Status Updates From This Arab Is Queer: An Anth...

'Like many queer children, deep down I knew my existence was a transgression, that if I lived long enough I too, would be asked to step aside for someone else's respectable happines.'

“‘I wonder if the demand that marginalized artists repeatedly perform trauma – becoming trauma clowns – in our art is a way to contain and oppress us, politely or indirectly, from the comfort of a seat, hands clean,’ Vivek Shraya writes in her exquisite essay, ‘How did the suffering of marginalized artists become so marketable?’.“

“There is a tendency among the audiences of marginalised authors, such as myself, to assume that every piece of writing is a reflection of real-life events that the author went through. There is this tunnel vision that many audience members get; it generalises the experience of one marginalised writer for it to become the general experience of that marginalised community....”

“...Parental restrictions on the computer and TV, sure, but also bribing teachers at school to watch me for any signs of ‘gay behaviour’, throwing away any clothes that could perceived to be feminine and scaring me with terrifying passages of hell in the Quran. The wider family were conscripted too, with my uncle being tasked with giving me lectures on the dangers of homosexuality...”