, ‘is this allowed?’ I looked around the room, seeing the rest of the cast laugh and celebrate both men in their feminine get-ups. The pair were melding the masculine and the feminine, transgressing both, relishing both, and there was nothing dangerous about it – all it brought into the room was a feeling of collective joy. Just as Umm Kulthum’s voice could apparently overcome audience gender divides, again I was witnessing the potential of femininity to alter social space. Rules and codes of behavioural conduct formed a major part of Islamic teachings, so the idea of a man transgressing his gender codes was not something I thought I’d ever see publicly in the Middle East. But here, in front of me, were men wearing women’s clothing, and the only reactions they provoked were ones of enjoyment. I was smiling goofily, and, as I turned to my mother, I could see that she too was enjoying the performance of the two infectious, loveable queens. Mama’s enjoying this too! Maybe not being a manly boy will be OK with Mama! It seemed that in our secret club, these other ways of being were tolerated – celebrated, even. Perhaps I had nothing to worry about.

But, as I would shortly learn, Mama’s and my bubble was going to burst. And in the next phase of my life, nothing could have prepared me for how sharp a turn Mama would take to stop me being different.

The first proper realisation I had of being gay was at the age of ten. I was at home watching TV when the cartoon of Robin Hood aired. And let me tell you: I crushed hard on Mr Hood (the cartoon fox, not the actual historical figure). Now I promise you I’m not into bestiality, but the arousal I experienced was an extension of the titillation I had felt for the men wearing spandex in CATS, only this time it was tangibly sexual. The cartoon character wore a remarkably progressive gender-queer T-shirt, which was long enough to cover his groin, but he wore it with no bottoms, and cinched at the waist with a River-Island type belt. The way the garment billowed around the character’s pelvis had me fixated, and I was desperate to know what lay underneath – to be frank, I was hungry for a bite of it (minus the fur, but definitely with the balls). His stud status was accentuated by muscular thighs and an ability to penetrate enemies with his bow and arrow, and, as I watched, I imagined myself by his side, a little damsel in distress who he would make it his mission to protect.

I knew that it wouldn’t be the best idea to verbalise my crush to anyone – but I needed to investigate my desires more closely. So when the whole house was asleep one night, I locked myself in the bathroom, got naked, and lay on the marble floor, imagining Robin Hood – yes, the cartoon fox – next to me. The texture of the cold floor against my sweaty torso created a tingling sensation, and the pitch-black midnight of the room made for a psycho-sensory experience. Pretty quickly, it felt like Mr Hood was next to me, and I started writhing around the floor, my aroused body fusing with the galactic space around me, as if the desire in my body poured through my skin and into Mr. Hood’s soul, which was totally consuming me. As the experience intensified, the more out-of-body it became, and I lost all sense of my physicality, floating in a foamy limbo of ecstasy, as if every atom of my being were being engulfed. The next thing I knew it was 7 a.m., and someone was knocking on the door. It was time for school.

It wasn’t long before we were warned about the perils of homosexuality at school. As a Muslim, you were already in a committed, non-negotiable relationship with Allah; the rules, according to our teacher, were that you could open this relationship if it was with a devout Muslim of the opposite gender. A Muslim man dating a non-Muslim woman? Eternal damnation. A Muslim man dating a man, period? Eternal damnation ad infinitum. The closer we got to puberty, the more insight we were given into what actually went down in hell. And it was in these lessons that feelings of terror and shame attached themselves like a bloodthirsty parasite to my sexuality.

It is worth noting that it’s not entirely clear whether the Quran actually condemns homosexuality. The only passages in which it seems to, in The Story of Lot, are ambiguous. In the story, Allah punishes the men of a city for their indecent sexual activities with male visitors. Yet it is not the homosexual act that is being denounced, but rather that the visitors were being raped. It is the way such Quranic passages have been interpreted by conservative Islamic scholars and lawmakers that has partly led to such institutional homophobia among Muslims.

So as I’ve explained, whether we ended up in hell depended on the points between our left and right shoulders – if those on the left exceeded those on the right, then hell it was:

But he whose balance [of good deeds] is found to be light, will have his home in a [bottomless] Pit. And what will explain to you what this is? A Fire blazing fiercely! (101:8–11)

Cute, right? The snag for me was that I was taught that homosexuality resulted in an automatic infinite number of sins, and no kind of good deed – not even curing cancer or solving climate change – could help compensate. But I only have a crush on Robin Hood THE FOX – the Quran doesn’t say anything about fancying foxes? I clutched onto this minuscule loophole of hope – I had to. For the punishments of hell were described to us with intimate detail. While water in heaven was a redemptive, cleansing element, in hell we’d be forced to drink and bathe in boiling water. ‘Close your eyes and imagine the heat on your skin and in your stomach,’ our teacher would tell us. With my eyes shut, I clung onto the lifebuoy that was DR. ABC – but it was no longer enough to stop my whole body from boiling. Another fabulous little treat in store for us was The Tree of Zaqqum, a deceptive piece of foliage whose fruit we’d be forced to eat. When I say ‘fruit’, I mean little devil heads disguised as fruit, which would mutilate our insides once ingested. And what to drink to wash off the horrific taste? Boiling water, of course. DR. ABC – what’s your cure for a shredded, incinerated gut? Nothing.

The intensity of hell’s punishments had a domino effect that debilitated DR. ABC’s capacity to hold off the terror, spreading around my brain like a wildfire that just couldn’t be controlled. And then came the final blow in our classroom tour of Satan’s lair: the overarching punishment of hell would be our regret that we hadn’t changed our behaviour on earth – that we lost Allah – coupled with the knowledge that nothing would placate Allah’s rage. We were stuck here for eternity, and it was entirely our fault. Eternal self-blame was Allah’s ultimate punishment, and it’s a feeling that has seeped into absolutely everything I experience.

To this day, every single time a traffic light goes red, I experience a pang of anxiety because I fear I’ve incited its fury. I’ve tried and tried to shirk this, but it is so engrained into my neurological make-up that I just can’t. Another road phenomenon that overwhelms me with guilt is when I press the ‘wait’ button before crossing a road; if there are no cars coming, I might decide to cross, but sometimes the traffic light then goes red, forcing a car to stop even though I’ve already crossed the road. I usually feel so bad when this happens that I have to mouth an ‘I’m sorry’ to the delayed driver every time. And, throughout my life, whenever I’ve had major doubts about Islam, one of the key thoughts that dissuades me from my scepticism is this: but just in case Allah is real, I should probably stay Muslim to avoid the not-so-glam time in Lucifer’s dungeon. This shadowy doubt, which I managed to stave off through times with my mother as a kid, became an all-consuming plague when I went from fancying cartoon foxes to actual boys.

The first boy I crushed on was none other than Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone – can you honestly tell me you didn’t when you were a kid? I was ten years old. I knew I was gay by this point. I wanted to cuddle Macaulay Culkin in bed, and had the intense urge to help him through his lonely sorrow in the film. I wanted to support him, to be his partner, to lie naked with him and to feel supported by him. Perhaps it was also because I was starting to feel lonely in the Middle East, and I thought that he and I had a lot in common. When I realised the intensity of my desire, I was terrified by the religious implications of it. What I really wanted to do was cuddle up to Mama and have her and Umm Kulthum sing me to sleep, telling me it was going to be OK; but the fear was all-consuming, and it had to come out of me, for the thought was munching at my insides like a flesh-eating virus. And so I came out with it when we were on a family vacation in London.

Let me set the scene: we were visiting my dad’s old childhood friend who worked in the UK (let’s call him Majid); unlike most Arab men his age I’d met, he had never been married, and was dating a raucous and infectiously free-spirited English woman (let’s call her Lily). They were the first ‘interracial’ couple I’d ever seen, and much like the panto dames fusing genders, this relationship seemed to bridge cultures, a further sign that there were other models of behaviour outside of what I’d grown up with. Lily had a gay friend (let’s call him Billy) who was a fleeting but powerful presence. With bright red hair and toned arms, Billy wore tank tops and denim hot pants, and spoke with a melodic Liverpudlian accent that made every room he was in feel like a scene in an uplifting musical. My interactions with him were slight; when he came over to Majid’s house in Islington, I stayed quiet and read my Jacqueline Wilson ‘teenage-girl’ books in the corner (they were my favourite), attempting a surreptitious peep over the pages every now and then. I’d never seen a man so effeminate owning space like he did, and as he and the adults – my parents included – chatted over dinner and drinks, he splayed his lean legs over a spare chair, recalibrating the entire rhythm of the room to his own pace. Billy was the mistress of ceremonies in this house now. Lily referred to Billy with a ‘she’ pronoun throughout the night, and this flexible attitude towards gender seemed entirely accepted, just as it had been with the dames in pantomime. Perhaps this is only OK in London (or the British Council)? When I looked at my mother, she also seemed to hang on Billy’s every word, and she laughed from the belly in a way that told me she was genuinely delighted by his company. The next day, they even went clothes shopping together, for crying out loud.

The way in which Billy was accepted by everyone – particularly Mama – gave me the confidence that confessing my love for Macaulay Culkin might even be celebrated, despite what I knew about homosexuality from Islam. So as I was having lunch with Majid at a restaurant one afternoon, I said ‘I’m in love with Macaulay Culkin.’ Majid, who was sipping a whisky and Coca Cola, slowly put down the tumbler.

‘Oh yeah,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘You love him in the film? Because he’s a good actor?’

‘No! I’m in love with him. I want to marry him.’

Majid picked up his drink and took a big gulp, then he told me to finish my food. His thick eyebrows furrowed as he watched me slurp my spaghetti. The silence was a bit unnerving, but I interpreted his gaze as somewhat benevolent – maybe he feels the same because he also fancies a white person? As I found out later that evening, that was definitely not what he was feeling.

As I thumbed a new Jacqueline Wilson book in the guest room that evening, Majid called my name from the living room downstairs. I presumed dinner was ready. But after descending the staircase, I entered a room that was eerily quiet. The TV was off, no food was laid out on the tables, and Majid, my father, and mother were sitting neatly on the living-room couch, like Olympic gymnastics judges, ordered and unreadable. On the sofa next to them sat my brother, Majid’s fifteen-year-old son and marijuana-enthusiast, and Lily, who had her eyes glued to the floor. Majid then spoke: ‘Is everyone OK if we go out for dinner tonight? There’s a tasty Lebanese place near us.’ Phew. This is just a menu meeting. General mutters of agreement spread around the room. ‘But before we go … Amrou, do you want to tell everyone what you told me today?’ Mama sat up straight, the fact that I might have confided something to Majid without telling her first clearly upsetting to her. Mama and I didn’t keep secrets from each other. But on a cultural level, the fact that I said something to a family friend without first checking it with my parents was also very taboo; where we’re from, family units are more like clans. You are less an individual, and more one puzzle-piece of the collective familial-self, where everything that you say or do reflects the entirety of the family tribe. If any member of the family unit displays individual ways of thinking and behaving, the entire clan must come together to control, exile or destroy the offender.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. My mother’s eyes were giving out a hot glare, as if thin infrared lasers were beaming out and trying to penetrate my subconscious.

‘About Macaulay Culkin?’ Holy Shitting Fucking Christ on his Fucking Crucifix.

I looked around the room and assessed the perilous situation. Maybe I should just tell everyone I’m in love with Macaulay Culkin? I mean, we are in London – the home of spandex male cats, the place where pantomime was born – and look at Lily! She parties in St Tropez and wears revealing clothes – and she’s white and dating an Arab! – and WAIT A SECOND, what about Billy, the gay superhero who my mother LOVES?! Maybe it won’t be so bad? What if Islam doesn’t exist in this part of North London? OK – I’m going to go for it. What could possibly go wrong?!

‘I told Majid that I’m in love with Macaulay Culkin. One day, I want to marry him.’ My dad, who avoids emotion like it’s a skunk’s fart, looked almost fatigued by the news, as if it being raised was an utter imposition to his dinner schedule. Ramy started playing on his Game Boy – I would have done the same to be honest – while my mother looked stunned, tears brimming in her eyes, as if this was the most shocking, dangerous thing she had ever heard.

Majid looked to his son (let’s call him Hassan), who had clearly been briefed on this Iraqi episode of Jeremy Kyle. ‘Listen dude,’ Hassan chimed in, ‘just ’coz you think a guy is cool and you want to hang out with him, doesn’t mean you’re in love with him. Dudes can’t be in love with other dudes, it’s haram.’

‘Exactly,’ said Majid, with a self-satisfied grimace that even today makes me want to go back in time and whack his face with a slab of raw tuna. ‘You just want Macaulay Culkin to be your best friend. You didn’t know what you were saying – you were being stupid.’

With Lily’s eyes now fused to the ground, my dad sinking into the sofa as if it were quicksand, and my mother wearing the expression of a traumatised soldier just returned from war, I decided just to say this: ‘Yes. I was being stupid. I didn’t know what I was saying.’

I said I wasn’t hungry, and retreated to my room upstairs. My mother swiftly followed, barged in, and with more terror than rage in her demeanour, held my face in her hands and said this: ‘Never say anything to anyone about being in love with a man ever again – have you no shame? Look how you’ve embarrassed me. Haram on you, Amrou!’’ Her fake nails indented my arm’s soft flesh, and I burst out crying and released myself from her grip.

This was the first time in my life that I had ever willingly renounced her embrace.

I locked myself in the nearest bathroom and stayed in there for what must have been at least two hours. But in those two hours, the entire wiring of my brain changed, as if the experience had torn down the remaining neurological systems built on trust and hope. The final childhood bridges were being burnt, with new, coarser and more corrosive patterns of thinking emerging from the rubble. It was the first significant realisation I had that my life was going to be difficult. Islamic attitudes towards homosexuality had already made me feel full of fear and shame on the inside, but this was the first moment that these fears played out in the external world I inhabited. I had developed a mechanism for coping with my anxieties in private, but as I cried in the bathroom, the looming journey into adulthood seemed unimaginably treacherous. And treacherous because of the desires and feelings that lived inside of me – as if my natural urges were building the hurdles that were going to trip me up. The enormity of it all fatigued me, and so I lay my head on the cold marble tiles of the bathroom. I closed my eyes and willed Robin Hood – fox, man, whoever was available – to come lie next to me. Only this time he appeared like a thin apparition, barely present, and unlike on our first encounter, the marble stayed freezing, and the world was cold and lonely.

After the Macaulay incident, the colours of my world changed – spell-binding hues of emerald, sapphire and ruby dulled into a formless mud. What was more, I soon realised this mud was a minefield. One incident was particularly unsettling.

During our London trip, I was of course desperate to go to the West End. More specifically, I wanted to see what I believed was the most profound work known to humankind – CATS. Finally, the opportunity arose. It was decided that Ramy, my mother and I would go with another Middle-Eastern family who were also having a summer in London. The two boys were friends of mine and Ramy’s from Dubai, and their mother was one of the wealthiest people I’ve ever encountered. She turned up in chinchilla – even though it was summer – and strangled by a diamond choker that looked more like a neck brace. It was fun to watch her and my mother gossip. Imagine All About Eve, but cast entirely by the Arab elite who eat macaroons at Harrods, and you might get a sense of their dynamic.

On the way to the show, we had to walk through Soho. This was before gentrification, and on a Friday night it was gay and raucous and colourful as fuck. I was overwhelmed by the number of outwardly gay bodies, my field of vision a collage of men kissing men, and women kissing women, a street boasting a whole spectrum of genders. I tried, as much as possible, to keep my head down to avoid my mother catching me looking – maybe if I just stop looking for ever, I’ll eventually be straight? With my eyes glued to my shoes, taking one step after the other as we slalomed through the queer scrum, one of the young boys from the other family shouted, ‘Look Mama! There are two men kissing!’ Yes, thank you mate, I was trying to ignore it. His mother, whose heels were quivering on the Soho cobbles, responded with: ‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s disgusting? Every single one of them should be shot.’

Hearing that, I felt as though I was taking a bullet myself. When I looked up to see Mama’s response, she was smiling, walking along with her girlfriend as if they were having an everyday, pleasant conversation. If I turn out gay, Mama would rather I was shot dead. It seemed that everything developing inside me was bringing with it diabolical consequences. My simple desire to kiss a boy from a movie could result in me being gunned down, and then having to nurse the gunshot wound with boiling water in the afterlife. It felt a bit like having an autoimmune disease, as though my own body and mind were attacking themselves, as if the world I inhabited was trying to kill me for existing within it. My brain was being programmed to fight its own natural curiosities, and it was turning my head into a war zone.