had clearly been briefed on this Iraqi episode of Jeremy Kyle. ‘Listen dude,’ Hassan chimed in, ‘just ’coz you think a guy is cool and you want to hang out with him, doesn’t mean you’re in love with him. Dudes can’t be in love with other dudes, it’s haram.’
‘Exactly,’ said Majid, with a self-satisfied grimace that even today makes me want to go back in time and whack his face with a slab of raw tuna. ‘You just want Macaulay Culkin to be your best friend. You didn’t know what you were saying – you were being stupid.’
With Lily’s eyes now fused to the ground, my dad sinking into the sofa as if it were quicksand, and my mother wearing the expression of a traumatised soldier just returned from war, I decided just to say this: ‘Yes. I was being stupid. I didn’t know what I was saying.’
I said I wasn’t hungry, and retreated to my room upstairs. My mother swiftly followed, barged in, and with more terror than rage in her demeanour, held my face in her hands and said this: ‘Never say anything to anyone about being in love with a man ever again – have you no shame? Look how you’ve embarrassed me. Haram on you, Amrou!’’ Her fake nails indented my arm’s soft flesh, and I burst out crying and released myself from her grip.
This was the first time in my life that I had ever willingly renounced her embrace.
I locked myself in the nearest bathroom and stayed in there for what must have been at least two hours. But in those two hours, the entire wiring of my brain changed, as if the experience had torn down the remaining neurological systems built on trust and hope. The final childhood bridges were being burnt, with new, coarser and more corrosive patterns of thinking emerging from the rubble. It was the first significant realisation I had that my life was going to be difficult. Islamic attitudes towards homosexuality had already made me feel full of fear and shame on the inside, but this was the first moment that these fears played out in the external world I inhabited. I had developed a mechanism for coping with my anxieties in private, but as I cried in the bathroom, the looming journey into adulthood seemed unimaginably treacherous. And treacherous because of the desires and feelings that lived inside of me – as if my natural urges were building the hurdles that were going to trip me up. The enormity of it all fatigued me, and so I lay my head on the cold marble tiles of the bathroom. I closed my eyes and willed Robin Hood – fox, man, whoever was available – to come lie next to me. Only this time he appeared like a thin apparition, barely present, and unlike on our first encounter, the marble stayed freezing, and the world was cold and lonely.
After the Macaulay incident, the colours of my world changed – spell-binding hues of emerald, sapphire and ruby dulled into a formless mud. What was more, I soon realised this mud was a minefield. One incident was particularly unsettling.
During our London trip, I was of course desperate to go to the West End. More specifically, I wanted to see what I believed was the most profound work known to humankind – CATS. Finally, the opportunity arose. It was decided that Ramy, my mother and I would go with another Middle-Eastern family who were also having a summer in London. The two boys were friends of mine and Ramy’s from Dubai, and their mother was one of the wealthiest people I’ve ever encountered. She turned up in chinchilla – even though it was summer – and strangled by a diamond choker that looked more like a neck brace. It was fun to watch her and my mother gossip. Imagine All About Eve, but cast entirely by the Arab elite who eat macaroons at Harrods, and you might get a sense of their dynamic.
On the way to the show, we had to walk through Soho. This was before gentrification, and on a Friday night it was gay and raucous and colourful as fuck. I was overwhelmed by the number of outwardly gay bodies, my field of vision a collage of men kissing men, and women kissing women, a street boasting a whole spectrum of genders. I tried, as much as possible, to keep my head down to avoid my mother catching me looking – maybe if I just stop looking for ever, I’ll eventually be straight? With my eyes glued to my shoes, taking one step after the other as we slalomed through the queer scrum, one of the young boys from the other family shouted, ‘Look Mama! There are two men kissing!’ Yes, thank you mate, I was trying to ignore it. His mother, whose heels were quivering on the Soho cobbles, responded with: ‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s disgusting? Every single one of them should be shot.’
Hearing that, I felt as though I was taking a bullet myself. When I looked up to see Mama’s response, she was smiling, walking along with her girlfriend as if they were having an everyday, pleasant conversation. If I turn out gay, Mama would rather I was shot dead. It seemed that everything developing inside me was bringing with it diabolical consequences. My simple desire to kiss a boy from a movie could result in me being gunned down, and then having to nurse the gunshot wound with boiling water in the afterlife. It felt a bit like having an autoimmune disease, as though my own body and mind were attacking themselves, as if the world I inhabited was trying to kill me for existing within it. My brain was being programmed to fight its own natural curiosities, and it was turning my head into a war zone.
I spent the entire production of CATS, my long-awaited beacon of hope, trying to avert my gaze from the spandex of the male cats. Rather than relishing the details of a show that I knew and loved so intimately, I sat there miserably, seeing only damning temptations. I remember very little about the actual production. The only clear memory I have is of looking at my mother during it and speculating: If she had a gun and found out I was gay – would she shoot me? For a very long time, a little part of me always believed that she would.
Another thing that made this all even more horrific was that in Islam class, we had also been taught that if we had more sins on our left shoulder than good deeds on our right by the time we died, not only would we be sentenced to eternal torture, but so would our mothers for failing us. No pressure. By the age of eleven, I knew hell was a certainty, and to calm the guilt of bringing my mother down with me, it helped to see her as someone who deserved to go to hell. It was a lose–lose situation, granted, but I needed a narrative that would stop me feeling like the root of all evil. As a survival tactic, I began to mythologise my parents as dragons that I needed to slay so I could live freely as an adult – I was definitely going to burn in the afterlife, but at least I could be some sort of hero here on earth. Picture them as villains, and you’ll no longer be the kid in the wrong. That was my only coping mechanism. And then I found something that convinced me that Mama was indeed planning to shoot me down.
My mother, as she rushed out of the house one day, left a copy of the book she was reading on the living-room table: A Child Called It. The book, in case you’ve not heard of it, is an autobiographical account by Dave Pelzer of his mother’s brutal and nightmarish abuse of him as a young child (when he was, somewhat eerily, a similar age to me when I found it). I read it from cover to cover in one gut-stirring sitting, feasting on the tales of a mother stabbing her son, forcing bleach down his throat, and gassing him with Clorox in a bathroom. Maybe Mama’s planning on doing the same to me to get the gay out? Am I her child called It? As I read it, I visualised all the torturous assaults taking place in our house, and pretty swiftly every room was a psychological site of Mama’s potential abuse. This might sound odd, but the book was a comfort for me; it confirmed that my mother could be a woman plotting my murder. The book was like a ghost coming to tell me that it wasn’t all my fault, that it was others who were causing my pain. The child is a total survivor, and he ultimately triumphs in a world violently against him. Perhaps I projected myself onto his narrative, telling myself I would eventually get out of a household that might have me shot for my sexuality. Or maybe I felt deep down that I deserved this kind of abuse from my mother, and wanted to believe that she really did see me as A Child Called It; painful as the thought was, at least it was simpler than questioning how Mama could love me even if the deepest part of me was something she hated. Either way, when I put down the book and returned it to the place my mother had left it, I went to the bathroom, locked the door, and lay on the cold marble floor again, imagining Mama through the door trying to gas me with Clorox fumes. After I got up, I washed my face in hot water, like a soldier readying myself
