|
|
We Don't Have Rights, But We Are Alive
A gay soldier in Assad's army
Harkin, James http://harpers.org/archive/2016/02/we-dont-have-rights-but-we-are-alive/
Publisher: Harper's
Date Written: 01/02/2016
Year Published: 2016
Resource Type: Article
Considered more of a safe haven for homosexuals than other places in the Middle East, the author speaks with a military member in Syria about being a gay man in Assad's army as well as the future of his country.
Abstract:
-
Excerpt:
In 2009, Samir came out to his mother. She wept when he told her, but has since come to accept the reality. (His father and brother remain in the dark.) Around the same time, he began a serious relatioinship with another man, but it fizzled out after he was called up to active duty in 2011, at the beginning of the revolt. In peacetime, military service typically lasted eighteen months, but so far Samir had been in the army for four and a half years. Every three months he got fifteen days of leave, and it was on one of those days, three months earlier in Damascus, that he had met the young art student whom he was dating now. Samir said that he knew roughly three hundred gay people in Damascus, most of them men. None had ever been arrested, as far as he knew, and the bars that they frequented didn't mind their presence, provided that they didn't "do dirty dancing," as Samir put it.
All the same, the lack of formal rights for Syrian homosexuals makes them vulnerable. A few months earlier, Samir had been sitting in the bar where we'd first met when a friend of his went off to a date that he'd arranged on Grindr, the gay dating app. Samir had warned his friend not to go, and it turned out that he was right to be wary. The date was a trap: two men set upon his friend, stealing his phone and his wallet. When he returned to the bar several hours later, he was covered in bruises. Samir said that few of the patrons expressed any sympathy; it was his friend's own fault, they felt. For a long time afterward, people at the bar kept asking to use the man's phone before announcing, to general hilarity, that it was no long in his possession. Like Hassan, Samir blamed such callousness on traditional Syrian culture, not on Assad. "Even straight people can't express themselves fully here," he said. It sounded more like resignation than a complaint.
Topics
|
AlterLinks
c/o Sources
© 2023.
|
|
|
|
