by Ammar Azzouz
Why do people choose to move from their homes? What are they searching for? And to what destination do they go? In his book Guest Privileges: Queer Lives and Finding Home in the Middle East, Gaar Adams traces these questions by following the lives of LGBTQ+ migrants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He meets there with migrants from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Yemen, Filipin and more, reflecting on the rich diversity, and the multi-culturalism that make the Gulf Estates. Through the migrants’ intimate lives of loss, grief and love, Adams shows a different kind of story about the UAE. In his own words, Adams reflects on the stories of these migrants and notes:
I witnessed their gains, sacrifices and compromises – in acts of both concealment and coming together; in life and in love – while living in a foreign country with active laws that threatened their freedom, livelihood and existence.
He asks the people he meets why they choose to live in UAE, how is it to live there as a member of the LGBTQ+ communities. When sitting with Shivani in Abu Dhabi, he asks her about the hardest part of being a lesbian here. She laughs and simply says ‘Finding a place to live.’ Together with her Turkish girlfriend, they illegally sublet an apartment. Even though Shivani lived most of her life in the country since the age of three as her family moved from Sri Lanka, she is still on a student visa.
Even though the book’s primary focus in the UAE, Adams takes the reader in a journey across different cities in the region as he travels to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman. By doing so, Adams explores the spaces of queerness where members of LGBTQ+ communities gather. The scale of these spaces range; sometimes it is the intimate home of migrants meeting together but fearing being reported, or a booked hotel room where men meet for sex but are risking being arrested, other times it is the public space, the darkness of the Corniche of the Persian Gulf, where hours are spent late in the night to find other men for cruising. Wherever the space is, whether it is private or public, Adams shows the way in which these people switch on and off their queerness, practice their gayness depending on who is around them as they try to navigate the system and perform how ‘straight’ they are. Queerness is like a theatre – acting is not an option but a way of survival.
Moving from the US to UAE in 2010, Adams is, like these migrants, also searching for something. He is aware of his positionality and privilege as a guest –a ‘white American choosing to live in a place where human rights abuses occur each day.’ This self-awareness is open and transparent in the book and is important as the freedoms and privileges vary to a great degree based on one’s own race and passport.
Writing Guest Privileges is not only about the lives of the people that Adams met, but to a great degree, it could be seen as a memoir too. As Adams note, ‘It would become a journey not just in unlearning my own perceptions of the misunderstood region and the notion of home’ Adams note (p.4), ‘But in reckoning our very ideas of sexuality, gender, migration and belonging itself.’ As if he is travelling back in time, Adams narrates early memories of longing for men in adolescent. He recalls the memory of being with his father in hardware store, watching men who smelled like diesel and sawdust walking to the restroom. Or at the tenth grade, weightlifting after-school so he could spend much of the gym sessions in the steam room ‘where men who had just finished work dangled towels lazily around their thighs.’
The book, could therefore, be seen as a reflection on gay life filled with desire, nostalgia, fear and anxieties. Adams himself throughout his time in the UAE shows his inner struggles, wondering about the choices he is making in the UAE. There is a scene when he is walking late from the Corniche in Abu Dhabi where gay and bi men met. He arrives at his home at 3 am. Adams is thinking of his then boyfriend and of his own life. He takes the reader into his inner thoughts reflecting on the desire to push back against hegemony and expectation, to follow curiosity and move away from his relationship.
I had been told for so long that stability was the ideal, and yet it felt so foreign to how I had learned queerness. I wanted to be out of this room; wanted even less to be downstairs with the man who held me too tightly in his bed.
Beyond the unforgettable and remarkable stories that Adams narrate in the book, he has offered an excellent writing style. He is sensitive to the details, able as an artist to transfer the reader into the scene through colours, sounds, smell, movements, touches and emotions. This is reflected in this sentence ‘The friend kneeled down, gingerly stretching the wrestler’s left leg to horizontal while kneading his calves. With broad shoulders, a grey-flecked beard, and a slight paunch visible even beneath his breezy kameez, it looked like he probably had been an athlete himself once, perhaps many years ago.’
It feels as if Adams was searching for a new language, a new freedom; a freedom that he has been longing for, and to a certain degree, was found in the UAE through the new friendships, discoveries and choices he had made there before he finally moved to London, his current home.
Guest Privileges is a book about the making and making of home, it is about lives unfolding in the danger, lived in secrecy. It is an under-researched and under-represented story of beauty and joy that emerges even in places were queerness is illegal. But despite its danger, Adams shows that love can exist, even when life is harsh and tough for LGBTQ+ people. If you are looking for a book to read this year, or to start in 2025, I recommend Guest Privileges.
[To read more on this and everything Middle East, the LSE Middle East Centre Library is now open for browsing and borrowing for LSE students and staff. For more information, please visit the MEC Library page.]
