Guest privileges, p.16
Guest Privileges, page 16
We took one last look around the site, abandoned and yet alive. “People think there’s nothing here, but there’s so much,” he said, kicking at the dirt. “Some of it’s underground, but so much of it is visible, too, if you look. It all serves a function.” We stood a few minutes longer, silent. As we got back in the car and drove away from the unfinished project, a little somber, I realized our little pit stop had felt to me a bit like a memorial service.
He held fast to my hand atop a metal table while humming Nicki Minaj. I could not see his face. I had heard his humming echoing down the hallway minutes earlier, but he turned his back almost as soon as he rounded the corner and ushered me from the waiting room into his treatment room. He’d sat down to work right away, pulling out metal instruments and pouring astringent liquids into ceramic bowls, his thick swoop of jet bangs coming loose from behind his ears and falling in front of his eyes. He did not offer any chatter; he just grabbed me by the wrists and set upon my cuticles, picking and filing as a Tagalog soap opera played on the TV behind him. I could have watched the histrionics unfolding on the screen, but I was drawn to watching the deft movements of his hands on mine.
I had arrived at the nail salon by accident. I’d walked into a barbershop in Abu Dhabi the afternoon before we left for Dubai and noticed a slight Filipino man sitting in a massage chair in the corner. He shot me coquettish smiles whenever I glanced back at him in the mirror. When I stood to leave, he beckoned me over to his chair and asked if I wanted a pedicure. I apologized, explaining that I was in a rush, that I had just gotten a fresh haircut because I was about to drive to Dubai. With my, uh, friend, I quickly added, as though someone in the shop might somehow discern I was traveling with Sunil. Smiling again, he asked me to hand him my phone. I watched him type in an address to a salon in Oud Metha, explaining that his cousin worked there and that I should visit him.
I had only visited Oud Metha a couple of times for its sagging ice rink. It was an old neighborhood set just back from the creek on the edge of one of the city’s most tightly clustered residential districts. The area had been a thriving, modern neighborhood during the city’s ascent in the 1980s, but as I took in the clutch of squat, low-rise buildings that sat far from the glass towers of downtown, it was clear its degraded buildings once reserved for citizens were now being occupied by migrants of a lower socioeconomic status.
Building after building housed modest salons on the ground floor beneath stacks of apartments. I opened the heavy door at the address the manicurist had typed into my phone. On the floor crouched a man with the same gleaming black hair. He knelt over a basin, toweling off the feet of a man in a kandura, carefully holding back its starched white hem. Apologizing for being busy, the pedicurist pointed me to another salon just down the road.
It was full, too. As was the next, and the next. Like the barbershops I was now used to frequenting in Abu Dhabi, the salons in Oud Metha were all male spaces, filled with the bodies of men in various stages of waiting or luxuriating. At each one, I was kindly pointed to a chair where I could wait an hour, and then—when I politely refused—to the next salon a few buildings over. I was struck by how their hospitality felt communal: Kindly make your way to our waiting room or down the road to an entirely different establishment where I’m not even employed. Each manicurist and receptionist had long black hair that reminded me of my longstanding impulse to grow out my own hair, the impulse I was currently suppressing because it felt too feminine, too much of a queer dead giveaway.
In another salon with beige tiled floors, I finally got a walk-in appointment with the man with his hair over his eyes. I felt compelled to compliment him. It seemed so daring.
“I like your hair,” I said, before quickly adding, “And your polish.” It was just barely visible: a layer of clear shellac that made his long nails gleam. If I hadn’t been staring directly at our hands, I may not have noticed. I leaned across the table to whisper it. It felt like the kind of compliment that would best be received if it were spoken conspiratorially.
The man finally looked up from my hands. He held eye contact with me and stopped moving the pick he had buried under my index finger. I waited for a jab of pain, a sign that we were both prying too deep, but it never came. He smiled and kept working, sure and confident as ever. I felt a knowledge pass between us.
He introduced himself as Marie. He flipped his long hair behind his shoulders and playfully batted his eyelashes, coyly proud to have received my compliment. His femininity—this thing that felt so glaring to me, this thing I tried to hide in myself—I watched him flaunt.
“Thank you. I sometimes want to use color, but I don’t want to get into too much trouble for being a bakla,” he said, giggling.
My ears perked up at the use of the word “bakla.” They were a self-identifying group in the Philippines who were assigned male at birth and adopted a feminine gender expression, I remembered. Many of them also considered themselves a third gender, and were acknowledged as such by much of Filipino society, while still others identified as transgender.
In 2007, I had sat in a cramped dorm room to watch a film called Paper Dolls with other students from an LGBT student group I’d just joined at NYU. It was a documentary that followed a group of Filipinos who had migrated to Israel to work as caretakers for elderly Orthodox Jewish men. They called themselves bakla, wore their hair long, and shuttled between male-and female-presenting outfits, styles, and affectations depending on where they were—at work, at home, in public, at a Tel Aviv gay bar. The six characters shifted back and forth across a fine line: they understood that Israel had fairly liberal LGBTQ+ rights, but they were working within a conservative religious community. Furthermore, as migrants, they had to reckon with their own precarity; their residency visas would be revoked if they lost their jobs. And indeed, their ability to stay in Israel hinged on their sex: religious rules forbade Orthodox men from being touched by women, so their carers needed to be male, making both the baklas’ evening drag performances and many of the documentary subjects’ desires to have gender affirmation surgery even more fraught.
The film and the term bakla expanded my idea of what “queer” could be at a time when I was still figuring out how I could operate within LGBTQ+ community and history. The term could be conditional and contextual—pliable and playful, even. Some were this, others were that, still others lived within the slippage between signifiers. I asked if he had seen the film.
“I think every bakla has heard of this movie.” He laughed. “Are you wanting to know about Sally?” I didn’t know who he was referring to, but he carried on as though I had nodded. He explained that Sally was one of the stars of Paper Dolls. “I didn’t know her, but some of my friends did. She was murdered on the street in the daytime a few years ago in Dubai.”
Marie left the room to retrieve another tool, and I pulled out my phone, smearing it with nail-soaking liquid. I quickly came across an article dated November 2007 from the local UAE press: “Hairdresser found dead in Sharjah.” It stated that a body was found on the street outside an internet café and that “there was no sign of assault.” But I found another article from a Filipino newspaper a month later: “Noli asked to intervene in death of Pinoy Hairdresser in Dubai.” The family of Sally slammed the inaction of the Philippine Embassy and the authorities in Dubai, accusing both of a cover-up and stating that an embassy worker had referred to Sally as “the one whose head was bashed.” I noticed also that the Filipino papers referred to the deceased as Sally, but in the UAE, they used masculine pronouns and used her birth name. Marie returned and set back to work on my nails. I asked him how he felt about his safety.
“I wear this, and it’s no problem,” he said. He pointed to his tight pink scrubs, jamming his chest together and putting his hair up in a ponytail. “I only wear a bra and makeup at night,” he said, grinning. “I can look like a girl and get compliments from men. But when I am working, I look like this,” he said, letting his hand go and his hair flop to his shoulders while frowning, before letting out a hearty laugh.
“And my boyfriend is a policeman, so he will tell me about the campaigns.” Marie explained that there were occasional campaigns to rid the city of crossdressers. Later, I would read about a one-week campaign from a few years earlier called “Preserve Our Social Values,” in which the Dubai police chief at the time was quoted in a press release as saying: “We have noted an emerging trend of men dressed as women and vice versa in the UAE markets and streets. Several men in women’s dresses and makeup have already been arrested from shopping malls and residential buildings.” But another release by the Dubai police stated that their campaign was “targeting transsexuals,” demonstrating a conflation in the eyes of the authorities of those who wore clothing perceived to outwardly signify another gender and those who identified as trans. Marie explained he had several bakla friends who had been deported simply for looking too feminine.
“They know bakla are parloristas,” he said, using a Tagalog word for the stereotype of bakla as flamboyant, campy crossdressers who work in beauty salons. “This is our main job here, so sometimes they come looking.”
He showed me his ID photo. He had a slender jaw and long flowing hair. Even in a photo taken to look neutral—the final step for a residency permit—the left side of his lip turned up into a near smirk. It was like he was goading the camera, daring whoever was looking at him to take in his feminine beauty, his wily smile, and not offer him a work visa. You need me, the photo said.
His phone vibrated. He said it was from a friend living in Manila who was badgering him about how he could come to Dubai, too. “I know so many bakla wanting to come here.” He showed me his Facebook page. There were dozens of messages with friends asking about Dubai. “I tell them everything honestly,” he said.
I remembered an article I’d read about a photo studio in Musaffah near a large compound housing thousands of migrant workers. The photographers would take photos of the men and edit them into suits, behind fancy cars, in front of office towers so they could send them to family back home—a stilted image of the life they wanted to project, a curated white lie. I thought also about how limited an understanding my family and friends in America had about the region in general.
Marie said he told them it was easy to get a job, even as a bakla. “I just said I was a boy on all my forms and didn’t act too girly when I went to get my ID here,” he said simply, like that was the only hurdle. Perhaps, in some ways, it was that simple: learning when and how to fit in, to pass.
A moment of silence passed between us while he rifled through a plastic bin for some other tools. “They want to come because they can work in both salons like me,” he said, winking. “I work in men’s and ladies’ salons.” He explained that his Muslim boss owned both a men’s and women’s salon and that he offered Marie the opportunity to work and get paid in both after catching her leaving a shift having changed into a skirt. So convinced by Marie’s appearance, he even permitted Marie to don women’s attire and makeup at the women’s salon.
I was stunned. He was not just viewed by his employer as cheap labor adept at beauty services, but had actually been sought out for his ability to subvert laws and disrupt the bifurcation of gendered spaces—and encouraged to do so. Marie’s phone pinged again. I wondered who it was, if they would be able not just to pass across spaces but have the opportunity or recognition to do so.
Marie apologized for rambling, as though this were mundane conversation, and asked me about my job. I told him I was a writer.
“Maybe you can write my story,” he said, giggling. I didn’t know how to tell him that I wanted to. “But today, I have so many customers. Too bad you can’t come to the ladies’ salon to talk more.”
He finished up with my nails and gently folded my arms into my chest. I told him I wanted to speak to him again.
“Would you like to come to a small party?” he asked. I smiled at him and handed him my phone. He entered in his number.
“This kind of party is where we put on the colored polish,” he said. I walked back out into the full reception room. It was filled with men waiting for Marie.
When Marie invited me to “a small party,” I expected a few friends drinking wine around a coffee table, not a dozen bakla rifling through makeup kits and swigging straight from open handles of vodka. When I arrived at his third-floor apartment near Oud Metha, Marie ushered me into the apartment and offered to pour me a glass. Two bottles were already being passed my way from opposite directions. I chose the one with less lipstick on the rim and took a swig.
Despite their prominence on a foldup table, neither the booze nor the makeup was the centerpiece of the apartment. In the middle of the cramped living room, a mound of dresses sat bundled, some bursting out of an open suitcase, others spilling out of a thick black plastic bag, the discreet kind I recognized from my trips to African & Eastern, the alcohol shop near my apartment. Most of Marie’s friends sat on the floor around the dresses in a roughshod circle like campers around a bonfire. Every couple of minutes, someone would rifle through the material and head to the hanging mirror in the corner to change and apply makeup.
I tried not to make a big show of my arrival, but Marie turned down the Filipino pop music and introduced me in front of everyone. Three were his roommates—like Shivani, four of them rented the illegal two-bedroom apartment—and all of them worked in salons. Even the two at the mirror turned around, mid-undressing, to smile at me and introduce themselves. I felt like I needed to explain why I was there. I mentioned Paper Dolls and told the room that I wanted to take notes and audio recordings if anyone wanted to talk to me. Marie turned the music back up, and everyone went back to laughing and singing. When I told him I thought they were all surprisingly easygoing about my request, he leaned over and said he had already told them, and that they were all enthusiastic. I thanked him, and he handed me a mirror so I could wash off the lipstick he had left on my cheek when he’d greeted me with a kiss.
“You can thank me for that,” he said, laughing.
It was only after I scanned the group of people in the room—in various stages of makeup, dress, drunkenness—that I fully recognized the potential danger we were in. Police raids of queer events in the Middle East were infamous, including the Queen Boat raid in Cairo in 2001 that led to the arrest and subsequent sensational trial of nearly two dozen men, many of whom were handed multi-year prison sentences. But raids of private establishments and homes had also occurred in the UAE, including roundups in 2005 and 2012 in which dozens of people were arrested.
Marie stood up, grabbed a dress, and started stripping out of her oversized blue sweatshirt on his way over to a full-length mirror in the corner of the room, leaving me alone with a group of strangers. Most were deep in conversation with one another, but a few were looking at me expectantly, as though I should make a speech. I rifled through a makeup bag to offset their stares.
I politely motioned for the person nearest to me to hand me some makeup. He was already in a dark red minidress with lipstick to match and introduced himself as Crystal. I asked him about his name: I had noticed that some bakla used what sounded like their given Filipino names—many, like Sally’s birth name, Catholic due to Spanish colonization—but many had adopted Western female names.
“I already knew one bakla named Diamond, but I still wanted to sound expensive,” he cooed. He handed me some mascara.
“Ooh, you want to be a ladyboy, too?” she giggled and held another mirror up for me.
I cringed at the word. It seemed like such a derogatory term—a shorthand Westerners used, especially in Thailand, to place a diverse group of people into one category. It erased any nuance between intersex people, transgender people, crossdressers, gay men, and more. It seemed to both too easily group and inarticulately flatten.
But what did it mean for Crystal to use the term “ladyboy” for me? Was it a term she was reclaiming, a fraught process like the one I was engaging in trying to reclaim “queer?” Or was it just the case of a non-native English speaker adopting a derogatory term slung at them without fully comprehending the history and etymology of the word? Did it matter?
I started in with the mascara. I had worn makeup a few times for costume parties and theater, but this felt different. I tried to steady myself in the handheld mirror in the same way I did when Marie was digging under my nails at the salon. Tagalog music blared from a speaker next to my ear, and I watched in the mirror as several partygoers started singing. I thought about Reggie’s performance and felt a sudden pang. We were all performing, but there was a weight, a consequence to their performance of gender that mine didn’t have. My application of makeup was different from the others in the room: a sense of fun versus a need to pass or express femininity. I looked down at my recorder and wondered about my performance of journalism, about that responsibility, too.
I asked Crystal about his job. He explained that he worked at a salon only a few blocks from Marie. He had messaged Marie from his family home on the outskirts of the northern town of Baguio after seeing some of Marie’s Dubai posts in a bakla Facebook group, drawn to the tantalizing opportunity to also work two jobs at two different salons across the gender divide. Not only could he double his potential salary—one that was already several times more lucrative than what he could earn in Philippines—but he would be doing it simply by being himself: a person who inherently broke categories. After three months of trying, he secured a visa to work in a men’s salon and had arrived a few months earlier.
