This is the conversation we had for The Rage Monthly’s February issue about living life without fear, and coming from a legacy of love and action.
Your history is fascinating in that you have such a strong connection to your Egyptian roots and Muslim heritage, as well as being Canadian and your Jewish connection there. When you link that with being a gay man, it gives you a unique perspective on each world. When you were a kid growing up, was that intersectionality something you were cognizant of? I suppose I was aware, because I was always shuttled back and forth, so my whole life became sort of about adaptation to my current environment. Whether I was in Montreal with my mom for six months and going to Jewish day school and spending time with my grandparents who were Holocaust survivors, or whether I was in Egypt for six months with
two of the most well-known Arab
superstars...It was always sort of about adapting. Not only culturally and religiously, but socially and economically as well. My mom came from a very middle to lower- middle class family and my dad from a very wealthy family, so life was always about adjusting to those experiences.
That juxtaposition must have been a challenge to adapt to in many ways, but I would imagine it offered you exposure to many different ways of living. Yes, for sure. Hearing all of the stories from
the Holocaust and from my grandmother, who survived the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps, makes you very aware of current injustices in the world. And yet at the same time, I was given the benefit of seeing what an elevated platform can do to change the world. Both my grandparents on my father’s side were very outspoken about the causes that were important to them. My life became about marrying the two and speaking out when I saw something worth speaking out about. You certainly have done that. Thank you for your activism, it’s important work. I’m curious about when your sexuality came into play and what the coming out process was like for you in that environment. I had absolutely no intention of coming out publicly when I did, I sort of did it on a whim. I was working on a television show that was fairly popular in the Middle East and the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in 2012, Islamists had just won over 70 percent of the parliamentary seats. At the time I didn’t even worry about LGBT people necessarily, though the situation was never great, it was tolerable for many years. There were instances and incidents that were very unfortunate—if not tragic—but I worried more about what would happen to women under the Islamist government or what would happen to Caustic Christians, which many of my friends and family members were at the time. I sort of used myself as a litmus test. That was
what I was able to identify with, in terms of fear, being gay and Jewish and what that would mean if people were to find out. No one really knew, because those were taboo subjects. In the Middle East, they were not something I had never discussed or that the press had ever reported on about me. Though it was certainly available to them to find out about, at least the fact that my mom was Jewish. I figured because I had the platform and no
one else was speaking out, certainly not the international community, who was very excited about the wave of democratiza- tion. I’m not sure they realized the full consequences of that on a population who did not necessarily have the
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