Not an option!!

by D S from Egypt

I’d like to start by saying how much I admire the courage that it took from all of you guys to do such the show. I mean, to make yourselves vulnerable in front of everybody, not being able to have private thoughts and to have everybody comment on your lives and judges it, that couldn’t been easy.

About my story, well, here it goes. I am Egyptian and l live in Egypt. You must be thinking how is that a problem? Let me tell you a bit about it, being a gay person in Egypt is just impossible. For starters, people get persecuted for being gay here. There is no such a thing as coming out of the closet in Egypt because people here don’t believe in the existence of the closet. There is no such a thing as being GAY here, everything here is controlled by religion whether it is Islam or Christianity and traditions that will never change and people are not even willing to understand or compromise.

It is like; you don’t even have the choice and control of you own life. Society determines almost everything about everyone’s life but I reached a point of my life in which I am finally getting to know who I am and what I wanna do in my life and no one is going to take what I’ve achieved in that area away from me. I didn’t feel the confusion about my sexuality until about a year ago because my society never even introduced me to my options because it is NOT AN OPTION. So when I finally understood who am I and why I am not into (you know what), it was like seeing a really good mystery movie in which everything is revealed by the end of the movie and you are like “AAhhaa so, that is why” but the hero of the movie will die anyway because the truth wasn’t revealed in the right place and time.

There is absolutely no choice and since I am kinda good looking, I am getting asked out by guys a lot and people always set me up with their friends without even telling me and when I turn down someone who is really good, I get the looks from my friends, like “Are you crazy? What is wrong with you? I am never gonna be able to tell them why and I am running out of “I am too busy to date”, “I am not ready for a relationship” blah blah blah…so I don’t even see my friends as I used to because I got tired of the whats and whys about my life and what is wrong with it.

I am in my early 20s right now and in Egypt people here push girls to get married early in their early 20s so I am on the marriage radar. I forgot to tell ya, sex is not even allowed before marriage. Yeah, that is right, you didn’t misread that. So, even if I am just confused about me being gay, I can’t even have sex to determine whether I am gay or not.

I’ve wanted to come and live in America for a while but that was just because I wanted to take screenplay writing courses there but since I discovered that I am gay, it is my only option to live my life as it should be but getting the visa from Egypt to the US is so damn hard and I have applied in so many internships to get there but I didn’t get any.

So not only I am not able to come out, I am not even able to date, to have the simple right of choice, no, actually it is not the simple right of a choice, it is the simple right of having a LIFE!!

So my story is “What do I have to do to have a life?”