More Bitching

I had a realization, earlier today, about relationships that I think is worth sharing, but first: More of the Cairo gay life!

Just got a text message from the Swedish (and gorgeous, although repeatedly turned-down by yours truly) Assistant Manager of F&B at the Hyatt: “I am horny. Any recommendations?”

My reply: “The other hand?”

: )

It’s been a week of gay scene disappointment overload. In the same way that a lot of people find traveling through conditions of extreme poverty and squalor depressing, I find gay life here really unmanageable.

It’s also odd how much time I devote to thinking about how miserable gay life here is, since in New York my sexuality and the society that that aspect of my identity fit into was such an unimportant part of my existence. I think about dinners with Pookie in which there might be a table full of gay friends and amongst whom it was not even known, even after years of friendship, who was top or bottom or both or doing what with whom – not because sex was demonized or shameful to talk about, but because for reasons that I think are obvious, fascinations with gay sex and gay life are pretty much exhausted amongst a group of 40+ year-old urban gay men.

I could hypothesize about why that is not the case in Cairo, but I don’t think the obvious explanation (that men here don’t get to freely experience their sexuality and so there is a constant fascination with what *might* be) really holds. Not with the people I know. Even men with international degrees, full passports, and a blackbook that rivals that of any guy in Chelsea, still somehow seem contented in Cairo to spend their time endlessly gossiping and hunting for the next story or lay that will occupy their time and feed their supposedly “discrete” network.

That men here are satisfied (or even if they are dissatisfied: reluctant to change) with what most people get over in their late teens and early twenties is only part of what bothers me about gay life, here. The other major annoyance with gay life in Cairo relates to what I think of as the “sexual utility” principles according to which all men are judged. It’s related to class, discretion, aesthetic preference, and I’m sure a lot of other things, but in general in Cairo men will not befriend each other unless they are theoretically capable of (or have, at one time or another) had sex. Of course, some men are not sexually compatible even if they find each other mutually attractive, due to an incompatibility of roles in the boudoir, but even amongst friends for whom sex would be impossible for that reason, they normally still need to find each other at least mutually attractive (if unfortunately unsuited for each other role-wise).

I find this really odd, and it took me a few *months* to put my finger on the phenomenon, because it’s so completely divergent from the standards according to which I normally select my friends. When I am at dinner (always dinner with Pookie seems to be the moment of comparison for this blog, lol) with Pookie and four of his friends are at the table, even if some of them are exes, you can see a CLEAR variety of types, and there are not really questions being asked, looks exchange, or any subdialogue AT ALL of how each person could be or is sexually useful to the other people, there. In New York, you might have a “straight acting” muscular Chelsea who has a “screaming queen” of a best friend who is not AT ALL his type physically, but who he adores as a person. In Cairo that couldn’t happen. Sure, you have friends who will say “no he’s my friend…not my type at all…” but in general that’s more about background stuff than actual physically taste. If you told someone here that Italian models hang out with Filipino drag queens, leather daddies, and surfer boys, and didn’t think anything about the fact that their friends, for them, might be totally unf*ckable, I think a lot of people here would find it shocking. If you aren’t potentially interested in someone here, at least from afar, then you won’t even speak to him, let along befriend him (and be seen with him in public). That’s the “sexual utility” principle that I find so disturbing about Cairo. I cannot wait to be back at a dinner table with Pookie and his friends in which there is as little sexual tension (or judgment) in the air amongst them as there would be between a gay man and a woman.

Getting back to my life, though, I said it’s been a week of disappointment overload, and Swedish guy is the least of that (I had his number before he even had a chance to embarrass himself, so there were not real expectations to be disappointed – he still annoys me, though). Another part of it has been Leopold. I had started to actually think of him as a friend after we managed to have an entire lunch, last week, in which, despite speaking tirelessly about the Egyptian caste system, he did not revert to his infinitely-tedious speculations about who is hot and what they are doing and with whom they are doing it. He passed-on some rather interesting stories about his family during Nasser’s time and their relationship to the Saudi royal family, and it was a really enjoyable afternoon.

A few days ago, however, Leopold called me to tell me he was having coffee with a friend (who tells people he his Saudi, but who Leopold of course follows behind his back with the qualification: “Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia”), who I was introduced to socially in the past. Leopold wanted to know if I wanted him to hook us up. I told him no, that I didn’t need a hookup, and that there was zero chemistry when I met this guy in person, before, even if physically he wasn’t bad. Leopold pressed the issue and it ended with me saying “whatever, I don’t care” and leaving it up to his discretion (and this was just a day or two after I turned down another guy he tried to pass-on to me without request/solicitation).

Yesterday, while in the middle of my work marathon, Leopold calls and tells me that he’s with the Palestinian-Saudi again, and wants to know if I can give him the phone number of the American hussie who I blogged about having dinner with me, Leopold, and Lord of the Dance for Coptic Christmas (the one who was with us the night that we fought with Amr Bin Laden and his guards).

I told Leopold that I’d give it to him, but that I thought it was really tacky that he was calling me, in this guy’s presence, when he’d been trying to hook us up just a few days before, and was now asking for another guy’s number. He protested that it wasn’t tacky, and that I wasn’t Palestinian-Saudi’s type. I told him that it was irrelevant, since I told him I wasn’t interested in the first place, but that for the record the hussie and I are physically *exactly* the same type (which Swedish guy confirmed when I turned him down the last time, but passed-on the hussie as “same type as me but like a cuter version” – which for the record Swedish guy AND LoTD both said I was cuter…not that it matters!). Leopold tried to say something weird about how hussie has darker hair, and when I said that’s ridiculous (because his hair is light brown), Leopold was like: “Well Palestinian-Saudi likes bitchy guys and you aren’t a bitch. You’re a proper guy.” (for the record: “bitch” and “bitchy” means, in Cairo terms, not feminine or mean, or any of the things one would expect it to mean in the US, but means more like “trashy” or “low-class slutty”)

I found the whole conversation frustrating – particularly because it so neatly embodied exactly what I find impossibly disappointing about gay life here: the middle of a “work” day and the only few 40yo gay men in this city with any education who aren’t already married are sitting around passing around numbers and scheming for their next kill, and feeling totally fulfilled and entertained by that.

I sent him the following text message: “Do not EVER network me in your circle of bitches again. It’s pathetic that a 40yo with any class or intelligence spends this much time on these things. I don’t want X or Y or any of your other contacts and stop calling if all you have to talk about is bitchy bullsh*t. Hussie’s number: ____.”

Refer to my blogging about making enemies, below. Needless to say a day has gone buy and he hasn’t called.

The examples of my being frustrated with this THEME of social annoyance would take me hours to describe. Swedish guy and Leopold are but two pictures of my current frustration that decorate the awful museum of Cairo gay life (I’d make a joke about entrance to the museum being “couples only” but probably only Desi would get it).

There has been another frustration that I’ve been meaning to blog about, and I’ve kept a running commentary on the situation in a Word diary, but I’ve not updated in a few days, mostly because I’m too lazy to fish out all the old text messages for you to supplement the diary and give you an idea of the ridiculousness of it all. Let’s just say as a preview that it involves an Italian diplomat, a piano concert, and diarrhea on the Mediterranean.

In many ways, though, be it the lashing I gave to Leopold, my refusal to even minimally indulge Swedish guy, or my iron-willed resistance to the Italian, this week has been about the wiping-clean of my social slate. It’s odd that my angst is, in so many ways, a romantic angst, and yet with none of these people who are causing my angst did I actually have anything romantic. Just the environment in which romance WOULD occur, but is so quickly snuffed-out, distresses me…so it’s not that my romantic life is full of drama, but rather that the setting in which my non-existent romantic life SHOULD occur is itself so full of drama.

Ok, now I need to write about what I decided about relationships, today…stay tuned!

While you wait: Check out these links about PUGGLES!

VC