This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The story set in Morocco was first published as Stranger in Marrakech in What Love Is
(Arcadia Books; London, 2011)
© Brent Meersman.
© 2018 Salzgeber Buchverlage GmbH
Prinzessinnenstraße 29, 10969 Berlin
buch@salzgeber.de
Cover design: Robert Schulze
Cover photo: shutterstock.com/everst
Printed in Germany
ISBN: 978-3-95985-341-5
eISBN: 978-3-95985-361-3
Adventures of a World Traveler
INTRODUCTION
Masree and Dahoud – BANANA ISLAND
Luxor, Egypt
William – PAGAN RITES
Damascus, Syria
Anonymous – I’M A BERLIN BOY, NOW
Berlin, Germany
Musa – BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Paris, France
Jussef – THE OUTSIDER
Marrakesh, Morocco
Hakim, Asma and Julio – AFTER DARKROOM
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Abel / Isobel – SWAPPING SEX
Toronto, Canada
Chester – THE INVISIBLE GHETTO
New York, USA
Giovanni, José and Santos – SEXPLOITATION
Havana, Cuba
Sergio – MACHO
Cancun, Mexico
Diego, Rico, Gregg, Scott and Kate – GOOD CITIZENS
Mérida, Mexico
Chavez and Pepe – FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
Mexico City, Mexico
Michael – ARCHANGEL
Los Angeles, USA
Adan and Xolelwa – BLACK BUT BLUE
San Francisco, USA
Lee and Rex – THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
Auckland, New Zealand
Daniel – OUT CLONING
Sydney, Australia
Hiroshi, Hilton, and Jiro – AVATARS IN BED
Tokyo, Japan
Leo Ping Lee – THE CUT SLEEVE
Shanghai, China
Jason – ADDRESS LOST
Bangkok, Thailand
Muhammad and Terrence – SINGABORE
Singapore
EPILOGUE
India
For Jörg & Andreas
In coming to terms with my own sexuality, I developed an almost anthropological obsession with what it means to find yourself inexplicably and irreversibly attracted to the same sex. I wanted to understand homosexual life in all its diversity. How, I wondered, do men sexually attracted to other men live in different parts of the world? How do they see themselves? How have they survived over the centuries, mostly in places hostile to them?
I set out to immerse myself in every part of the world I could reach. Through 60 countries and seven continents, it has been a journey that has fundamentally changed my conception of myself, and along the way my view of so-called ‘gay’ identity.
As a reader, it used to irk me how sex, such an integral part of most people’s lives (which doesn’t suddenly stop when traveling) is usually deliberately written out of travelogues; swashbuckling adventurers suddenly become awfully coy. Such intimate contact with someone who has their roots where the traveler is merely passing through often leads to revelation; the unexpected romance with a beautiful stranger that transforms a dingy destination into a brief paradise; a mysterious man who turns exotic fantasy into reality; a dishonest rent boy who poisons a whole city for one.
The stories in this collection are spun from my uncensored travel diaries. I have included accounts of sex and non-sex and no sex, some events of which I am now somewhat ashamed, together with stories of love, and some of violence. They are not in chronological order.
In my short life, I have seen my society make some profound shifts in how it views homosexuality. For most of my childhood, I believed I was the only one like that in the world. When I grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, homosexuality was illegal and punishable with imprisonment. The social stigma was even worse than the law. There were no queers on television – unthinkable today. Even heterosexual sex was made into something dirty by the hypocritical, puritanical bigots that ruled my country.
Before the 1990s, you didn’t see genitals in South Africa, apart from the breasts of black women, who the authorities thought of as wildlife. Magazines and newspapers redacted white peoples’ private parts with big black stripes and put stars over nipples. Even art programs were censored. On state television, when the camera panned down the body of Michelangelo’s David, the screen would go blank at the navel, and the picture only recover around the knees. The only nude male you ever saw was a Nuba tribesman in a National Geographic magazine. No wonder sex was something dirty or unspeakable, something to be sniggered at.
Society had defined me as a pervert. God, I was told, wanted me dead. So it seemed did the government. When I went to university, my country was militarily occupying Namibia, at war in Angola, and on the brink of a civil war at home. Nearly all my close friends skipped the country to avoid conscription into the hated army.
I was in two minds about fleeing. I spent several months on the backpacking circuit with a Eurail Pass crisscrossing the ten countries that at that time made up Western Europe. Coming from parochial, culturally isolated and backward apartheid South Africa, I had an insatiable appetite for the bookstores, the architectural wonders, the galleries and museums of Europe. I sought out all those paintings and great works I had only ever seen as feeble facsimiles in counterfeit color in encyclopedias.
With my nascent sexuality, still unfolding, heuristically, Cellini’s Perseus, Moreau’s unpierced Saint Sebastian, the men from Picasso’s rose period, and all of Géricault’s male nudes, came to define a sexual ideal. I began to yearn for male bodies that resembled those palpitating sculptures and paintings; I’d go weak at the knees when seeing a face that appeared like an El Greco saint; my heart skipping when I met a young man who looked as if he had just stepped out of a painting by Botticelli.
Western Europe gave one a bittersweet taste of freedom and the dream of self-actualization. You could dress as you pleased, and you could say what you liked. And in Europe, finally, we could love who we wanted, whatever their sex or race.
Not unlike South African backpackers, British aristocrats of the eighteenth century also took to escaping the rigidity of their society. They embarked on what became known as the Grand Tour. It was meant to broaden, edify and cultivate the mind. Inevitably, the body received educating as well, usually in the form of paid sex in Paris.
At the start of the nineteenth century, the most famous of these travelers was probably Lord Byron, who made a bisexual sweep of the continent. Other homosexuals followed, sometimes discovering their ‘true identity’, liberating their sexual inclinations suppressed in prudish England, and feverishly indulging their passions in the relatively easy virtues of the continent, where the rustic Italian ragazzi, with their swarthy complexions, gazelle eyes and curly locks, were the equivalent of today’s rent boys in Pattaya.
Some of those gay travelers are homosexual luminaries to this day, such as E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.
However, most of these travels went unrecorded, and the men they encountered have passed into the unknown, much as a page fades to blackout during a Bruce Chatwin travel narrative. I think we can – and we must – guess what happened in the dark.
In my early 20s, I concluded that homosexuality, although not the norm, is perfectly natural. I had slept with girls, but I had never slept with another boy, so on that first trip to Europe it became a priority among other civilizing attractions.
My traveling companion was Simon, a straight boy from school days, my age, at the time living in exile in London.
In Paris, he accompanied me on my pilgrimage to Père-Lachaise to seek out the resting place of Oscar Wilde. We found a stone tomb vandalized with graffiti by fans expressing their undying love for Oscar. I skipped lunch so I could afford to place a red rose on the grave. Then I told Simon, “I think I might be gay”. I said I wanted to go to a gay bar to see what it was like.
When we reached Vienna, which was hardly known for its gay life back then, somehow I located a gay spot on my city map, appropriately called The Why Not.
Cherub-faced Simon agreed to go with me as my protector.
We arrived to find a dark entranceway with a heavy wooden door firmly shut. We rang. A slot opened in the middle of the door. A set of narrowed eyes peered at us through an iron grid.
Simon, stammering, asked if we could come in for a drink.
“Sorry,” a voice said emphatically in a thick Austrian accent, “this is a gay bar.” The slot closed.
I pressed the buzzer again. This time the door opened, but only a crack. “It is a gay bar,” the man hissed. “It is for men only, understand? For homosexual men.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know, I know, that’s why I want you to let me in!”
The man in the doorway looked at us. We were dressed like backpackers; quite unconscious of our appearance those days; hiking boots, jeans with knees worn through, lumberjack checked shirt clashing with a Palestinian keffiyeh, unkempt hair, unshaven. With hindsight, Simon probably looked like a pretty boy for rent and I looked like a gay basher. The man, baring a set of yellow teeth, hesitatingly allowed us to pass.
Inside, there were three single, elderly men sitting on high stools, evenly spaced for equal opportunity along the dimly lit bar, nursing drinks and looking sour. My heart sank; the only open space for two of us was on the corner of the bar counter, where we were in full view of the men.
I ordered two draft beers, which came in embarrassingly large glasses. Simon was looking a little nervous. The men all focused on him. How typical, I thought; what is it with gay men that the straight guy always gets the most attention, even when he looks more gay than you do? But Simon was quite safe; nobody made a move on us.
We left with my virginity intact, Simon relieved, and I despondent. Those men exiled in a dark bar, always waiting, not speaking to each other, haunted me. Understand, that from the 1950s to the late 80s, we were constantly told by society in one way or another that this was how being gay would end – in tragedy without witness.
But then, apartheid croaked its last and Nelson Mandela made homosexuality legal. We went wild. During our Prague Spring, after years under the jackboot, people partied. Gay bars and clubs sprang up, crammed to bursting with patrons spilling into the streets, and backrooms for sex. I remember some revelers openly smoked pot in front of the police. Nobody it seemed was sure anymore what was and wasn’t legal.
It wasn’t all plain sailing. I narrowly missed a bomb planted in a gay bar on Green Point’s Main Road. Nine people were badly injured. That particular bar never reopened.
But in time, Cape Town became a gay mecca, a pink paradise, a rainbow village. Apparently, we middle class gays had won our freedom without even having to fight much for it.
Now in South Africa in the 21st century, we have extensive ‘gay rights’, including marriage. On Clifton Third, Cape Town’s gay beach, muscular bodies of all hues, from deep ebony to blinding white, from chemically bronzed to natural beige and sunburnt pink, lie side by side. At the height of summer, the vast majority of sun-worshippers here are gay males, though scattered between them are always a few umbrellas with families and children, who seem quite unperturbed by the occasional kiss, body rubs and other demonstrative physical affection between the men. It is a postcard for the country’s human rights-based Constitution; black and white, straight and gay, young and old, male and female, all peacefully luxuriating in natural beauty. We are celebrating and no longer protesting.
Yet there is another side; the majority of queer men in South Africa are black and living below the poverty line. Victimized by ignorance, cultural chauvinism and religious prejudice as bad as the naked racism of apartheid, they are unable to assert their rights. Sometimes subject to extreme homophobic violence, they nonetheless survive in their communities by forging other ways of expressing their sexuality and hopefully gaining acceptance. Street-smarts, fashion and bling are some of the strategies they employ. Others have even managed to “recruit” local gangsters as their protectors, because it’s cool to have gay friends.
Reflecting on their lives during the course of my journey around the world, compelled me to question the very concept of ‘gay’ identity.
Like Gore Vidal, whenever I hear the words ‘gay culture’, I too reach for my revolver. When I grew up, gay life was a politically subversive subculture. That was a big part of its attraction. In the West, gay has now become “normalized” to the point of becoming mainstream: the stereotyped gay clowns you find in television soap operas; the yuppie gays that car advertisers and so-called ‘lifestyle’ marketers target; the model gays who magnetize Cape Town’s booming rainbow tourist industry; the go-go cover boys found dancing on floats in gay pride marches the world over. But the gay village and the gay beach is only one highly visible, shared identity, one particular model of masculinity in which gay men can be publicly comfortable, assimilated, confident and aspirant. But it is a very narrow, globalizing, consumerist paradigm. No fats, no femmes. It also excludes bisexuals and the asexual. For another thing, it largely excludes older men, while offering them the purchase of happiness through some superficial, titillating, porn-imitating gay capitalist nirvana.
Is this really the best road to safeguard the rights of men who have sex with men?
The men I encountered outside the West forced me to question the very notion of the closet, the liberationist and peculiarly Western preconception that ‘coming out’ is the prerequisite to live authentically. I discovered the heterosexual/homosexual binary fails as a model for understanding human sexuality in many parts of the world including my own backyard.
Long before Europe had even been conceptualized, men who have sex with men have lived in almost every society that has ever existed, from ancient China and Egypt to the Americas. Socially accepted homosexual behavior is not only well documented in classical civilizations, but also in first nation traditional societies, and in such remote places as New Guinea and the Amazon rainforest, existing long before there was any contact with the white man.
The view that homosexuality is European and un-African is not only false, but a pernicious belief on my continent, spread by corrupt African politicians and white, North American evangelicals who preach their hatred in Africa. To say homosexuality is un-African is racist and patronizing to black homosexuals.
In so many countries – Russia, Ethiopia, Egypt, and India, to name a few – I found men who have sex with men trapped between political rivals, each trying to outdo the other in persecuting them.
And place after place, I found the wealthy and middle class can live and do as they wish, while the poorer are left to the mercy of intolerant communities.
It has been a journey of many discoveries, discoveries of what we already know but must learn to feel. If we think the mind is treacherous, the body is even more so.
I hope I have done justice to the boys and men I met along the way. These are a handful of their stories.
Cape Town, South Africa
In Cairo, on a sightseeing trip to the pyramids, entering one proved to be a vastly different experience from appreciating their famed exteriors. The pyramid I entered was pitch-black and there was a smell of dried fecal matter. There didn’t appear to be anyone else present. I hesitantly moved forward, the floor uneven, not sure what I was meant to be looking at. Nearby was a strange rubbing noise, like an anorak against stone. I could see nothing. Then a hand touched my hip, and quickly felt its way to my groin. It was a large, rough ham of a hand with outgrown fingernails. I leapt back and bolted blindly for the exit, feeling every bit like Miss Quested fleeing the Marabar cave in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.
Egypt has a rich homosexual history – from the transvestite khawalat dancers introduced by Muhammad Ali, the founding Pasha of Egypt, who banned women from performing, to the famed oasis of Siwa on the Nile that practiced boy marriages up until the 1930s, I must add to the disgust of the occupying bigots, the British colonials. Indeed, Anglo-Saxon travelers to Egypt in the eighteenth century often commented with horror on the prevalence of homosexual activity at all levels of society, from Sultans to fellahin.
At the time of writing, the oldest evidence of homosexuality is in Africa, in Egypt near Giza, in the 4390-year-old Saqqara tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, two men buried together for the afterlife. On the walls are several depictions of them in intimate embrace and nose kissing (the form of kissing also favored by heterosexuals in those ancient times).
Men who had sex with men used to be called lotis, rarer now, a word derived from the Prophet Luth (‘Lot’ in the Bible) who was sent to Sodom. Homosexual desire as an imprint from birth is acknowledged by Islam, but its practice is forbidden. According to some Islamic and Qur’anic scholars, the prophet Muhammad held that two men who loved each other and kept their love platonic were to be honored as martyrs for this sacrifice. And there is a wealth of literature since medieval times (today being suppressed) from passing references in the Arabian Nights to the Sufi poets penning odes to the Christian boys that poured them wine. The Sufis were a fine bunch it seems; the poets slept with their young men, and one can be sure their idealized poetic love often crossed into a more physically penetrative one, not unlike Plato’s Symposium, which I first tracked down in the university library, with trembling hands, at last holding philosophical proof that I was not a freak. I wish such opportunities were available to Egyptian boys who suffer ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ and have for so long been written out of their classical history.
But Egypt is always in a state of constant tension between Islam and not only the pressures of the modern world, but also with its own proud history. Surprisingly, homosexuality wasn’t technically illegal in Egypt. The police used other laws such as trumped up charges of public indecency or resorted to entrapment. The secret police cruised the internet chat rooms, targeting and detaining homosexuals.
A decade before the so-called Arab Spring, I was in Luxor, Egypt, taking a late afternoon stroll on the Corniche, Luxor’s wide, rather boring promenade along the Nile. I’d heard it was a notorious strip for hustlers of all sorts. But it was deserted and eerily quiet. Perhaps the place had still not recovered from the massacre of fifty-eight tourists by Islamic fundamentalists on the west bank, in the city of the dead, in the shadows of the temple of the great female Pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut. The tourists were gunned down with automatic weapons and their bodies mutilated with machetes. An Islamic pamphlet was left in the disemboweled cavity of one visitor.
A solitary boy on a bicycle nipped past me several times, his bicycle bell tinging over the bumps. Finally, he skidded to a stop, a fair distance ahead, and waited, arms folded, sizing me up circumspectly it seemed. I approached with a mixture of interest and dread, thinking, ‘Please, not another damn beggar!’
When I reached him, he started walking alongside me, pushing his bicycle.
“Hey, mister! American?”
“African,” I replied.
He laughed. His hair was a thick, tangled afro; his skin dark – concentrated by the Nile sun. His body and limbs were covered by a thin, off-white cotton galabiya, oil-stained from his bicycle chain. He looked black African, more Nubian than the people of the north. What made these Egyptian youths (and frankly some of the police too, in their immaculate white uniforms) so good looking? Was it the strength of their eyes – with their perfect contours, like the hieroglyphic eye of Ra, the whites large and pure, the irises deep brown – and their pearl-white teeth, offset against polished ebony skin?
“My name. Captain Masree.”
“Captain,” I said, making it sound impressive.
“I have boat. You want boat ride? Very cheap.”
We were now approaching the pier.
“But it’s late,” I replied.
“Today, good wind. No pushing.” He giggled at his joke. I laughed. “We back … two hours. Special rate for you. See – no business today.” He indicated the almost empty expanse of the promenade.
My haggling lacked lustre and I gave in quickly. I felt he was asking a fair price, unfavorable market conditions aside.
“Boat very safe,” he announced pointing to a tiny felucca, similar to the dhows I had been on in Madagascar, except it didn’t have the extended outrigger. Another boy, slightly younger, was sitting in it, stripped to the waist, busy braiding twine into rope.
“That Dahoud,” said Masree.
Dahoud gave me an enormous toothy grin. While I inspected the boat, his face stayed frozen in that position, as if I was the school dental examiner.
They got us underway within moments, and soon we were tacking out into the wide river, the white sail replete with a fresh Nile breeze. It was far cooler out on the water, but I’d caught the sun on my arms and neck that morning, and the gentle wind exaggerated the burn, a sensation like turpentine evaporating from lips.
The shore receded quickly, shrinking into a dusky line, though we could not have been that far out. I could probably swim to shore if we sank.
“Where you from?” asked Dahoud, working the rudder.
“Cape Town, South Africa.”
“PAGAD,” he said, to my astonishment. PAGAD was the acronym for a polarizing vigilante and largely Muslim organization called People Against Gangsterism and Drugs.
“What you do?” he asked.
“Journalist,” I said.
“Take picture?”
He insisted. I took my camera out. Delighted, they screeched, and dropping the stays and rudder arm, jumped into the middle of the boat, arms around each other’s shoulders. It was a charming image.
Then when we were further out, Masree asked, “Are you married?” He nodded knowingly, as if I had confirmed his suspicions, and licked his ripe lips, which shone now. His voice changed slightly, cautious but oddly bold. “You want to see Banana Island?”
“Where is it?”
He pointed vaguely.
“Perhaps.” I’d heard there was such a place, apparently very pretty.
“Perhaps you like Banana Island very much.”
“Why? What’s there?”
The two boys giggled.
“Perhaps you like Egyptian bananas?” He turned to face the wind, his galabiya conforming to his body in the breeze. He smoothed his garment down with the palm of his hand so that I could clearly see the outline of his long, dangling fruit.
“Egyptian man good. One hundred and fifty pounds,” Masree said.
I probably wasn’t too hard to figure out: single, Western, male, one of those who returned the gaze.
“And me? You like me?” Dahoud suddenly spoke.
“He only hundred pounds,” laughed Masree. “Not big banana like me.”
Dahoud protested, banging himself on the chest.
Masree squealed, delighted. “You like to suck?”
But Dahoud said something sharply in Arabic, and Masree turned quickly. There was another felucca bearing towards us.
It was a much longer boat, in better shape, the wood varnished, and it had two lateen sails. In it sat a couple of Western women, I guessed in their early fifties. One had her hair sensibly tied up in a pink headscarf; the other had her face shielded by a slouch hat she kept pinned to her head with one hand. They wore badly fitting bikinis, the straps too tight, making their trussed up bodies bulge, their skin glaring white, the sun cream sweating out of it. The women’s eyes were hidden behind large designer sunglasses.
There were three fetching young men sailing the boat, one in a striking, pale blue djellabah. On the deck were large wicker hampers, outsized bananas going black on top, and the distinct orange label of a French champagne. The looseness of the women’s heads and their dangling arms suggested they were tipsy. We Westerners ignored each other, while the boys exchanged comments in Arabic, and guffawed loudly as the boat glided swiftly past us.
As soon as we parted, Masree said, “Now we go Banana Island.”
“Mañana, no bananas today,” I replied disinterestedly, staring out at the water, my tone hinting lightly at the famous song.
“Come! You will like! Two hundred pounds – Dahoud and me, special price. Two fuck!” He was rubbing himself avidly as if polishing metal.
Dahoud and Masree were both beautiful. I found it distressing, these two kids offering themselves to me this way.
“No, take me back to shore.”
“Nice fucky. Look, big, very big.” Masree was squeezing, both hands wrapped around his penis under the galabiya. “You can suck.”
“No!” I snapped at him. “I said, no!”
I looked helplessly at the distant shoreline. They were giving me dirty, hostile looks. How ludicrous – I was stranded on a boat with two handsome teenage, street-smart hustlers, begging me to suck them off.
“To shore, now! Otherwise no pay for felucca ride. No pay for anything,” I shouted angrily.
There was a long, stunned silence. Then at last, confounded, they turned the boat. It required both of them to revolve the yardarm.
I was thankful the sailing distracted them for a while. But I was raging inside. Sex has a habit of making unwanted intrusions.
My anger subsided with the rhythm of the boat, the gold sunlight, the muddy blue water, leaving me feeling more upset than anything else. I thought of boys on other trips. But those encounters had been different. There had been a semblance (however untrue) of equality, of payment as gift, of them being gay and trapped in their cultures, of me in some small way facilitating the exploration of their own sexual identity. But these two felucca boys were not gay; they were selling their bodies.
Who knows; maybe they enjoyed it. Perhaps they were just randy and liked getting their rocks off and being paid for it too. And there was that local belief that only the passive partner was actually homosexual. A Westerner’s ass was just a rich, ugly hole, an ATM that took flesh.
There was no shortage of tourists eager to stick their heads under galabiyas, nor boys happy to feed the white monkeys their bananas. How long before this place went the way of sex-tourist Pattaya? Did these felucca boys keep condoms on-board? I doubted it. So the plague would soon reveal its true extent here too, as it had everywhere else in the world.
Did the punters care about these boys? Or were they no more than exotics, an adventure amongst the Arab studs harking back to Orientalist fantasies, a genre in an erotic gallery, to be sampled, tasted, and discarded.
In the end, we parted amicably. Dahoud and Masree gave me their names and addresses, and I promised to send them copies of the photos. It was hard to tell, if some part of them respected me more for having rebuffed them, or whether I disgusted them for rejecting their favors and wasting their afternoon. I paid them for the felucca ride, and then I gave them the two hundred pounds.
Back at my swanky tourist hotel, I crossed the plush carpeted dining room looking for a table that was quiet and had enough light to read my Cavafy. I recognized the two British women I’d seen on the classy felucca. They were now royally pissed; they’d obviously been at it since lunchtime. I overheard the one say, “Banana Island”, followed by a dirty laugh. “I haven’t been drilled like that for years,” she tittered. Then they both guffawed.
So perhaps it was not only fat, old, homosexual white men that took their pleasures on the Nile.
The Syrian immigration officials simply refused to explain why I was being held. The captain pointed to a bench. “Sit there.”
Of course, they didn’t care if William had given up waiting for me. If he had, I was stranded. My last contact with him had been by email more than a month back. Since then, there had been no way to reach him out there in the sands on his archaeological dig near Ma’lula.
We were to have met here, in Damascus; in William’s words, “to do as the Bedouin’s do” – you agree on a time and a place, a year in advance, and then you simply show up; no mobile phones, no emails, no reconfirmations. While I waited, I silently amused myself by inventing words: ‘officialdumb’, ‘impassport’.
A little pig-tailed Swiss girl, small fingers struggling with her camera, pointed it at me, and, flash, took my photograph. She gave me an impudent look. The chief official jumped up in his squeaky boots, shouting in Arabic, demanding to know who had taken a photograph. We all looked at the ground. I surreptitiously stuck my tongue out at the little girl, now sitting back down between her parents. She blushed with guilt. The official huffed and went back to his paperwork, giving all of us in the arrivals hall one long last look of loathing.
An official, perhaps the same one – they all had the same moustache, came over to bark questions at me with military courtesy.
How long are you staying in Syria? How much money do you have with you? Where will you be staying?
After each question he would disappear down a grim foreboding passage with its oil paint curling off the walls in leaves, his boots echoing down the corridor, followed by the chilling clank of a metal door firmly closing.
What is your profession?
After each of my answers, the police took up to ten minutes to deliberate. And each time I’d see my passport walked back to the immigration control box. Discussions in Arabic would follow. Maybe they were talking about sport or their in-laws. Again and again, I would watch my passport with its green cover returned to the police desk.
Where is your wife? Are you on holiday?
I knew that with bureaucracy, from Her Majesty’s surly customs at Heathrow to the barefoot, gum-chewing immigration officer that stamped my passport in Zimbabwe (while gossiping and laughing on her mobile phone), it was crucial to be patient and outwardly calm.
Then on one round, I noticed my passport did not go back to the police kiosk. Instead, the official walked right past me without a word, slumped back into his seat and started writing in longhand.
The baggage carousel ground to a stop. In the stillness, the last passengers stood transfixed by disbelief, hoping the machinery would start up again. Of course it never does. They anxiously exchanged glances, and sighing deeply, strayed slowly across to the lost-luggage claims desk. It was closed. There were no more flights. Lights were being switched off, and there was the jingling of a large bundle of keys.
I waited humbly with my eyes fixed on the passport official filling out forms, his head bent low. Well over an hour had passed since I first presented my document. It was now minutes before 11 p.m., when William had said the last bus would leave for Damascus. I could wait no longer. I stalked over to the cubicle and demanded my passport.
Without the faintest hesitation, the official smiled, “Okay, okay, South Africa.” He decorously handed it over. It was already stamped.
Flabbergasted, but grateful, I rushed to the exit. Approaching the barricades, I began to fret. Two minutes to 11 p.m.
Was William there? Had he come at all?
We had tricked in Cape Town and clicked with our computer mice ever since, but in truth we hardly knew each other. Many emails, but only two brief encounters – one in a leather bar, then a hasty afternoon exchange at my apartment a week later – constituted the sum of our romance.
I was staring up at the signage looking for the bus pictogram, when I heard William’s American accent. “Hey! Dude!”
There he was, as promised, beaming. I threw my arms around him like a long-lost soul mate.
“I thought you’d have given up on me. Did you know the flight was delayed? And then the police held me. Luckily, the customs didn’t stop me as well. Have we missed the bus?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s always like this.” William spoke with a slight drawl. “Welcome to Damascus. It’s normal, don’t worry.” I was grateful for his unshaken faith in me.
“But why hold me of all people?”
“Oh, just put it all down to Syrian incompetence. You’ll learn. When our team arrived, we were also kept, because the clerk stapled our passport photos to the permits, not checking if they were the right picture with the right name – ten pictures, ten forms, staple. What’s more, our names were clearly written on the backs of the pictures! Some things are hard to explain away through cultural differences. Some people are just stupid.” He laughed. “So you came! I wasn’t sure if you’d want to recognize me; look, I have this ugly eye. See?” And he pointed to his right eye; it was swollen, puffy and red. “I’ve so much to tell you, but quick, we’ve got to catch the bus. It’s fifteen Syrian pounds, as opposed to a taxi which is fifteen times that!”
William grabbed one of my bags and we dashed for the exit.
The bus was still waiting. There were only a few seats; the rest was standing area. William spoke Arabic to the driver.
“It was only fifteen pounds when I came to the airport, now it’s suddenly twenty. What the heck, it’s fifty cents.”
“I don’t have any Syrian—” I started to say, but William pushed me to the back of the bus and started kissing my neck, my cheek, on the mouth. His teeth bit ever so slightly. I was wide-eyed, slightly terrified. This was the middle of the Middle East.
“Don’t worry. We’re brothers. We’re foreigners.” And he rubbed his crotch against my thigh. “We haven’t seen each other in ages; we’re long lost friends; we thought we’d never see each other again …”
I had to laugh. None of the handful of people on the bus were paying any attention. I noticed the women weren’t veiled.
“Relax.” He kissed me again and hugged me. I felt relieved, saved, taken up. I was ready to believe, perhaps like the strangers on the bus, that we were actually long lost friends, childhood buddies, kissing cousins. It was as if our semblance of a history had become real.
“It’s quite acceptable for men to kiss here. You see it all the time.” William chuckled impishly. “And I think the guys must be fucking each other too. They have to pay a dowry for a wife, and many of them cannot afford this before they’re into their late thirties. They have to be getting their rocks off somehow, somewhere. Sex with women is out of the question, unless they go to brothels.”
The libido is like any other appetite, the more sex you have the stronger it becomes, and it aches from inactivity, but if left unexercised, it shrinks. Perhaps, after a life of control, it ceased to be an issue for the Muslim boys. I thought of those images on television, of Arab militia poking their Kalashnikovs at the sky, firing off their sexual energy with a religious fervor.
“And how do archaeologists get their rocks off?” I grinned.
“By excavating!” William laughed. Then he added mischievously, “I’ll demonstrate later.”
William was an American and a hereditary Jew. But he worked for a Polish university, and he put Episcopalian on his visa. Atheist would be accurate, but even worse in Syria than Jewish. Fortunately, he was swarthy with cropped black hair; I later found, sometimes people would spontaneously speak Arabic to him.
There was hardly any traffic on the road. The airport, for “security reasons”, was located over thirty kilometers from the city. We lurched against each other in the back of the bus, which made good progress for a vehicle that felt as if it had been fitted with square wheels.
My first impression of downtown Damascus was one of neon. Liberal, if simple usage, was made of it across Martyrs’ Square, the Arabic lettering spectacular in fluorescent orange and red. There was a heavy police presence on the streets. Even the country’s two-star, three-striped flag looked like an epaulette.
This was in 2001, ten years before civil war would tear the country and its people to shreds. And in that conflict homosexuals would be targeted for killing, as they were in Iraq after the American invasion, where dozens were tortured to death with impunity in ways I simply cannot bear to describe here.
The ‘hotel’ in Damascus was a pleasant dump; a huge, three-story house renovated, but still crumbling, with collapsing beds. It was as if everything tilted precariously towards the stairwell, which spiraled like a great vortex in the center of the building. Arrangements were casual. You had to step over the great unwashed backpackers; Euro-grunge types on indivisible budgets, head to toe sleeping-bagged, covering every square inch of floor and verandah. There was little chance of William and me becoming intimate here. The five-star European hotel across the way charged two hundred dollars for a room, and then it still only had squat toilets.
“The whole team has been sick on the dig. Can’t figure it out, the water, some bug, I don’t know.” William’s eye looked pinched with pain. “I hope it’s not pink eye or contagious. Hopefully, it won’t spoil our fun.”
I insisted on keeping our pillows strictly separate, and made William paranoid about touching his eye and afterwards touching me.
This was the very first time I’d traveled with a foreign companion. William possessed all the essential qualities of a good traveling mate: considerate, scrupulous, articulate, humorous, and most importantly, curious, even intrepid. Over the course of the next week, we explored the new territory of our relationship in a sort of saltarello way.
On the very first day, I placed my life in his hands. There is nothing in the world, including Cairo, that I’d come across that vaguely compares to the deranged netherworld of Syrian traffic. Rules are not enforced. The drivers are not mechanically inclined, and neither are their vehicles. You choose your destination and relinquish your destiny to Allah.
Most of the first day we spent trapped in our small Peugeot, hurtling through the flat landscape. It was a lengthy trip to Aleppo, in the far north of the country, about ninety kilometers from ancient Antioch and forty kilometers from the Turkish border. We took several detours for we could never establish for certain which road we were in fact traversing. Apparently, some Stalinists redrew Syria’s roadmaps for “security reasons”, deliberately obscuring the position of roads. Highways that did not exist were depicted, and roads that existed went unrecorded. I was to navigate armed only with this state fiction. Our dual carriage freeway regularly gave way to traffic in both directions. The first you knew about it was shortly before an impending head-on collision. Sometimes the highway itself would run out. If luck prevailed, you bounced onto a newly laid strip of sticky tar. A road sign placed outside almost every town, declared: “Make Light Speed! A place full of inhabitants”. Syrian drivers took it as an invitation to travel at the speed of light.
William took it all in his comfortable stride. He was happy to be in charge. “We have time,” he said. “And it’s not like they have a lot of roads.”
With the reflection in the windscreen glaring back at us from our Stalinist maps skating across the dashboard, we tore through the desert, sunglasses pinched down, and constantly nagging at us, the disturbing awareness that we did not have a spare tire.
We did reach Aleppo, and took rooms in Al Gedeideh, at reputedly the cleanest budget hotel in Syria. Everything was painted in pastel green enamel: the walls, the ceiling, the fan, the bed, the chairs, even a ball of paper that had been left stuffed in a vent. The enameled interior had been meticulously wiped clean. There was ample hot water and a flush toilet. You still however put the toilet paper in a bucket after use. But it was the décor – the curtains, lampshades, pillows and bedcovers – all in the same gaudy floral fabric (surely conceived by a designer suffering from deuteranopia) that made the room as conducive to sex as grandmama’s flat. To add to one’s nerves, we’d heard the proprietor made regular unannounced inspections, bursting in without knocking. Slobs, this included people who left the toothpaste cap off, were summarily evicted; any abandoned items, such as a pair of socks, a razor or toothbrush left on the basin, were permanently removed.
Aleppo, equidistant from the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River, had gathered to itself an eclectic population – mostly Sunni Muslim, but also Kurds, Orthodox Russian traders, Christian Armenian refugees from Anatolia, and even a few beleaguered Jewish families. The diversity was apparent when walking the streets; you saw red haired Syrians and blonde Ukrainians, unveiled Christian women and Muslim women in yashmaks. But what you saw mostly were men: men relaxing, men commuting, men working. A gay bar in the West will have more women in it than an ordinary street café in Syria. Men smoking hubbly-bubblies hung out together, playing cards, backgammon and dominoes or sometimes they sat and simply held hands – a seductive visual aesthetic of the old city. A generosity existed among these straight men, allowing them to enjoy physical freedom and intimacy with one another. Elderly men affectionately, unhurriedly, touched each other’s skin.
I guessed, in this culture, their closest emotional ties were ordinarily with other men. Women were reserved for matters of honor, procreation, and family.
Even though the men all around us held hands, while touring the city, William and I did not risk it.
It was late afternoon, and William was on a mission for a loofah and Aleppo’s famed handmade olive, bay and laurel soap. We were going to the hamam.
“It’s the only way to get clean in Syria,” said William. Yet there was a mischievous hint in his voice, and he slyly raised his eyebrows.
The hamam had been a major tourist attraction, but in that fateful year, with the United States manufacturing evidence for weapons of mass destruction and starting to beat its war drums in the Middle East, we found ourselves alone, and the staff respectfully absent.
In the hamam, men have always reposed together. In Syria, unlike Budapest or Finland, the social etiquette at a thermal bath is strictly to cover the genitals at all times.
After the searing heat of the sauna, we withdrew to one of the private alcoves leading off an octagonal center, each with its own fountain.
By turns, we lathered one another’s limbs with the olive soap worked into a heady white cream. I turned onto my stomach, lying on the smooth, hard, ancient marble floor, William’s loofah scraping, arousing each nerve across the soles of my feet, between the buttocks, between my fingers. I felt vulnerably clean, like albino skin kissing sunlight. One of my contact lenses swam away. The heat and mutual massage momentarily exhausted us.
When we finally retired, the supervisor unexpectedly ripped my towel off. I stood slightly embarrassed, somewhat proud of my detumescent cock. Taking no notice (as if he hadn’t seen), he covered me with a light, stiffly starched, white percale robe, and wrapped my head up. I thought I must look like Lawrence of Arabia, but William said I looked more like Gloria Swanson.
We reclined on our benches, hearts still palpitating, propped-up on tasseled pillows, sipping mint tea. We were alone again.
Always the archaeologist, William was exploring the origins of the place, his long flickering eyelashes dusting away like an archaeologist’s brush, scrutinizing the inscribed metal bowls, the wooden Arab chests with silver studs. I could hardly see a thing, having lost my contacts.
Just as we were about to leave, three women gingerly entered to inspect this male sanctuary. They hesitantly advanced a few steps, stared and pointed at various objects, speaking in hushed voices, while I, a stranger from another country, had permission to be naked and at home here. On rare occasions, according to William, women could hire the facility, but then exclusively for females.
We’d lost track of time. The souk would start closing around 8 p.m., so we decided to pass it over until the next day.
Aleppo’s Al-Madina souk was one of the finest in the Middle East, all thirteen kilometers of it were well organized. Under a canopy of spectacular, lofty stone arches, it retained much of its fourteenth century feel.
Fortified with nickel pops, we were ready to elbow our way through its paved lanes. The stepped streets had narrow stone ramps in their center for barrows. We competed with a chaotic traffic of donkeys, vespers, wheelbarrows, and rails of fetid carcasses that careened past too close for comfort. You had to be cautious not to be caught under the wheels of brakeless, zigzagging carts overloaded with protruding wood and metal staves aimed at various parts of your body like medieval siege machines.
The quality or at least the authenticity of articles was almost assured; prices could be made good with firm bargaining, and traders, unlike those in the souks of Marrakesh and Fez, did not hound you. Until …
“Squeeze me!” said a merchant with a castrato pitch. I was genuinely confused. He was in his mid-20s, I guessed, but William insisted that the attrition of Syrian life meant you always subtracted seven years from people suspected to be in their twenties and five if they looked like they were in the thirties, making him eighteen.
“Squeeze me!” he repeated.
“You mean excuse me.”
Without hesitating, he said cockily, “Show me the difference.”
“Well, excuse me, means excuse me, and squeeze me …” I squeezed his wrist gently. “Means this …”
His voice dropped to husky camp. “I bet Oscar Wilde never said excuse me.”
Taken off-guard, I felt transparently gay. Dumbstruck, I rushed after William who was walking on, quite oblivious.
A little further into the souk, we discovered that Oscar Wilde was alive and well and still posthumously facilitating homosexual introductions. A blondish boy, possibly of Russian stock, selling engraved silver bowls, volunteered in a mincing voice, “Oscar Wilde said you should always express yourself.”
“He did, indeed, but that was in Paris,” I replied.
“Do you enjoy exploring yourself?” he asked. At first, I wondered if the ambiguity was deliberate; did he mean exploring on one’s own or playing with oneself?
“We’ll manage,” I replied, somewhat curtly.
“It’s good to explore yourselves. At first, it will be hard, but soon you will be knocking at my door. I will be waiting patiently!” he predicted with great confidence. The poor boy’s nose was mined by not one, but several, frighteningly prominent, white-headed pimples, each one about to explode any moment now. He had a viperish manner I did not like.
“I have a waiting list!” he yelled after us.
We stepped up our pace.
Here we were in a country where half the population believed homosexuals should be stoned to death, and yet we were ducking innumerable unwanted advances.
“We’re being hit on by a bunch of queens!” I said to William.
He chuckled, and paused to peruse some woodblock print fabrics that had caught his eye.
Two young men manned the stall.
“How long are you and your ex-boyfriend staying here?” one of them asked.
“Let us discuss our future!” said the other.
“Very short,” I replied.
“No, perchance you have a future with a Syrian man, ah, I mean woman.” I gathered his clumsy technique was to sound us out by making idiotic mistakes in English. His voice had a peculiar singsong lilt. “Lady and gentleman,” he started again.
But the other boy grabbed my arm, “You’re acting like a big Sheila! Where are you from? Australia?”
“No, South Africa,” I said triumphantly.
“Ah! Big scene in Cape Town, yes?”
“Lady? Did you call me lady?” I asked.
He turned to his friend, and said quite openly in English, “I want the dark one. I like him. You can have what’s left.”
But William and I were speeding away as fast as possible, convulsed with laughter.
“Come! Friends! Friends, let’s break the ice, test the waters, and bury the hatchet!” he shouted after us.
Rounding a corner, I glimpsed the boy turning back to his stall, shoulders slanted, disconsolately shuffling to his station.