Written by:
Bushra Rehman
Photographer:
Andrea Dobrich
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 13#4
Since September 11, 2001, I’ve felt torn between my loyalties to Muslims who don’t understand my queerness and queers who don’t understand my Muslimness.
It all came to a head when I gave a poetry reading at an Ohio university with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. The next day, I visited a class with the other writers.
While the class was mostly white, there were also two Muslim women wearing headscarves and three African-American students in one corner. At first, I talked about the detentions and hate crimes after 9-11, but that wasn’t what the class wanted to hear. They wanted to hear about my queerness.
This wasn’t because the majority of the class was queer themselves. It was because they wanted to annoy the Muslim women. The professor had told me that earlier in the semester, the Muslim students insisted that homosexuality doesn’t exist in Islam.
I slowly realized that I was being used to harass the Muslims — and that what little support I had among them was about to disappear.
“So let me get this straight,” a woman with permed blond hair said. “You consider yourself Muslim and queer?”
I replied, “Yes,” and a chaos of thoughts rushed through my head. I realized it was time to get on the tightrope again: I wanted to defend the Muslim community in America, but I knew that even if I was loyal to them, they would not always be loyal to me.
“Well, there are some people in this class who would say that’s impossible.” She looked at the Muslim women.
“I do exist,” I replied. “I’m right here.”
The other students were fascinated. The ones who had been slumped in their chairs were suddenly wide awake. There was a sway, a shift, like the way the sounds of a fight on a playground send electricity through the wires and heat through the air.
I continued, “But if there are people in the class who feel that’s impossible, it’s not surprising. Most communities, most families, deny the presence of gay people in their lives. It’s like Margaret Cho’s Korean mother says: ‘Gays. They are everywhere … except for Korea.’”
Most of the students thought this was funny, but what I thought was funny was how offended they seemed by Muslim homophobia, even though most churches take a similar stance.
“Does Christianity accept homosexuality?” I asked.
“Of course not!”
There was some squirming. Then another woman raised her hand. My gaydar went off and I thought: Thank goodness, an ally.
“I’ve been doing research on gay Muslims for my thesis and I can’t find information on women. Is this because there are more gay men, or are Muslim women more sexually repressed?”
Were these people even listening to me? My mind flashed to all the queer South Asian parties I’ve been to. I saw the sweating brown bodies and heard the bhangra-bollywood-house mix music. There aren’t enough women at these parties, but to say that this is only because of Islam is not the whole story. There aren’t enough spaces for queer women to feel comfortable, even in New York City.
Actually, there aren’t enough spaces for women to feel safe, period.
“I don’t know if there are more men,” I replied. “But they definitely seem to get more action. Female sexuality is repressed in general, not just for Muslim women.”
Then the Muslims stepped in. “We aren’t saying that homosexuality doesn’t exist; we’re saying that it’s just not accepted in Islam. Do you really think of yourself as Muslim?”
This was the only question that stopped me inside. The truth was, for years I didn’t. I grew up in a close-knit Muslim community in New York City where being gay didn’t seem like an option. I hadn’t known any queer Muslims (with the exception of, well, myself), so I understood the students’ confusion over my identity. When I accepted my sexuality, I dropped my Muslim identity.
But these days, denying that I am Muslim is like denying the color of my skin. After September 11, after the beatings, the mass arrests and detentions of Muslim immigrants, after the suspension of their civil liberties, I know that it doesn’t matter whether or not I fast during Ramadan. I am Muslim.
If I was attacked on the street (as many of my Muslim-looking friends were after 9-11), I couldn’t say, “Wait — Mr. Attacker, you know, I haven’t actually listened to the call for prayer since 1986. So do you want to reconsider beating the crap out of me?” I wouldn’t be able to tell the FBI agents when they came to question me, “Hey, I’m queer, so I can’t be a terrorist Muslim. See you later. No hard feelings. Really.”
Lately, I’ve been having Anne Frank-type nightmares. It wasn’t sudden for the Jewish people in Germany and it wasn’t sudden for the Japanese in America. Jewish people were vilified and marked before Hitler’s gruesome final solution and Japanese-Americans had to register before they were forced into internment camps for the “safety” of the nation. As a female, I don’t have to submit my fingerprints (yet). For all its talk about equality, our government still doesn’t take women seriously. And despite all the ways I thought I could hide from my Muslim identity because I am queer, I realize that once the government starts fingerprinting people based on their religion, I cannot forget.
I told the Muslim women, I told the rest of the class, and I told myself. I’m Muslim and I’m queer — and I’m never going to forget that again.
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