When I came out in 2012, I wanted to use my status as a relatively public figure — grandson of two of Egypt’s most beloved celebrities — to push LGBTQ acceptance through what I then assumed would be our darkest hour. Unfortunately, since then conditions have only worsened, and the country is now gripped by a brutal crackdown against some of its most vulnerable citizens. In recent months, Egyptian police have begun stopping men they suspect of being gay on the street, searching their phones for incriminating photos or hookup apps, and throwing them in prison for sentences ranging from six months to six years. There have been raids on bathhouses and at least one same-sex wedding. There are stomach-churning reports that police have subjected suspects to forcible anal exams, which are — let us not mince words here — a particularly humiliating form of torture. The supposed impetus for this crackdown was a widely circulated video from a September concert in Cairo, during which some attendees waved rainbow flags in support of the band’s gay singer. The images spurred a wave of hateful rhetoric from Egyptian cultural commentators, who claimed these debauched radicals (as gay Egyptian people are imagined to be) represented a slap in the face to our country’s identity and goals.
OMAR SHARIFF JR.
These hateful messages found fertile ground in a country that is rightfully frustrated by the slow and painful pace of progress. As many frustrated societies have found, gay Egyptian people make for a convenient scapegoat. When we are already forced to live in the shadows, we are the perfect, faceless villains. In the photographs of the men dragged into Egyptian jails, they all cover their faces with their shirts or their hands, hiding their shame and leaving observers to imagine that these men could be anyone (anyone except their friends and brothers and sons).
FEBRUARY 2018 19