A Column for the Queers.

Part of the work of decolonizing is busting myths and propaganda. There might not be a Gay Pride Parade in Gaza because of Israel’s punishing siege and occupation, but make no mistake, there is a lot of queerness there. One tactic the Occupation uses to dehumanize Palestinians is to convince the world that queer Palestinians do not exist, in Gaza particularly. To paint Gaza as savage and backwards and hostile, where modern liberal freedoms like a Pride parade couldn’t possibly exist. While in many cases, queer people in Gaza have had incredibly challenging lives because of the circumstances, it is misleading to believe that Palestinians are inherently more homophobic than their occupiers. In fact, Gaza is just as queer and problematic as the rest of the world. Journalist Afeef Nessouli talks to “Adam,” a 20-something queer Gazan who lived in the enclave his whole life before getting evacuated to escape the genocide earlier this year. Adam is using a pseudonym to protect his identity. His story is not meant to represent every queer story in Gaza. But we do want to create a space in “Everything is Political” dedicated to documenting as many queer stories from the region as we can. It is our personal Pride Parade.

ADAM: I was lucky that my dad, while really religious, is really open-minded and cultured. He treats me differently than any other family member or son of his because he knows how different I am. He knows. And my family raised me knowing that I’m different.

AFEEF: When you use the word “different” — that your dad knew you were different – what does different mean? And then what do you mean “they knew”? Did you talk to them about that differentness?

ADAM: No, it’s not something you talk about because it’s not something that you can feel with your hand. It’s something that you can see and notice, you can know about this and you just let it happen, it’s simple if you want it to be. You either support it or just leave it. And I was lucky to have a really different family than religious Middle Eastern families. They were super supportive– it’s really uncommon in a religious community, in any religion.

AFEEF: Can you tell me a bit about your family?

ADAM: Sure. My family used to live on the border between Egypt and Gaza. Like the checkpoint on the border before they removed everything and just made up a border back in the day! And part of my family is in Egypt and part of the other part is in Gaza. I’m the youngest in the family. My grandma’s side of the family is Lebanese, from Tyre, South Lebanon. The other part of my dad’s family is from Tulkarim and I have family in Jenin, West Bank. So imagine being me dealing with what’s happening in Gaza, dealing with my family in Jenin, and dealing with my other side of the family in Lebanon. It is like the ultimate situation.

AFEEF: So are you stressed out?

ADAM: I was raised religious so I don’t really worry. Thanks to religion and being raised Muslim, I do not worry about anything because I believe anything that happens in the world is happening for a reason. One way or another, it will turn out good for you if you let things take its flow and believe it happened for a reason. So I think if anything may happen to any of my family members anywhere in the world, I would get emotional of course, I would be sad for a few days. But then I would move on quickly.

AFEEF: You’d say you’re still pretty religious?

ADAM: I was born and raised religious. I memorized the whole Qur’an at 12. And then at 13 I hit puberty, and had new thoughts. And I looked for answers to my questions and found peace quickly. All religions are carrying the same message in a different text and I appreciate all of them but I believe I don’t need to be under a specific religion to be more Human.

LOVE

ADAM: I was always aware of my preferences, and I was vocal about it my whole life, teaching myself and others that love is love. At 13, I started experiencing life as a queer person at school. There was a lot of making out and a lot of cuddling but at the same time a lot of harassing — Like, when I’d be walking home, and some boys would be like “you’re such a sexy bitch come do this and that to me oh my god I wanna do this and that to you” even though they are pretty much straight – as they describe themselves but I highly doubt it – and they would sometimes spank me or just do weird shit I didn’t like.

AFEEF: Can you remember one of your first gay experiences in Gaza?

‘We were kids, he wasn’t Hamas back then, he became Hamas after they bombed his house.’ —Adam

ADAM: There was a friend I went to kindergarten with. He was from a family who were our neighbors and our friends. I met him and he was one year older than me. He was super nice. And we just found ourselves … kissing and things developed from there obviously. And he became someone who I hooked up with all the time. I’m talking about having sex every day for three months at some point. We were teenagers. I think I used all [my] fun back then.

AFEEF: How gay could you be in Gaza?

ADAM: In schools, being gay is like completely there – you can see it and teachers can see it. If you know, you know. I’ve seen people hugging, kissing and cuddling in class. I’ve done it myself in the class, outside of the class, everywhere. And I was the nice, respectful kid, by the way. I was the teacher’s pet and I had high grades mostly.

AFEEF: That’s interesting and pretty relatable. What was it like being religious and gay for you then?

ADAM: Well, it’s my whole perspective. I was religious until I was 12 and I remember at 13, everything changed because I figured out that there’s a part of religion that people are too scared to say: the more religious you get, the weirder you get. I got touched by people who were teaching me Qur’an, I got touched in the mosque — I understood that this is not the religion (Islam), it’s the people. But, it also opened something in my head that made me say: “okay, so if this is something that people really want, even religious people want, why is it illegal in my religion?” So trust me, religious people, and even people from Hamas, some fighters actually, some of them are gay, and in the new generations it’s way more common than what you would think. One of them was trying to link up with me. He actually got martyred years ago. I didn’t know he was a fighter until he got martyred.

AFEEF: Can you tell me a story about one of your relationships in Gaza?

ADAM: There was this one dude who I grew up with, our families are similar, we came from a similar mindset. But we were so different from others, and he knew he was different. And I knew I was different. But we kept it to ourselves. One day, we’re playing football and that day nobody was there except for me and him, and I was just sitting and he was just sitting next to me near the street. The streets were empty by the way. There weren’t many people in their cars, especially in the afternoon because people in Gaza nap. He was so sweet, so respectful, so nice. And he moved a little closer to me and just put his hand on my thigh and just left it there. And I look at him and he looks at me. We both were attracted to each other. I always like to tell gay jokes or sexual jokes. It makes it easier to recognize gay people. It’s just natural. And our love– with this dude– me and him, was natural too. So he starts touching me and I just, I hold his hand– we hold hands and I touch him back. In public! Then I told him, “hey, we’re in the street. Do you want to go inside or something? I don’t want you to get caught.” I was more worried about him than I was for myself.

AFEEF: Because he was in Hamas?

ADAM: We were kids, he wasn’t Hamas back then, he became Hamas after they bombed his house, but he was very religious. So, anyways, we just go inside, and we’re just walking there, we start making out. An hour and a half of making out. So we went inside, we just started moving forward and kissing and making out and stripping each other and just cuddling with each other. I was eating him out and then Al Maghreb prayer just started and he was like “Can you stop?” and I was like “What?” and he was like “I have to go to pray at the mosque.” His family is dead now and I think he’s gone too now, himself. We were in our early teens in love at the time. Making out with him was something that until this very day I don’t think I will ever have something like that because it was genuine and true, true, true, true, true authentic love before anything and it came from someone I know, he was an honest and a respectful young man.

AFEEF: Wow. Everybody kind of imagines Gaza as extremely conservative only.

ADAM: It is conservative, what’s the issue with that? But these things are natural. These things you don’t hear of because you don’t need to hear of them.

AFEEF: Ya, queer life finds a way no matter what.

ADAM: We were together for two months and he stopped seeing me because he’s super religious and he started feeling bad about himself. You have no idea how brave that was from him to take this decision to make out with me to to do all of this with me. It takes a very brave and genuine man to do such a thing, especially when you’re from a conservative family and you’re super religious.

AFEEF: Do you believe you can be gay and Muslim?

ADAM: You can combine religion and sexuality. Yes, you can. Yes, yes. In General; People will tell you you can’t. It’s just the people who have less understanding of life, very zoomed in and biased towards a specific idea.

‘So trust me, religious people, and even people from Hamas, some fighters actually, some of them are gay, and in the new generations it’s way more common than what you would think. One of them was trying to link up with me. He actually got martyred years ago. I didn’t know he was a fighter until he got martyred.’ —Adam

THE GENOCIDE

In October 2023, Adam was studying. He was also working on his dream on the side, his own clothing line and the start of him getting into fashion. He had been making money from the line while studying at a university in Deir al Balah. At the time, Adam was getting ready to start an apprenticeship in culinary arts in Gaza.

ADAM: That was the 5th of October. Then the 7th of October happened. And everything is gone. The restaurants, the whole square in Gaza, Hay al Rimal. If you know Hay al Rimal in Gaza, it is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Gaza. It’s gone completely.

In fact, I know a family of 25 that got completely, like, they vanished, the family vanished, and this family fucking hated Hamas, they were literally Athiests, and weren’t huge fan of religion even, but they got bombed. That’s how you know it’s not about Hamas, it’s about the land and whoever is on top of it.

AFEEF: Can you explain your experience during the last year?

ADAM: We moved to my sister’s house three days in, and I couldn’t really stand it. My oldest brother, who lives with us, went back to our house. And then my dad followed him and I followed my dad. That’s like three days after it started, so we just stayed at home for a while. Later on, I spent a month in Khan Younis because I just wasn’t comfortable in my area anymore. I felt like I’m gonna die any second because death was literally around me everywhere. Like it was too much. So I just went to Khan Younis because my uncle’s area was safe. It’s a bunch of potheads and a bunch of hippies who don’t care about anything. So that was like a nice place. I went there, I spent a month there, went back to Rafah and I stayed there. The third month people started getting displaced from the north to our neighborhood. And everyone was like, oh, this is “the safest spot in Gaza now.” Well, it wasn’t by the way. Imagine waking up every day to an airstrike in your neighborhood and this is “the safest spot in Gaza.” That’s how wild, how insane the amount of airstrikes there were. Every day from 10 at night to 5 in the morning, there were airstrikes everywhere, and you could hear it. And our house was in the middle of it, and I heard what’s happening everywhere, north, south, west, east, all of it. So it was really hard for me. I would fall asleep and I was looking at the ceiling and waiting for the rocket and thinking of how the rocket is gonna penetrate the ceiling. I was thinking, okay I’m gonna get sucked into the other room, I’m gonna be under this wall, maybe buried underground by all these walls blah, blah, blah. Or an explosive, I’m gonna be thrown somewhere else.

AFEEF: Were you guys in a high rise, or what was your living situation?

ADAM: We were on the second floor, and it was in Rafah. That’s why we were able to hear everything. I covered most of this from my window, but I was so scared to post anything or talk about anything until the third month of the genocide, actually, because they [Israelis] can and will kill you if you do this. So the third month of the genocide, people got displaced from the north. Our neighborhood was 5000 people at first, maybe 10,000 people. It became 50,000 people all of a sudden. And it’s a bunch of people who seem really privileged. But by the time they came…they didn’t have money to get a haircut. They barely had food. They didn’t have clothes. Nobody was supporting them. And there was way too many of them to a point where they opened governmental schools for them.

I said to my dad – we are really close by the way– “okay, listen, what do you think we could help them with?” He said, “they lack basics first, water, they don’t have water, they don’t have food, they have nothing.” I was like, okay, listen, “how much money do you have?” I told him that I still had all the money from my clothing brand. We started helping them with what we could until people from the neighborhood shared what they could with them. Later on, we started cooking for them from our own pocket money, from the profits I made from my clothing brand. Meat was really expensive. It was 100 shekels I remember. Now, it’s even way more, but yeah, those people hadn’t had protein in two months, and it was so sad, so fucking sad, and we were in the same boat, us and them. So me and my family were like, you may die any second, so let’s just spend all our money, fuck it. Like, let’s be good. We spent like a high percentage of our money on cooking for them. I think the second week I started cooking, I started posting stories for the first time, and I had really bad social anxiety– insane. I’m diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, and my anxiety was really bad.

AFEEF: I cannot fathom what you were dealing with. How did you eventually get out?

ADAM: So yeah, later on, people started donating to me. And I had a GoFundMe. A GoFundMe for evacuating because my knee was really hurting. When I was cooking for three months, I was, like, feeling pain in my left knee. I put all the pressure on my right knee. Then both knees got fucked up. So I needed to heal. And I needed to evacuate to heal. There wasn’t much in Gaza. No medications even. No painkillers. I wasn’t able to sleep because of the pain. So I evacuated on my own [without my family]. It was a tough decision but I needed it and the pain was increasing. I feel the pain right now as I talk about it, it’s just muscle memory.

AFEEF: Around when did you get out?

ADAM: It was two weeks before the borders got closed. Like April.

AFEEF: Woah. You were pretty lucky to get out then. Do you feel lucky?

ADAM: I am very lucky to be alive, PTSD, trauma and all.

AFEEF: You’re in Egypt now. Do you feel hopeful about the future?

ADAM: Oh, I have nothing but positive thoughts about the future., I’m aiming for 1 million dollars this year from the clothing brand. Really, nobody else can help my family or build their destroyed houses other than me. They’re depending on me. So this year I will work very hard.