Guest privileges, p.15
Guest Privileges, page 15
I told him I felt a little like a performer, too. I leveled with him: as much as I wanted to write his story, I wasn’t actually a working journalist, though I hoped to be one soon.
“Well, I think you will make a good one. You ask good questions,” he said, tapping at his temple. I walked side by side with him, hoping this was true. To fill the silence, I asked him what he thought made a good performer.
“The truth is, I think the best ones of us are gay,” he giggled. “We are kind of like chameleons.”
I walked with him a few blocks and noticed he was heading north. I asked him if he ever goes to the Corniche at night.
“In the past.” He smiled. “But I am with Manuel now.”
I said goodbye and started walking home, replaying the band’s onstage antics. I had registered the queerness of Reggie’s performances, and yet he hadn’t displayed even a glint of flirtation with Manuel under the spotlights. He had shown what he wanted to and nothing more. Humming Whitney Houston, I walked back to my apartment under streetlamps that felt like stage lighting: first in shadow, then under the spotlight, over and over again until I reached home.
“Well, this is it,” I said, pulling the two crumpled slips of paper with Scissor Sisters songs on them from my pocket. “I can put these requests in if you want. Or,” I grabbed a pen and a new sheet of paper at our familiar table, “you can trust me, and I’ll try not to get us booed off stage.”
Sunil looked at me and smirked. “I trust you,” he said. “But will I know the song?”
I handed my request slip to a passing waitress. “Everyone knows it,” I said. She snuck a peek at my song and giggled.
The bar was packed but not heaving. We had arrived early so we would be assured a chance to sing. After just a few songs, a waitress in a sparkling black dress approached our table with two microphones and told us we were next.
Though we had been coming for weeks, this would be our first introduction to this community as singers. I had started to recognize familiar faces and wanted to become one as well. I thought of the Arab man singing the Tagalog song, how he moved his chair, cheating out toward the audience. As we took the microphones, I told Sunil to grab his barstool and follow my lead. We walked a few feet to the very edge of the stanchions, taking up most of the narrow passageway between the stage and the first row of tables.
The bouncer wagged his finger and pointed to the stanchions, but I held my ground, placing our chairs three feet apart and turning them to face the audience. “Just watch, we won’t go on stage,” I told the bouncer. He reluctantly took one step aside. We were mere inches from the edge of the stage, and just eight inches lower than the platform. It was just enough room for us to maneuver.
“We’re going to need to perform the shit out of this,” I whispered to Sunil.
The guitar riff for the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” started. I dared to look at Sunil. He was grinning at me. I took the first verse, holding out my hand at Sunil in performative longing. He turned his chair to face me at the first chorus, allowing himself to be publicly cast as the object of my affection in this performance. His perfect harmonies caught me off guard. I didn’t know he could actually sing.
We improvised hand choreography and reveled in the melodrama of the song by projecting furrowed brows and parted lips. I reached out to Sunil again with an overly dramatic hand gesture, and he replied with a soapy look of yearning as he gazed into my eyes, pretending to caress my cheek from a distance. Schmaltzy pop lyrics and campy choreography—they were the only way we could express our affection for each other publicly. It felt both insufficient and totally right.
The cheers were raucous. The crowd rose, offering us the same ovation as “Endless Love” had received. Even the bouncer was clapping. I pushed our chairs back, and Sunil raised his eyebrows in an expression that looked something like relief. I wanted to hug him but offered a wink instead. It was enough.
A string of people approached our table as we sat down, offering high fives and handshakes and a couple of rounds of beer. Sunil ran his foot up my leg throughout the receiving line. I saw the Arab man next to us look at our nearly intertwined legs, and he leaned over. “You guys were so funny,” he said, smiling.
His Filipino girlfriend winked. “Very cute.”
I could tell they both knew about us. We had both skirted the law that kept amateur singers off the stage and captured their attention with a visual performance. Even more, we had performed a kind of public queerness. Sure, we had couched it in ambiguity—were we making light of the idea that two men could sing this song to each other or was our presentation authentic?—but we had also devised a performance that allowed us to outwardly express raw, forbidden emotion while keeping ourselves safe. We had both worked within the limits and pushed against them.
This was the balance of assimilation and subversion I saw in Reggie. It was a calculation: a careful algorithm of pushing and relenting, honed and fine-tuned over years of performance that both acknowledged the reality of and flew in the face of respectability politics. Some might immediately recognize it, but everyone would at least be witness to it. Maybe performing this kind of queerness in front of this diverse audience was enough of a political act.
I got a ping on my phone. It was a message from Reggie; he was in the next room rehearsing a new Rihanna song. “I could not see you,” he said. “But you sounded very good. And who was that other boy?” Maybe just being in proximity was enough, too.
I looked at my watch. I didn’t want to leave, but I knew James was waiting; he had his repatriation flight scheduled for the next day. He had tried for weeks to get me to agree to a long-distance relationship. I couldn’t imagine what it would look like. It felt like a poor imitation, a bad mimic of some straight ideal. I felt so much more potentiality for a different kind of queerness here.
Sunil grabbed the binder and asked if I wanted to put in another song. We flipped through the sticky pages, and I let my hand linger on his. It wasn’t for long, but it felt like just long enough. I noticed a few conspicuous absences I wished were in the book, but there were surely enough songs to keep coming back week after week and do something new, I reckoned.
I sent James a message. I told him I’d see him in the morning before his taxi. I felt like I had just arrived for my own kind of residency, and I wasn’t going to waste it.
PART II: THERE
5: A SALON
(Dubai: Marie and friends)
“Did you notice the change?” Sunil asked, his hands drumming the steering wheel.
I looked up from the radio dials and squinted into the distance, scanning the horizon for a tower to emerge, poking out of the haze. Nothing. I felt Sunil take his eyes off the road just long enough to stare at me expectantly.
“No, you were too slow; look behind you, quick!” he said, laughing.
Dusk was settling. Since we’d left the island of Abu Dhabi and hit the mainland on the highway out of the city, I had mostly busied myself with the radio. There was little to see besides the occasional petrol station. The few towns that bled together, effectively forming the northernmost suburbs of Abu Dhabi, had fallen away nearly an hour earlier.
I turned around quickly to look out the rear windshield. Nothing again—just sand bifurcated by a six-lane tarmac that unfurled into the inky distance.
“The lights! Look at the streetlights!” Sunil cried.
I could see—something. The light that hit the asphalt seemed slightly different a hundred meters back. In the near distance, the road was cast in an incandescent white. What we were driving through now was murkier, a darker hue of yellow.
“That’s the border between Abu Dhabi and Dubai,” Sunil said. I started to laugh, thinking he was telling some kind of joke, but he shot me an earnest look and pointed to the lamp posts that lined the highway. He explained that on both sides of the border, the poles were the same thirty-meter height, but that the lamps themselves were different. Abu Dhabi used six-thousand-watt globes in a circular formation, like a Ferris wheel turned on its side. Dubai’s lamps were molded in a V shape with only four bulbs of a higher wattage. We were far away, but I could just make out the difference: the tops of Abu Dhabi’s chevron-shaped posts emitted a languid yellow, which flattened out into the halos we were now driving under, bursting with incandescent white, as we passed into Dubai.
“You didn’t feel the bump either?” He was genuinely incredulous. There was a tangible difference in the road at the border, he explained. Dubai used a different kind of pavement. You could feel a slight bump, like a crease or a seam, if you really paid attention. I watched him explaining it all to me, riling himself up just enough to gesticulate with both hands before quickly grabbing the wheel again. He had such an earnest buoyancy. I leaned in and kissed him.
Everything had changed so quickly. James had wanted to pursue a “long-distance relationship,” but even the framing of this proposal felt inadequate. Though the distance itself might have been a hurdle, I knew migrants could sustain romantic relationships through blurry photos and prepaid phone cards. But “long” seemed to hint at an eventual end—one I could not yet conceive of, now that I had decided to stay in Abu Dhabi indefinitely. And “distance” felt like a flippant understatement in measuring the dissonance between his contempt for the city and the undefinable queer potential I was beginning to feel in it.
Sunil and I had spoken vaguely about where our relationship might go after James left, and we started dating the day after he left. With him, “dating” meant emerging from our apartments and into the public sphere in a way I never had with James; we were getting out, finding our way through. That morning of our first trip to Dubai, Sunil had called, telling me to pack some overnight gear. It was only when I opened the passenger door to his car that he told me he was taking me to Dubai to celebrate the publication of my first major article.
I had traveled to Yemen to write an article about the country’s only activist rock band. Editors were eager to capitalize on the Arab Spring protests that had sent millions of people into the streets in over a dozen Middle Eastern and North African countries from Morocco to Oman. The demand for articles and photographs about places that had toppled decades-long rulers proved irresistible. Even outlets that had never before published about the region were getting in on the game, commissioning content about countries from Tunisia to Yemen. A story about Egyptian revolutionaries calling in pizza orders for protesters on the steps of the Wisconsin state capitol had gone viral. A region seemingly ignored in the Western media outside the lens of terrorism was now being breathlessly written about through the prisms of human rights and protest.
But I had to travel: little had happened in the Gulf in the way of popular protest. For one, both criticism of the government and public protest remained outlawed across much of the region. Regional protests resulted in some political reform, mainly economic concessions in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and the resignation of the Kuwaiti prime minister, but very little else tangible had occurred.
In the UAE, construction on Qasr Al-Watan, the $500 million presidential palace spanning two million square feet, began mere months after the deposition of the leaders of two Arab countries; the construction site blighting much of the northwestern corner of the city felt almost like a provocation. The protests that did arise were almost entirely virtual: five bloggers were rounded up in 2012 and tried for defamation and insulting the state for posting material critical of the UAE government. Their arrests resulted in limited international news and almost no local media coverage. Much like how articles about the Scissor Sisters were neutered of any mention of queerness, given the illegality of homosexuality, mention of the Arab Spring was covered locally as a foreign problem, alien to the stability of the region.
With the media tightly legislated, no journalist working at a local media outlet could publish anything overtly critical of domestic policies, the economy, or religion under a 1980 law regulating printed matter and publications. Though a few international outlets maintained channels or limited bureaus in the UAE, like the Wall Street Journal, they were understood to operate with the tacit understanding that they would also play by the rules. Even the local bureau of CNN International was subject to frequent criticism for running PR for the nation and ignoring human rights concerns in favor of fluff stories. Moreover, journalists hoping to visit the country for work were sometimes denied entry; many of the pieces critical of the government were penned by those who had entered the country covertly on tourism visas.
But I was in a slightly unique, if precarious, position. I was subject to the same laws as other UAE residents, but I was also employed by a unique, high-profile institution, NYUAD, whose close links with the UAE government were established with the agreement that the university would have complete academic freedom both in the classroom and in faculty’s areas of research. Though the university did not offer a journalism degree, it was a liberal arts university with a robust arts and humanities division, one I was affiliated with as a theater producer and instructor. And as a faculty member, I was given a research fund, initially leading research trips to Yemen to think about performance in the way I was thinking about performers like Reggie. I realized I had unique access and opportunity: I could begin to collect stories and publish my interviews—my research—as journalism that might offer more nuance than what I read from Western media and a slightly more critical eye than local outlets. It was a gray area, but one I thought was worth the gamble. I fashioned myself a de facto freelance journalist, writing long-form arts, culture, and environmental pieces from the Middle East and South Asia. I couldn’t necessarily publish anything overtly critical, especially at first, but I could toe a line. Like my queerness here, I felt an opportunity for my work to exist between the cracks.
Buildings finally appeared through the windshield. I thought we would keep driving toward the city, but Sunil made a sudden turn onto a construction exit. He shot me a grin. We drove through industrial estates and past corrugated metal warehouses and arrived at a mess of gates and overlapping barriers. We couldn’t go any farther. Sunil put on his hazard lights, cut the engine, and opened the door, motioning me out of the car.
The light was falling fast, but he pointed out toward the sea, another few hundred meters away, unreachable due to the metal barriers. He told me that this, the Palm Jebel Ali, was the project he came to the UAE to work on.
I had been to the Palm Jumeirah, a few kilometers up the shoreline, once the largest manmade island in the world, visible from outer space. Shaped like a palm leaf, it was a modern architectural marvel consisting of seventeen wide fronds—each its own little peninsula to maximize water frontage—an eleven-kilometer-long breakwater in the shape of a crescent, and ninety-four million cubic meters of sand. But the Palm Jebel Ali was over 50 percent larger.
An astonishing amount of the Palm Jebel Ali was constructed before a single building had been erected, he explained. Its final shape was complete, as were all of its land reclamation works. Some of the fronds still had piles of coarse sand, but most looked flattened. Sunil explained that this was called ground improvement works, and it allowed road infrastructure to begin. Some roads had actually already been built, and construction had also started on some of the planned 125 bridges that would link the fronds.
Infrastructure works began in 2007; workers began laying in the roads and lighting network and water, a mammoth undertaking of historical proportions because nothing had ever been quite built to this size before. This was the work that Sunil was brought over from Australia in early 2008 to do: manage the building of roads, digging of tunnels, laying of power cables. And yet, just a few months later, the entire project—one that had cost $12 billion before a single structure stood on the island—was stalled due to the financial crisis.
We looked out onto the island, the parallel bars of land like dozens of fingers that fanned out into the water. I felt a kind of vertigo as we stared in silence: visually registering the scale of this neatly organized behemoth and yet unsettled by how much more I could not see—intersecting pipes, miles of snaking wires—that men had built underfoot. It was exhilarating to work on a project so large when he would be doing small fry stuff in Australia. In Sydney, he would have been working on one city block—if he were lucky, he said. He felt like he had snuck in under the radar in 2007, an unqualified brown kid from Australia with no knowledge of the Middle East who had only just finished an internship at a toilet paper factory. I told him that I knew a bit what he felt like—even down to the toilet paper factory, one of the places I almost did temp work while making money for university. He sheepishly told me he knew the factory, Kimberly Clarke: it was the headquarters of the one he worked at near his home in South Australia.
“I didn’t mention it before, but it seemed like an auspicious sign for us somehow.” He laughed. “I was lucky here,” he continued. “Everyone else got fired. I think they kept me because I was a graduate and didn’t cost much.” He explained that his job was safe now: there was a government plan called Emiratization to coax Emirati citizens from the bloated public sector into skilled private sector jobs, but he knew not every job could be taken by the local population, even with incremental implementation. His company couldn’t get rid of him. He was necessary here, even as he felt under the radar and like he didn’t belong.
“This is the kind of work I do,” he said, nodding again out to the unfinished island. “I’m part of the things people don’t see, and don’t know they need.”
In the silence, I considered how this might ring true for queerness as well. None of his colleagues knew about his sexuality; they couldn’t, of course, as it was against the law. But he wondered, was that the thing that would most define him in their eyes if they did? He was so good at his job. He had told me he sometimes fantasized about going up to his boss and fessing up. Would his boss dare turn him in and lose him as an employee? And even if he were jailed and deported from the country, someone would need to fill his role. And what if she were queer? Even if the government desired a kind of purity not to have queer people as residents—and even if outsiders couldn’t understand why they would come to this place—we would always be here.
