GUEST PRIVILEGES
Queer Lives and Finding Home in the Middle East
by Gaar Adams
Dzanc Books. 299 pages, $27.95
PART MEMOIR, part travelog, and part journalistic inquiry, Gaar Adams’ Guest Privileges embraces multiple genres. The heart of the book is a series of vignettes following Adams’ travels to a range of locations in the Middle East involving a number of different interlocutors. These scenes provide the writer a vehicle to examine Western presuppositions, including his own, about life in the United Arab Emirates and its surroundings. In choosing to pursue the stories of queer life in this landscape, Adams has set himself a difficult task.
Adams structures his book to parallel his personal journey. Having grown up in northern Wisconsin and spent several years studying Arabic in Yemen after college, he inaugurates his expatriate life in 2010 in Abu Dhabi as a writing instructor. His meeting at a skating rink with a gay Iranian named Imran exposes his initial cultural clumsiness when he asks Imran to lunch during Ramadan. Still, this meeting provides a nexus to many of the queer storytellers Adams meets throughout the book. The writer’s reflection in the book’s final pages—“Imran had connected us all—my first queer friend here—though he had abruptly taken a position in Canada”—suggests transience, a prominent condition of queer immigrants’ lives.
Queer spaces figure importantly in Adams’ peregrinations. In his home base of Abu Dhabi, he discovers key bonding locales: the all-male barbershops where queerness can be detected; the Corniche, a cruising area that functions as a gymnastic sportsground during the day; a Scissor Sisters concert, where he meets his second lover Sunil; and a Filipino karaoke bar. where the lead singers of the band turn out to be queer. These initial encounters in Abu Dhabi highlight little known details about the layers of displacement and belonging and the negotiations between subterfuge and openness that characterize the lives of queer migrants in the Gulf states.
After Adams enters a relationship with Australian expatriate Sunil, he begins to travel out of Abu Dhabi in pursuit of various journalistic stories. The liminal spaces he occupies and the queer migrants he meets form the body of the second section of the book. One such space is a nail salon in Dubai whose Filipino staff members identify as “bakla.” At a party hosted by the proprietor, Marie, participants discuss friends who have been harassed and deported and the murder of a transgender film star on the streets of Dubai in 2007. One distracting feature of Adams’ treatment of this group is his seemingly arbitrary pronoun changes, sometimes in the same sentence. Even if it’s sometimes confusing to read, the chapter broadens the sample of queer migrants Adams discusses and reveals the unpredictable dangers that Marie and her friends face every day.
In the last section, Adams intersperses his wedding plans and decisions about where he and Sunil will live with updates on the whereabouts of some of his queer storytellers. Unfortunately, the marriage narrative undermines the promise of Guest Privileges. While Adams’ autobiographical trajectory may have been aimed to make his stories cohere, the discussion of wedding plans and rings and places to resettle takes on a life of its own, and the book doesn’t quite come together. With topics ranging from the tension between geographical stasis and mobility, issues of gender fluidity, the interaction between law and custom, definitions of home, et al., this is a book that sprawls; a good editor would have been helpful, but seems to be absent here.
Still, in conveying the urgency and authenticity of selected queer stories from the Gulf, Gaar Adams does provide an important service. Those of us who wish to interrogate the easy assumptions about what queer life is like in this region are offered a place to glimpse into queer worlds that Westerners seldom see. The journalistic elements succeed in sharing material that many people may not know. That Adams includes research from a range of sources contributes to the success of the book’s journalism. Despite its shortcomings, Guest Privileges contains important information that can broaden our understanding of the lives of the countless queer migrants of the world and provides a useful opening for more inquiry. _________________________________________________________________
Anne Charles is cohost of the cable-access show All Things LGBTQ.
Discussion1 Comment
As someone who struggles with mental health, I appreciate the support and empathy displayed in your blog It means a lot to know I’m not alone