Unicorn. Amrou Al-Kadhi
out loud.
The way in which Billy was accepted by everyone – particularly Mama – gave me the confidence that confessing my love for Macaulay Culkin might even be celebrated, despite what I knew about homosexuality from Islam. So as I was having lunch with Majid at a restaurant one afternoon, I said ‘I’m in love with Macaulay Culkin.’ Majid, who was sipping a whisky and Coca Cola, slowly put down the tumbler.
‘Oh yeah,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘You love him in the film? Because he’s a good actor?’
‘No! I’m in love with him. I want to marry him.’
Majid picked up his drink and took a big gulp, then he told me to finish my food. His thick eyebrows furrowed as he watched me slurp my spaghetti. The silence was a bit unnerving, but I interpreted his gaze as somewhat benevolent – maybe he feels the same because he also fancies a white person? As I found out later that evening, that was definitely not what he was feeling.
As I thumbed a new Jacqueline Wilson book in the guest room that evening, Majid called my name from the living room downstairs. I presumed dinner was ready. But after descending the staircase, I entered a room that was eerily quiet. The TV was off, no food was laid out on the tables, and Majid, my father, and mother were sitting neatly on the living-room couch, like Olympic gymnastics judges, ordered and unreadable. On the sofa next to them sat my brother, Majid’s fifteen-year-old son and marijuana-enthusiast, and Lily, who had her eyes glued to the floor. Majid then spoke: ‘Is everyone OK if we go out for dinner tonight? There’s a tasty Lebanese place near us.’ Phew. This is just a menu meeting. General mutters of agreement spread around the room. ‘But before we go … Amrou, do you want to tell everyone what you told me today?’ Mama sat up straight, the fact that I might have confided something to Majid without telling her first clearly upsetting to her. Mama and I didn’t keep secrets from each other. But on a cultural level, the fact that I said something to a family friend without first checking it with my parents was also very taboo; where we’re from, family units are more like clans. You are less an individual, and more one puzzle-piece of the collective familial-self, where everything that you say or do reflects the entirety of the family tribe. If any member of the family unit displays individual ways of thinking and behaving, the entire clan must come together to control, exile or destroy the offender.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. My mother’s eyes were giving out a hot glare, as if thin infrared lasers were beaming out and trying to penetrate my subconscious.
‘About Macaulay Culkin?’ Holy Shitting Fucking Christ on his Fucking Crucifix.
I looked around the room and assessed the perilous situation. Maybe I should just tell everyone I’m in love with Macaulay Culkin? I mean, we are in London – the home of spandex male cats, the place where pantomime was born – and look at Lily! She parties in St Tropez and wears revealing clothes – and she’s white and dating an Arab! – and WAIT A SECOND, what about Billy, the gay superhero who my mother LOVES?! Maybe it won’t be so bad? What if Islam doesn’t exist in this part of North London? OK – I’m going to go for it. What could possibly go wrong?!
‘I told Majid that I’m in love with Macaulay Culkin. One day, I want to marry him.’ My dad, who avoids emotion like it’s a skunk’s fart, looked almost fatigued by the news, as if it being raised was an utter imposition to his dinner schedule. Ramy started playing on his Game Boy – I would have done the same to be honest – while my mother looked stunned, tears brimming in her eyes, as if this was the most shocking, dangerous thing she had ever heard.
Majid looked to his son (let’s call him Hassan), who had clearly been briefed on this Iraqi episode of Jeremy Kyle. ‘Listen dude,’ Hassan chimed in, ‘just ’coz you think a guy is cool and you want to hang out with him, doesn’t mean you’re in love with him. Dudes can’t be in love with other dudes, it’s haram.’
‘Exactly,’ said Majid, with a self-satisfied grimace that even today makes me want to go back in time and whack his face with a slab of raw tuna. ‘You just want Macaulay Culkin to be your best friend. You didn’t know what you were saying – you were being stupid.’
With Lily’s eyes now fused to the ground, my dad sinking into the sofa as if it were quicksand, and my mother wearing the expression of a traumatised soldier just returned from war, I decided just to say this: ‘Yes. I was being stupid. I didn’t know what I was saying.’
I said I wasn’t hungry, and retreated to my room upstairs. My mother swiftly followed, barged in, and with more terror than rage in her demeanour, held my face in her hands and said this: ‘Never say anything to anyone about being in love with a man ever again – have you no shame? Look how you’ve embarrassed me. Haram on you, Amrou!’’ Her fake nails indented my arm’s soft flesh, and I burst out crying and released myself from her grip.
This was the first time in my life that I had ever willingly renounced her embrace.
I locked myself in the nearest bathroom and stayed in there for what must have been at least two hours. But in those two hours, the entire wiring of my brain changed, as if the experience had torn down the remaining neurological systems built on trust and hope. The final childhood bridges were being burnt, with new, coarser and more corrosive patterns of thinking emerging from the rubble. It was the first significant realisation I had that my life was going to be difficult. Islamic attitudes towards homosexuality had already made me feel full of fear and shame on the inside, but this was the first moment that these fears played out in the external world I inhabited. I had developed a mechanism for coping with my anxieties in private, but as I cried in the bathroom, the looming journey into adulthood seemed unimaginably treacherous. And treacherous because of the desires and feelings that lived inside of me – as if my natural urges were building the hurdles that were going to trip me up. The enormity of it all fatigued me, and so I lay my head on the cold marble tiles of the bathroom. I closed my eyes and willed Robin Hood – fox, man, whoever was available – to come lie next to me. Only this time he appeared like a thin apparition, barely present, and unlike on our first encounter, the marble stayed freezing, and the world was cold and lonely.
After the Macaulay incident, the colours of my world changed – spell-binding hues of emerald, sapphire and ruby dulled into a formless mud. What was more, I soon realised this mud was a minefield. One incident was particularly unsettling.
During our London trip, I was of course desperate to go to the West End. More specifically, I wanted to see what I believed was the most profound work known to humankind – CATS. Finally, the opportunity arose. It was decided that Ramy, my mother and I would go with another Middle-Eastern family who were also having a summer in London. The two boys were friends of mine and Ramy’s from Dubai, and their mother was one of the wealthiest people I’ve ever encountered. She turned up in chinchilla – even though it was summer – and strangled by a diamond choker that looked more like a neck brace. It was fun to watch her and my mother gossip. Imagine All About Eve, but cast entirely by the Arab elite who eat macaroons at Harrods, and you might get a sense of their dynamic.
On the way to the show, we had to walk through Soho. This was before gentrification, and on a Friday night it was gay and raucous and colourful as fuck. I was overwhelmed by the number of outwardly gay bodies, my field of vision a collage of men kissing men, and women kissing women, a street boasting a whole spectrum of genders. I tried, as much as possible, to keep my head down to avoid my mother catching me looking – maybe if I just stop looking for ever, I’ll eventually be straight? With my eyes glued to my shoes, taking one step after the other as we slalomed through the queer scrum, one of the young boys from the other family shouted, ‘Look Mama! There are two men kissing!’ Yes, thank you mate, I was trying to ignore it. His mother, whose heels were quivering on the Soho cobbles, responded with: ‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s disgusting? Every single one of them should be shot.’
Hearing that, I felt as though I was taking a bullet myself. When I looked up to see Mama’s response, she was smiling, walking along with her girlfriend as if they were having an everyday, pleasant