The Secret Life of a Gay Arab
Arab gays are under siege in societies that want to pretend they don't exist. But a new biography of an Arab artist offers another view.
At a dinner party among close friends in Jordan in November 2002, one of the guests was missing. Ali Jabri, then 60, was an artist with a temperament, and we'd gotten used to his no-shows. But still, it seemed odd that he wasn't there to be, as ever, the life of the party. The next day passed and then the next as I focused on reporting about the impending invasion of Iraq, and then one of our friends called to say Ali was dead, murdered in his apartment. The main suspect was his Egyptian lover, a man none of us knew, who disappeared back across the border.
My wife and I and our Arab friends mourned the death of a passionate esthete who brought great wit and discernment to the arid confines of Amman society. But one of Ali's circle, Amal Ghandour, did more. She began to pore over the journals that Ali had sometimes let a few of us glimpse. Their illustrations were extraordinary: pages upon pages of sketches, pastels, clippings, collages. And woven through the images was densely written script full of perceptive, sometimes poisonous aphorisms chronicling the life and sentiments of this tall, blond, blue-eyed Arab who moved among so many cultures. << continue reading @ Newsweek.com >>
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