What It’s Like to Live a Queer Life in the United Arab Emirates

I finally decided there was probably only the one band whose name was inspired by a lesbian sex position. But when I first read the headline “Scissor Sisters to perform in Abu Dhabi,” my initial thought was that some unfortunate, two-bit girl group had unknowingly taken the same name as the queer New York glam pop rock band. The real Scissor Sisters sang about cruising and chemsex. The band’s lead singer, Jake Shears, was an unabashedly gay former stripper seemingly always decked out in bedazzled hot pants. I’d even recently read an article about the band in which the journalist described Shears obscenely mashing his hands together to demonstrate the sex act that inspired the band’s name.

Surely, it couldn’t be this Scissor Sisters playing in the UAE, a country where even kissing in public could lead to imprisonment and deportation? And yet, there it was, just below a campy photo of Shears rope-tied to another band member: a headline announcing the band’s concert in the country’s most popular English-language newspaper.

I had loved the Scissor Sisters since their cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” debuted seven years earlier, during my sophomore year of high school. The song was unlike anything I had ever heard on Midwestern radio waves, and I voraciously read everything I could online about the band’s storied beginnings singing in grungy Lower East Side clubs dressed as rejects from Andy Warhol’s Factory—scenes I could scarcely imagine, cloistered in my Wisconsin bedroom.

I was also only tentatively beginning to acknowledge to myself that my interest in the band may at least have been partially rooted in the fact that four of its five members were gay. (Or, perhaps even more honestly, that my interest was rooted in the amount of time I spent studying photographs of Shears’s body in skin-tight costumes.) Before I had heard much of anything about the LGBTQ+ histories and communities of New York, the Scissor Sisters allowed me to contemplate what queer culture—what “out” and what my own queer future—might someday look like.

I carefully considered who I could alert about their concert in Abu Dhabi—especially considering the tour was to promote an album with a cover featuring a closeup of a man’s clenched ass in gauzy dance pants. I thought immediately of Shivani, but I still hadn’t introduced her to James. She and Yasmine knew about my cruising on the Corniche, but the dynamism of their relationship made me embarrassed of the insularity of my life here with James. Inviting Imran wouldn’t work either: perpetually and proudly single, he had been skeptical of my relationship with James since I’d first explained that a phone date with him prevented me from accepting the invitation to that first iftar. Imran’s anti-James stance had only fortified after I’d confided in him about James’s increasingly hermit-like tendencies.

“Tell him to get a dog if he wants to stay inside and be an American,” was the advice he half-jokingly doled out to me on more than one occasion. “Go enjoy life here.”

The Scissor Sisters concert seemed like a final chance to get James to enjoy life alongside me. I noticed him spending more and more time in front of the television or Skyping his parents, and he seemed to be intentionally steering more of our conversations toward how hard it was continuing to be away from the things he missed—his family, New York City, marijuana—in order to gauge my reaction. I thought the opportunity to see a band from New York might be a way of getting him out in this city with me and yet still be part of something that felt familiar to him.

I didn’t have any idea how the boys should not hide their queerness. Certainly, we were hiding ours.

I kept scanning the local newspapers for different articles about the event that might excite him, but all the coverage seemed nearly identical. It was a phenomenon I had noticed soon after arriving, the media often relying on press releases to build their articles, resulting in a sometimes-glaring uniformity. It seemed, in many ways, understandable: in a landscape with one of the most restrictive media regulatory laws in the world—the UAE ranked 112 out of 179 that year on the World Press Freedom Index—censorship was rife, and criticism of the government was officially outlawed.

Three years earlier, a brand-new newspaper, The National, was established with much fanfare to counteract international criticism that the country’s media was tightly controlled, but it was still owned by an investment fund controlled by the government, and several of the journalists poached from leading American newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal resigned within a year of the paper’s establishment, citing censorship restrictions.

The coverage of the Scissor Sisters concert announcement felt equally constructed around a safe press release. I noticed two articles that offered vague mention of “controversial” performances, but neither actually elaborated on the source of that controversy; one dared to use the word “transgressive,” which seemed to more explicitly hint at a conscious pushing of morality boundaries, but any mention of the band’s overt queerness was unsurprisingly totally absent from any local coverage.

I sent James a one-line email of invitation to the concert as soon as I saw the announcement: I’m going come rain, shine, or deportation!! Dark humor seemed like the right angle to convince him to come along with me. It was impossible to ignore the fact that attending the concert of a queer group seemed immeasurably riskier than just sitting at home and watching another Meryl Streep film, so I figured it was best to couch any danger in a joke. He sent a one-liner response just a few minutes later: he would come along.

I couldn’t quite believe that we would be attending—not just because I was skeptical about James finally coming out for the evening, but because it was difficult to imagine how the Scissor Sisters could ever take the stage in Abu Dhabi. The band had even bluntly stated they didn’t think they could ever play in the UAE because of the inherent risk involved. Not six months before the concert announcement, I had read an interview in British music magazine Q where band member Ana Matronic declared, “I have it on good authority that I will get arrested in the UAE. Just by brushing up against some of my friends, I would have so much cocaine residue on my clothes I would have to spend the rest of my life in jail. I’ve heard you can go to jail for having trace amounts on your clothes, because the drug laws are so insane there.”

The stories Ana Matronic had probably heard weren’t exactly inaccurate; people were indeed prosecuted for seemingly minute infractions across the UAE. In 2007, British citizen Keith Brown spent four months in prison after Emirati customs officers allegedly found .003 ounces of cannabis in a joint stub stuck to the bottom of his shoe. And only a few months after that, notable British DJ Grooverider was arrested at the airport and sentenced to four years in a Dubai prison for possession of just over two grams of marijuana, which he blamed on a forgotten spliff in his pocket. He was royally pardoned ten months after his arrest during Ramadan—a month which traditionally sees select prisoners released—though intense media coverage in the UK likely expedited that process.

Coverage of the UAE abroad was also fueled by salacious stories of Westerners caught up in sexual escapades: the infamous case of Vince Acors and Michelle Palmer, a British couple who were sentenced in 2008 to a three-month prison sentence for having sex on a beach in Dubai, was splashed across every British newspaper for months.

I was beginning to feel like the easy proliferation of these sensational news stories in the Western media was the very “good authority” that people like Ana Matronic relied on to understand the Gulf, and I was likewise just beginning to notice who was missing from these international accounts. I could find plenty of coverage of what were framed as undue punitive measures for minute infractions—like how a jail term for sex on the beach was an unjust sentence for a night of drunken passion between a pair of straight Brits—but never seemed to encounter stories about queer people, let alone articles about non-Westerners who were subjected to local law.

That is, until I started reading between the lines of local newspapers. There I found story after story of men engaging in illegal sex together and getting caught. A few days before the concert, I stumbled on an account in the Courts section of The National of four teenage boys being arrested for—well, what, exactly, was unclear. The entire episode was muddled. Initially, authorities took four teenage boys into custody, accused of the grave crimes of raping and kidnapping a man. But as the trial progressed, the most serious charges were dropped, two of the defendants were sentenced only for “homosexual acts.”

And then the trial became even more opaque: the remaining two boys were sentenced to two additional months in prison exclusively for masturbating atop the body of the victim. With few other details given, I wasn’t sure how or what to think about the boys. Had they indeed committed a terrible crime? Or were they on trial primarily for engaging in sex with a man? Was everyone in the story a victim—and of what, exactly?

I couldn’t discern the lines between these possibilities, if there even were lines in the eyes of the local authorities. And I saw myself in that undefinable space, too: all the times in high school I had coaxed gray-haired men off park paths and into public bathroom stalls, knowing exactly what I wanted them to do to me illegally in public spaces. I couldn’t help feeling an empathy—or perhaps even an unwarranted sympathy—for the boys when I read the judge’s statement, which referred to the act they were being sentenced for as “the secret habit,” an English translation of an Islamic term for masturbation. The judge told them, “If a person practices the ‘secret habit’ in the privacy of their bathroom, they don’t face penalties.” Was this the issue: what was public versus what was private?

I wanted to shout at the newspaper that queer people had rarely been granted privacy as a space of safety; fucking in public had become a necessity for people like me. I returned to the story again and again, not for how it read to me like a parable for my situation in this new oppressive land, but for how eerily the story of these boys in the UAE mirrored the cautionary tale I had been taught growing up in the US: that queerness was something not to speak of or allow to be discovered—and if it was, it incurred penalties.

I pulled the story up on my phone and started reading it to James as he rummaged through his closet, deciding what to wear to the concert. He pulled out a crumpled yellow shirt from behind his overstuffed laundry basket.

“Can I get away with this?” he asked.

“It’s a little tight. Maybe try something else,” I offered as diplomatically as possible. I didn’t know how to tell him that his gut hung conspicuously beneath the hem. It was his third prospective outfit for the evening. “Did you hear what I said about the court case?”

“Sorry, I’m kind of trying to sort myself out right now,” he shot back, his tone rising with each consecutive word. I summarized the case again to the shadow peeking out from behind the door of his wardrobe.

“Well, obviously, they should hide that,” was all he offered, turning a balled-up green T-shirt over in his hand like a worry stone. I tried to protest but he ducked his head out and cut me off. “Can you get me something from the kitchen?” he asked. “I’m kind of busy for this right now.”

“Hiding it” didn’t seem like the right answer to me, though I didn’t have any idea how the boys should not hide their queerness. Certainly, we were hiding ours.

I walked into James’s railroad kitchen, scanning the open snack boxes and chip bags for signs of sustenance. I wanted to keep talking about the case, but I knew he wouldn’t really engage. I inwardly acknowledged that it probably wasn’t fair to expect him to have the same connection to this place without studying the region or the Arabic language like I had, but I still felt his lack of curiosity taking an increasing toll on our relationship. I’d slowly initiated more and more time apart because of the claustrophobia I was beginning to feel, sequestered in his apartment covered in takeout litter. I suspected from his foul mood that he hadn’t eaten much save for the empty chip packets on the counter since I’d made him dinner the night before. I rummaged through his threadbare cupboards but knew I wouldn’t find anything. And anyway, I knew “get me something” meant “make me something.”

“You have absolutely nothing in here that even remotely resembles food,” I said, gathering up as many empty containers as I could and mashing them into his overflowing trash can.

I told him I didn’t feel like I was helping much, and that I was going upstairs to my apartment. He didn’t respond. Still buried in the wardrobe, I could only see the back of his head as I swung the door closed.

I returned to my own space thinking about those electric nights we spent sequestered in my tiny apartment in New York, dreaming of everything we could do together. That year felt like a gestation: two gay boys making plans of how to be together out in a world that hadn’t taught them how. But as I opened the door to my apartment alone and considered them again, they suddenly felt like a harbinger for James’s insularity.

While I was irritated—if not entirely surprised—by his behavior, I was at least partially relieved that I didn’t have to actually help him choose his outfit for the concert. I didn’t even know what the hell I was going to wear. Alongside the occasional stories of queer debauchery, I’d also come across stories in the Courts section about “indecent” clothes, as well as a proposed federal dress code. But an outdoor concert seemed like the perfect chance to step out and push boundaries. I pulled outfit after outfit from my closet in hopes of finding something even slightly transgressive, but I didn’t have anything, and I couldn’t exactly pop over to a Brooklyn thrift store in a pinch. I couldn’t figure out how to pay homage to the queerness of the group without potentially imperiling myself, until I came to the very bottom of my lowest drawer and spotted a pair of trim pink shorts that ran just above my knee. It was all the defiance I could muster.

James and I barely spoke in the taxi and arrived at a sprawling venue that looked like an airplane hangar shortly before the band was due to take the stage. We were meeting a few of James’s American colleagues. A group of my own colleagues was also attending, and though neither suspected anything amiss in my relationship with James, I was drawn away from James’s crew—not just because they counted James as a friend, but because the other group had spent time in the Gulf and spoke Arabic. Plus, they were meeting a friend I had never met before, and I was craving contact outside of James’s circle. I had tried to compromise with him beforehand by floating the idea of bringing the groups together, but his reticence at “investing in new people” meant I hovered between the two groups ten meters apart, like an impatient grocery shopper trying to hold space in two different checkout lines.

As much as I felt the tug of obligation to show James a good time, I also wasn’t going to stand at the back of the concert with the same people I saw every day. So as the DJ amped up the volume and the two groups pulled apart, I let the jostle of concertgoers take me away toward the stage. I wasn’t going to come this far and then not feel part of this. I offered an apologetic wave, but James’s eyes were fixed elsewhere.

I followed my friend Alana as the band strutted on stage, taking in their outfits. Ana Matronic wore a black polka dot dress with matching leggings. Jake Shears’s jeans were shredded enough to look like they had gone repeatedly through a bread slicer, but I noted that his denim outfit was also markedly modest. We tried to push further toward the stage. I bobbed and weaved through concertgoers, slightly alarmed by how all the men I pushed past seemed to be decked out in polos and baggy cargo pants.

The crowd was less packed at the front than I had ever seen at a concert, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the band’s overt queerness. As we slid into the second row, I noticed only one man dancing: a man in a tight gray T-shirt, directly ahead of me in the front row. As Jake swept across the stage, I kept my eyes on the man’s black curls, loose enough to bounce nearly in time with the beat. His sturdy shoulders swayed back and forth, his hips moving only slightly, as though he wasn’t sure how much he could move them in this setting. Alana mouthed “That’s him,” and pointed to the dancing man, tapping him on the shoulder.

He turned around quickly and hugged Alana, though I caught him staring at me. He smiled wider, daring me to hold eye contact, and I grinned dumbly back. He tried to introduce himself, but I couldn’t hear him over the noise of Jake Shears singing my favorite song from the new album. Oh, let’s see how far that we can run / I hear the warning sign / What would you do for more?

I began to dance not so much next to him as with him. I tried to stand in parallel so it looked like we were just two fans of the band, but I also tried to subtly move my hips in time with his. It felt like we were the ones on a stage in front of thousands of gawking spectators, our shoulders cheating outward to the audience, our eyes meeting only to look outward again. As the song reached its climax, he leaned in to whisper something, and I found myself leaning back, trying to get as close to him as possible. After a moment, I pulled away to apologize for not hearing what he was trying to say, but when we locked eyes, he just gave me a knowing smile. I gave him a nod and leaned in once more, knowing he hadn’t said anything at all, just grazed his lips along my ear. We held that position until the song ended. When the audience broke out into cheers, I looked back and remembered everyone standing around us. I pulled away to clap and cheer, but he motioned me to lean in once more.

“Alana said her friend Gaar was coming, but I had never heard your name and thought you were a girl,” he said. I stuck my tongue out at him and asked if he was disappointed. He smirked and shook his head with an emphatic, “No.”

I tried to concentrate on the concert. But I kept getting distracted by the energy I felt standing next to this stranger I suddenly wanted to know, who had introduced himself as Sunil. I found myself leaning over to him between songs and spontaneously hurling questions about everything from the genesis of his Scissor Sisters fandom to the name of his hometown. The vowels of his Australian accent bounced as much as his curls.

“Who did you think would come to this?” I asked. “I thought everyone would be a little more, you know…” I flicked my wrist and gave him a look, and he laughed.

He explained that the Scissor Sisters were big in the UK not because they were queer but on account of their electronica-infused glam-rock credibility. “I guess that’s why I’m here,” he said. “What’s big in the UK is big in the Commonwealth.” He laughed before adding: “Though I didn’t think I would feel like the only brown person here.”

I looked around the sea of apparently British men in cargo pants and women woohoo-ing like they were at a bachelorette party

We stood hip to hip for the rest of the concert, willing Jake Shears to speak to us, but there were scant few moments when he engaged in crowd banter, electing mostly to jump directly from song to song. I realized I was disappointed; Shears was normally so gregarious. The band’s famous rapport with the crowd felt lacking. Shears didn’t mention queerness at all. The most political moment of the show came in the form of an awkward joke; in a quiet moment between songs, Ana Matronic faked exasperation and asked the audience, “What does it take for a girl to get stoned around here?” before adding in bad jest, “I don’t mean that kind of stoned.”

Sunil and I looked at each other and winced. Was that the closest the band would get to mentioning anything controversial? I didn’t expect them to run out on stage waving a rainbow flag or engage in any Pussy Riot-esque stunts, but I realized that I did expect… something. Even the bumbling garage band The Black Lips had pushed more boundaries with their recent tour in India, reportedly getting chased to the state line by local police for kissing on stage. Is that what I wanted, some kind of performance—or at least acknowledgement—of queerness? I looked at their subdued outfits that felt like a poor imitation of straightness. The band launched into their next song, “Night Life.” When you’re underground / You need a breakthrough, Shears cooed. I found myself shuffling even closer to Sunil, wondering if that was the kind of defiance I craved.

After the concert, I stood in line for the modular bathroom pods behind Sunil, who invited everyone back to his apartment for a marathon of all three Scissor Sisters albums. James shot me his Let’s go home face that I had seen so many times over the past year. I thought about my first night with Imran, of missing out on my first suhoor, and how much I had missed since then. A year and a half later, Imran had nearly stopped inviting me to anything at all. I didn’t want the same thing to happen with Sunil. I watched men walk in and out of the bathrooms and wondered how many of them would be hooking up in the stalls at a Scissor Sisters concert anywhere else in the world.

“I’d love to go,” I said to Sunil. I shrugged at James and told him I’d see him tomorrow. It was so easy. All I had to do was step out of the queue and file past everyone standing so dutifully in line.

*

I felt like I was inside a Celine Dion music video. Electronic strings and heavy bass drums reverberated against marble walls as I picked at the upholstery on a velvet sofa. I tried to identify the song, but the heavy wooden door on the opposite side of the hotel lobby garbled the sound bleeding through from the bar. I looked at my phone, waiting for a message from Sunil.

After the concert a few weeks earlier, I’d taken a taxi with him back to his apartment, along with Alana and Sunil’s British flatmate, Jonathan, the man Alana had her eye on. I sat in the front and watched in the rearview mirror as she flirted hard in full view of the taxi driver. I stared at the registration information dutifully displayed on the meter, unsure whether the Muslim name of the driver was preventing me from chancing it with Sunil. Alana was a nominal half-Muslim, half-Jewish straight Lebanese American; I wondered whether some alchemy of those identities afforded her the gumption to saddle up so close to Jonathan. I looked back in the rearview and thought about Michelle Palmer and Vince Acors, the couple on the beach, and whether they took up any real estate in either Alana or Jonathan’s minds.

In Sunil’s living room, the four of us had danced next to an artificial gold Christmas tree still standing halfway through January. He must have seen me staring at it glinting off his windows, which overlooked the four lanes of a major east-west thoroughfare. “I love that it blinds whoever drives past with its gayness,” he said, pointing out the window with his middle finger. “‘Make the Yuletide gay,’ indeed.” He’d smiled, and I grinned back, charmed that his act of putting up a campy Christmas tree felt like the same impulse I had to wear pink shorts.

Now my phone vibrated with a text message from Sunil, jolting me back into the hotel lobby: Already inside! I gathered myself off the velvet couch and tried to adjust my collar in the reflection of the sliding doors. I felt the dull flutter of nerves. We were meeting for the first time since the night of the concert, and I was relieved it was in a place where darkness and noise might cloak my impulse to be so near to him.

I thought about the delicate triangulation of performer, audience, and content, what wasn’t just witnessed but also accepted—celebrated, even.

I flashed my identification to a bouncer and walked up the marble stairs to the bar entrance. The instrumentation shifted as soon as I opened the door. What sounded in the cavernous lobby like it might be a haunting grand piano sounded in the bar like a keyboard inside an empty tin can; the strings that seemed so rich and full were just a shaky, trebly synthesizer. It wasn’t even a Celine Dion song, I realized—or any other song I recognized, for that matter. The cheap speakers were blasting a karaoke instrumentation of some sweeping Tagalog ballad. The only thing that sounded grand were the vocals. Whoever was singing was hitting each of the low, smoky notes with the panache of Toni Braxton. The singer’s vowels were deep and clear with no hint of strain. I scanned the dark room for the singer but couldn’t find her anywhere.

The bar was packed with revelers humming along and swigging Singaporean beer. I spotted Sunil waving at me, leaning on a tiny high-top at the front of the bar. The table sat directly in front of a small stage, but I noticed that the singer wasn’t there either. I offered him a shy smile as I walked over, not sure how to greet him in a public setting. I stuck out my right hand, grimacing internally at the absurdity of a handshake. He pointed to a woman sitting at the far corner of the bar, alone in the near dark. I had walked right past her. I couldn’t imagine such a powerful voice emanating from such a slight, unassuming frame. And with such a powerful instrument, I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t on stage.

I settled into the chair next to Sunil, careful to sit far enough away so as not to arouse suspicion or be tempted to touch him. Like the concert, the music was deafening, and he leaned in to greet me. I felt his lips against my earlobe.

“What do you think of your first Filipino karaoke bar?” he asked.

I had felt embarrassed at my ignorance when he’d invited me via text a few days earlier. He explained that there were several in Sydney—that they were everywhere, really—and wondered how I hadn’t been to one in New York. I hadn’t even known where to look, let alone whether I should have found them on my own or whether I wasn’t hanging out with the right people. I thought about all that time with James in my apartment.

“Well may this be the first of many,” he said, clinking his glass with mine.

When the woman finished singing, the bar erupted into raucous cheers. It looked like nearly fifty people had somehow jammed into the tiny room. Each seat at the two dozen tables was full, and two rows of patrons hugged the back wall, several of them clutching the rim of their glasses with their teeth so they could applaud.

Waitresses collected little scraps of paper with hastily written song titles from eager patrons. I scanned the crowd in anticipation of the next singer, but a stern bouncer clad in a black T-shirt took the microphone. Five Filipinos in matching blue outfits burst through the doors, snaking between tables to high-fives and wolf whistles. The bouncer set the microphone in a stand and carefully unhooked a velvet rope from its metal stanchion. The group sashayed on stage.

A man with a helmet of long shellacked hair and a baby-blue button-down opened to halfway down his chest grabbed the microphone. “Welcome back! We are the Diamonds!” he cried, nodding to the guitarist, who kicked off the unmistakable plucking at the top of “Rolling in the Deep.”

“Oh, yeah—there’s a cover band too,” Sunil grinned.

I expected one of the two women to take the microphone from the man, but he broke into the first verse, emulating the same smoky tone as Adele. His backup singers swayed in matching blue miniskirts as the guitarist and drummer offered periodic smirks to the audience. At the bridge, the singer walked to the very edge of the stage and winked into the crowd. I turned to see if he was looking at anyone in particular, but everyone was in shadow. Sunil grazed his leg along mine. I wondered, our table parked so close to the stage, how illuminated we were for the crowd behind us.

“Remember, you can request a song from us during any of our four sets,” the singer coaxed once the applause for his pitch-perfect rendition of Adele subsided.

He walked to the corner of the stage and reached like a magician into an empty champagne bucket, where waitresses were throwing in request slips.

“Ah, I see someone has requested the same song as last week.” He laughed, shielding his eyes and peering out into the crowd. A joyful shout of acknowledgement from a man in the far corner shot back at him. “Don’t think we forgot about you from last week. I just need to pull up the lyrics, but I think we can do it.”

The band huddled on stage while one of the backup singers pulled out a tablet. I looked at Sunil quizzically. “If you request a song the band doesn’t know, they’ll go learn it. You can literally pretty much request anything. Watch,” he said, pointing to the singer in the button-down. “He is going to pretend he needs the lyrics, but I bet they’ve all learned it already.”

The drummer broke into a familiar soft beat, followed by the guitarist strumming an irrepressible riff. The song didn’t click until a few bars later: they were playing “Jai Ho,” but singing the original Indian version. This Filipino man with the coiffure of Elvis and the timbre of Adele was singing a song with lyrics that cut frenetically between South Asian languages.

As Sunil suspected, he really didn’t need the lyrics. When he belted the fourth “Jai Ho!” at the climax of the chorus, I expected the bar to erupt, but he held them entranced until he broke into the second verse, effortlessly modulating between intricate Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi lyrics.

The band whisked through seven more songs—including a barnstorming rendition of “Hotel California,” where the guitarist played his solo with his teeth—before they announced the end of their first act and exited the stage, promising to learn a new Nicki Minaj song. It was only when Sunil abruptly stood to grab a giant black blinder off the next table that I realized we had our arms around each other’s shoulders.

“All right, what are we going to sing?” he asked with a gleam in his eye, eagerly pawing through sticky pages of songs listed in Tagalog, Korean, Arabic, and English. “What about some Scissor Sisters?” he smiled.

I told him if the band needed time to prepare a new song, I’d probably need a week or so to belt some “Comfortably Numb.”

Sunil raised his eyebrow and winked playfully. “So, you want to do this again, then? What about that boyfriend of yours?”

Somewhere between dancing to Scissor Sisters songs at his apartment, I told him about how James wanted to return to New York and I, well, wasn’t sure. Our two-year contracts were drawing to their conclusion, and James was increasingly badgering me about returning along with him. I thought about that first night in Abu Dhabi, defacing my sofa with highlighter hours after arriving, and how I would have to account for it to somebody. But I hadn’t been found out, and neither had my queerness.

I looked around the bar. I felt here with Sunil what I did on the Corniche and also at the ice rink: a way through, a mode of operating that felt familiar. And viable. And thrilling.

I scribbled two Scissor Sisters songs from the book on a scrap of paper. Sunil grabbed them off the table to hand to a passing waitress, but I snatched them back and told him I’d only do it if he made a deal.

“If you keep coming back with me for a month, we can do it,” I told him, trying to make clear how much I wanted to keep spending time with him.

“Deal. There have probably been enough songs already to last the whole night, to be honest,” he laughed.

He was right; I couldn’t believe how many people wanted to sing. The buckets for song requests were nearly overflowing with little slips of paper, like a soup made of confetti. A grinning bald man at a crowded high-top a few tables away took the microphone from the bouncer.

Sunil leaned in. “Watch this. He sings the same song, like, every week.”

The man pushed aside a few glasses and a half-empty bottle of whiskey. As he carefully rearranged his chair to be more visible to the audience, I realized he was wearing a kandura.

“This song, I love it too much,” he said in broken English, chuckling. “Sorry for my Tagalog.” The crowd started cheering before the song even began.

“Apparently he learned the words just by coming here and watching other people sing it,” Sunil said. “Everyone goes nuts every time he does it.”

When Sunil invited me to a Filipino karaoke bar, I expected the audience to reflect that national qualifier. I knew Filipino migrants made up a large section of the population in the UAE, especially in the health care and hospitality sectors. But I was surprised how much of the audience was from elsewhere. Several of the tables were filled with men wearing non-Western clothing. A sign hung outside the bar—outside many of the bars in the city— officially outlawing “national dress” as a way of enforcing the law that prevented Muslims from consuming alcohol. Enforcement of this “national dress” law also served as a way of preventing men who wore shalwar kameez, the national dress of many working-class migrants from South Asia, from entering establishments serving alcohol. But here, both types of dress were present: tables of Muslim Arabs sat beside working-class South Asians, all cheering on a song with lyrics they most likely could not understand.

The lights dimmed. I could just make out the band weaving through tables in new matching pink outfits. The singer wore a pink button-down barely buttoned at all. White sneakers poked out from beneath pink crushed velvet bell bottoms as he climbed once more onto the stage and the lights rose. They had done a costume change. It was the kind of showmanship I had expected from Jake Shears.

“Thank you for coming! We are the Diamonds!” he repeated for the new arrivals. More people had somehow packed into the bar. “You might know this one,” the singer cooed, giggling as he tucked his thick black hair behind his ears.

The guitarist sat at a keyboard and banged out the familiar intro to Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross’s duet, “Endless Love.” The singer stood astride his mic stand with his face in dramatic profile, his left cheek gleaming in the spotlight as he nailed the first few lines of Lionel’s mournful tenor. I waited for one of the backup singers to chime in a few bars later with the Diana Ross section of the verse, but the singer abruptly turned 180 degrees to reveal the right side of his face in full makeup. “My first love / You’re every breath that I take,” he sang, his lips accentuated with a slather of thick red lipstick. He flipped back and forth, a one-man comedy act, delivering both Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross’s parts. Each time he flipped to his Diana Ross side, he fluttered his one visible set of fake eyelashes and smoothed down his bell bottoms as though he were wearing a dress.

The crowd hollered. He hit his final “My endless loooove” and turned to face the audience head on, finally revealing both sides of his face, one unadorned and one made up, as he blew a sensual kiss. He winked, and the audience rose to their feet. It felt more electric than standing at the front of the Scissor Sisters’ crowd.

The singer held his face in profile for the rest of the set, hiding the made-up side of his face, but I knew it was there. I had seen it—the lipstick, the gestures. He had flaunted this queerness. I thought again of all the newspaper articles I had read about legal reprisals for transgressions like this and wondered how much this artist was risking. Why was he doing it? Maybe if I could ask him directly, I could find the answer for myself.

I turned to Sunil and told him I was going to approach the singer when the band broke for their next set.

“Don’t you see the stanchions?” Sunil asked. “That’s to keep us separate. We aren’t allowed on stage, and they aren’t allowed to talk to us.”

“What do you mean they aren’t allowed to talk to us?”

“We officially can’t interact,” he explained simply, like I was a child and this was the most normal rule in the world. “There’s a law separating performers from audience members.” He pulled an article up on his phone to show me: a Dubai government regulatory commission enforced a rule that “prohibits artists from mingling with the audience.” Although the official cited in the article declined to state the motivation for the rule, it seemed to nod to the destabilizing potentiality inherent in performance: that those on stage wielded a particular power over their audience—of suggestion, provocation, or outright defiance of norms. Although a performer was not necessarily a political revolutionary, in a country where unauthorized demonstrations or public gatherings were prohibited, they perhaps came close.

The word “officially” that Sunil had used seemed slippery because the article stipulated that the law only applied to the emirate of Dubai, not the entire country. As the proprietor of an Abu Dhabi-based establishment, it was as though the manager of the bar enforcing the “rule” was self-censoring before any trouble could arise. Perhaps they recognized that this performance was already boundary-pushing—from the makeup to the fake dress, the singer had already broken laws, and been cheered for it. I thought about the delicate triangulation of performer, audience, and content, what wasn’t just witnessed but also accepted—celebrated, even. If the singer had done all that for a crowd, I hoped he could at least speak to me for a few minutes after his set.

I looked at my watch. If it were any other night, I would still be on the Corniche. This bar had the same feel to it: an electric fizz, a joy in hidden potentiality. Like the Corniche, I would need to wait, to be patient. I would find a time and a means to connect with the singer. I watched the band hurriedly exit the stage and push silently toward the door, weaving past tables, the singer’s lipstick still gleaming in the spotlights.

*

Wedged between two backup singers clad in matching snakeskin jumpsuits, I leaned back against an industrial dishwasher and cracked open my notebook, trying to project a confidence I didn’t feel. Stainless steel appliances cast reflections at new angles each time the overhead track lighting moved to a new setting. I couldn’t figure out why a sketchy bar where I’d only seen people down beer and whiskey to fortify themselves for karaoke needed a kitchen in the first place, but the lead singer had told me to meet the band there.

The guitarist and drummer, both in Metallica T-shirts, flanked the women. The lead singer—this man who was both Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross—sat across from me on the metal countertop, casually shifting his leg to rest atop a two-burner hot plate while I tried to conjure the right way to begin. I noticed his hands fidget as he waited. I wanted to cut him off before I even phrased my question, to tell him to be careful, not entirely unconvinced that he might accidentally turn a dial on the stovetop without noticing.

I was grateful that they even wanted to talk. A few nights after Sunil explained the real and perceived reach of the stage performance regulations, I decided to linger near the bathrooms between sets in the hope that one of the band members might walk past. I figured I had plenty of experience loitering outside men’s rooms trying to look inconspicuous. When I saw the singer walking through the empty hallway a few minutes later, I reached out a wild hand and told him that I was a journalist and wanted to speak to him. He smiled but barely stopped walking.

“Come tomorrow two hours before the show. The bar will be empty except for the band,” he said, winking as he breezed past just like he had after “Endless Love.” He told me his name was Reggie.

I had forgotten to introduce myself and felt self-conscious that I led with the title of journalist, which still only felt aspiration. Though I was beginning to ask questions and think about publication, the designation wasn’t yet quite right. I was curious about the band in the way any good journalist should be about a story, but I wasn’t quite sure how to prepare for the task of actually speaking with them. I spent the night before the meeting fretting about how to outwardly perform the role of journalist. Bringing a recording device seemed too impractical for a place as loud as a bar, not to mention too off-putting for a first meeting. Instead, I packed a shoddy pen from a Midwestern motel, an old notebook half-filled with college Arabic homework, and a list of hastily jotted questions. I felt like I was preparing for cosplay.

I didn’t know which of the questions to ask first: the one about the genesis of the band, the songs they pushed themselves to learn, the kinds of patrons who returned to the bar night after night. It reminded me of the laundry list of questions I’d had for people like Shivani: unsure of the right place to begin, my points of reference and framing scrambled by who sat in front of me. And though I wanted to hear about the band’s background and their journeys to the UAE, I knew it was Reggie’s overt flamboyance on stage that drew me to seek him out. It was this—how he navigated his queerness—that I most wanted to understand.

Like forgoing a recording device, I knew I also needed to start my inquiry somewhere benign. I stammered out a few basic questions, and the guitarist, Manuel, explained that all of them were from Manila and had been in Abu Dhabi for three years.

He spun a cutting board on its corner as he detailed their schedule: arriving two hours before they took the stage; performing a four-part, five-hour set six days a week; using breaks to learn new melodies, harmonies, and dance moves. As the drummer scrolled through a playlist on his phone, showing me the twenty songs they aimed to learn over the next couple of days—“I’m embarrassed we don’t play ‘Call Me Maybe’ yet,” he said—I heard a scraping sound and ducked my head around a cabinet. A man was placing stanchions next to the stage.

“He’s the manager of the bar,” one of the backup singers said in a hushed tone. “We can talk, but we should go a little more into the kitchen.” The drummer explained that plainclothes officers had been known to come into bars and fine both the management and the performers for speaking to anyone during performances in Dubai, so the manager was especially cagey about the band talking to anyone offstage, even though they were working in another emirate.

As the rest of us pushed farther into the tiny kitchen, I noticed Reggie unmoved atop the hot plate. “What do you really want to know?” he asked, smiling, almost gossipy. It felt too early to ask the loaded questions, but his grin felt like a provocation.

I hedged, asking him when he realized he wanted to be an entertainer.

“I’ve always known,” he said simply, flipping his hair. All different types of music—from the Righteous Brothers to 1970s Filipino-American band the Rocky Fellers—had been in his house growing up, he explained. But it was after puberty—he raised his eyes at me as he said this—that he realized he had an unusually high range. “I was different, and this helped me.”

Perhaps that was the power of a good performance in any realm of one’s life: concessions that led to acceptance, all while holding fast to one’s true identity.

“But why here?” I asked, almost frustrated. I realized I was getting ahead of myself, but I couldn’t understand it. I imagined there must be hundreds of better cities, if not a hundred better countries, to make a living as a performer.

“It’s not so different here than any other place, really,” he said. “I learn songs, people applaud, I make them happy. It is my job. No, it is my life.”

“But it is different here,” I insisted. I realized that I had pounded my fist on the counter, making the cutting board clatter. I knew that I didn’t sound objective, that I had a bias, and that perhaps a real journalist could have been more able to nimbly phrase a less leading, more neutral question.

His eyes lit up, and I saw the other three look to him. “Ahh, you are asking about that,” he said. “Tell me, this thing we both are—” I watched him look directly at me, into me, and recognize my queerness. “—you’ve always known this about yourself, right?”

I thought about my very first interaction with Imran on the ice, how he saw it within me, too. This time, though, I didn’t freeze.

“Yes,” I said. It was true; I could scarcely recall a single childhood memory that wasn’t colored by my awareness that I was always, on the most atomic level, fundamentally different than everyone else.

“Well, same for me,” he said, shrugging. “And I had the same feeling about leaving the Philippines to sing. I knew I needed to leave.”

Filipino cover bands were an industry, Reggie explained. As soon as they were old enough to understand that they had musical aptitude, each of the band members began searching for an agency. But they were not looking to sign a recording contract or form relationships with producers. The agency they sought was more common; it was one that recruited solo musicians, formed bands, and relocated them abroad for what amounted to multi-year musical residencies. Growing up, they all knew about Filipino bands who played in Shanghai, Goa, Bahrain, Hong Kong. This was their image of success: a musician not popular in the Philippines but created specifically to entertain abroad.

Competition, usually at multinational hotel chain bars, was fierce. Filipinos made up one of the largest diasporic populations in the world, and performing artists made up one of the largest percentages of these migrants, second only to domestic workers. Reggie explained that he stood in a line for three hours before he was seen at an open call. He anticipated more hurdles but found himself a week later with these four other performers in an office not much larger than this kitchen. A manager was forming them into a group. They would practice for a few weeks and then put together a video to send to entertainment managers abroad. To their surprise, less than a month later, they had an offer to sign a two-year contract in Abu Dhabi.

They had not been seduced by one ad campaign. It was a wider system that they wanted to opt into as the most viable career option. During their first day of rehearsals, they realized they had all come to the initial audition a different way: social media, message boards, a poster, the recommendation from a friend who was in another band.

“I applied to another agency, but the phone line was disconnected, so I just kept trying until I found one that would hear me,” Reggie laughed. “I could stay and try to be a singer for $5 a day, or I could be in a cover band and make $100.”

I realized I had been waiting for some kind of sob story— a sick relative, a father unable to work—that precipitated their movement. But being a successful singer for Reggie was not about hearing one’s own songs played on the radio; it was about having performance skills that enabled migration. And to make a living as a Filipino singer was to be away. This was not intermittent touring in support of music, it was a foreign residency to enable a feasible livelihood. They had no say where they were going to perform, Reggie explained. But it didn’t matter: nearly half of the Philippines’ 100 million citizens live on less than two dollars a day. Anywhere else was better.

I realized I’d had similar dreams of movement—I’d harbored a dim sense of New York as a kind of refuge, but I was driven by the more overwhelming awareness that I needed to leave where I was. The destination was shapeless. Only the departure was discernible: a specific need to be away.

“But what about the dangers facing people like us here?” As I asked the question, the manager shuffled nearer the kitchen, and the drummer signaled with a nod of his head that we would have to finish.

“It is dangerous everywhere. You can get killed for singing Frank Sinatra in the Philippines.” Reggie laughed. “Come to the show tonight. Maybe you will see how I can make it okay here.”

I bid them farewell and waited in the hotel lobby for their evening residency to begin, researching the killings that Reggie had mentioned almost as an aside. The “My Way” killings, as they were known, were a series of early-aughts murders in which a number of singers were killed, often on stage, while performing the famous Frank Sinatra song at karaoke bars across the Philippines. Several writers attempted to construct a pattern and narrative around the killings, blaming the incidents on the country’s culture of machismo or even Sinatra’s own brash lyrics, but I was most drawn to the accounts that pointed to the singers being murdered for not performing the song well enough. At one bar in 2007, a security guard complained to a “My Way” singer that he was off-key. When he refused to stop singing, the guard pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and shot him dead. I was transfixed by the idea that several people could harbor such protective, impassioned feelings, such ownership, over something—be it songs or sexuality—that another person’s rendering of it was cause for murder. How even just being confronted with it was too obscene and needed to be stopped at any cost.

Reggie began his first set later to a full house beneath a single spotlight. “I’m,” he breathed, as Manuel began a familiar riff. “Coming.” I knew what was coming, and yet I was still jolted by Reggie’s knowing smile. “Out.” Manuel continued the riff and Reggie repeated his declaration six more times before further proclaiming that he wanted the world to know and would have to let it show. As in “Endless Love,” he once again became Diana Ross not only in affectation—swishing his arms and shooting authoritative stares into the audience—but in the very timbre of his voice.

Perhaps this was the key: mimicry. Reggie had called it wido, a Tagalog cognate of the Spanish word for “to hear,” as in, “to play music by ear.” It was a title bestowed unto others in the Philippines, those with a particular aptitude. Oh, they have the wido. To excel as a Filipino cover musician was not just to sing the right notes but to fully inhabit a celebrated tune, from vocal inflections to mannerisms. It was a mimicry cultivated by history: already a music-loving culture proficient in Western church hymns after three centuries of Spanish colonialism, Filipino cover bands proliferated in the wake of WWII, filling a space to entertain troops around the world by perfecting American rock ‘n’ roll.

I watched Reggie finish his final note to thunderous applause. He had told me in the kitchen that he didn’t have any interest in making his own music. This was the industry; this was the dream. To make a living adapting to the likeness of another.

“There is an international understanding of what the Filipino mimicry brand is: exactitude in copying, technically and aesthetically precise repetition, and giving people what they want and what they expect, every time,” Abigail De Kosnik, Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, would later write in her research on the proliferation and global popularity of Filipino cover bands.

Was this adaptation the same as assimilation? Was perfectly mimicking someone else a means—or a shortcut—to acceptance? I wondered how it related to more than just music when the Emirati man sitting at the next table leaned over to me after a few songs. I had seen him at the same table for weeks, and we had exchanged pleasantries, especially after he realized I had studied Arabic. As he motioned for me to lean in so he could say something, I noticed his arm around his Filipina girlfriend.

“He is…” He waited for a second as though unsure which word to use. “Mithli, no?” He used the Arabic slang for a gay man. I looked up, and he was smiling, clapping. He switched to Arabic. “His show is so good.” He said more, mere inches from my ear, but I couldn’t make out his words amid the cheers.

I realized that this man may not have recognized the performance for what it was—charged with the politics of a gay anthem explicitly declaring one’s intention to live an openly queer life—but he did notice a flicker of something and was, at least, charmed. This was intentional. Reggie’s queerness was obvious; he was knowingly and outwardly performing it. He wasn’t just mimicking. He was infusing his performances with a just-there subtext, the very act that the law preventing singers and audiences from communicating was trying to avoid. Perhaps that was the power of a good performance in any realm of one’s life: concessions that led to acceptance, all while holding fast to one’s true identity. I thought again about Jake Shears on stage, still unsure if the Scissor Sisters had, in fact, done enough. At what decibel did subversion become audible to all?

Later, I waited for the band on the curb outside the hotel entrance like a groupie. I reasoned that even if we couldn’t interact inside, we couldn’t be barred from incidental conversation outside the bar. I was surprised to see Reggie push through the rotating doors alone.

“Sometimes, I need to be by myself after I perform,” he said. He looked tired but exhilarated, his eyes both a bit glassy and wild, the way I always felt after leaving a good concert. “Now you see? I am Whitney, I am Diana Ross, I can be anyone—a joke, a diva.” He flipped his hair. “And maybe sometimes myself.”

I told him I felt a little like a performer, too. I leveled with him: as much as I wanted to write his story, I wasn’t actually a working journalist, though I hoped to be one soon.

“Well, I think you will make a good one. You ask good questions,” he said, tapping at his temple. I walked side by side with him, hoping this was true. To fill the silence, I asked him what he thought made a good performer.

“The truth is, I think the best ones of us are gay,” he giggled. “We are kind of like chameleons.”

I walked with him a few blocks and noticed he was heading north. I asked him if he ever goes to the Corniche at night.

“In the past.” He smiled. “But I am with Manuel now.”

I said goodbye and started walking home, replaying the band’s onstage antics. I had registered the queerness of Reggie’s performances, and yet he hadn’t displayed even a glint of flirtation with Manuel under the spotlights. He had shown what he wanted to and nothing more. Humming Whitney Houston, I walked back to my apartment under streetlamps that felt like stage lighting: first in shadow, then under the spotlight, over and over again until I reached home.

*

“Well, this is it,” I said, pulling the two crumpled slips of paper with Scissor Sisters songs on them from my pocket. “I can put these requests in if you want. Or,” I grabbed a pen and a new sheet of paper at our familiar table, “you can trust me, and I’ll try not to get us booed off stage.”

Sunil looked at me and smirked. “I trust you,” he said. “But will I know the song?”

I handed my request slip to a passing waitress. “Everyone knows it,” I said. She snuck a peek at my song and giggled.

The bar was packed but not heaving. We had arrived early so we would be assured a chance to sing. After just a few songs, a waitress in a sparkling black dress approached our table with two microphones and told us we were next.

Maybe performing this kind of queerness in front of this diverse audience was enough of a political act.

Though we had been coming for weeks, this would be our first introduction to this community as singers. I had started to recognize familiar faces and wanted to become one as well. I thought of the Arab man singing the Tagalog song, how he moved his chair, cheating out toward the audience. As we took the microphones, I told Sunil to grab his barstool and follow my lead. We walked a few feet to the very edge of the stanchions, taking up most of the narrow passageway between the stage and the first row of tables.

The bouncer wagged his finger and pointed to the stanchions, but I held my ground, placing our chairs three feet apart and turning them to face the audience. “Just watch, we won’t go on stage,” I told the bouncer. He reluctantly took one step aside. We were mere inches from the edge of the stage, and just eight inches lower than the platform. It was just enough room for us to maneuver.

“We’re going to need to perform the shit out of this,” I whispered to Sunil.

The guitar riff for the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” started. I dared to look at Sunil. He was grinning at me. I took the first verse, holding out my hand at Sunil in performative longing. He turned his chair to face me at the first chorus, allowing himself to be publicly cast as the object of my affection in this performance. His perfect harmonies caught me off guard. I didn’t know he could actually sing.

We improvised hand choreography and reveled in the melodrama of the song by projecting furrowed brows and parted lips. I reached out to Sunil again with an overly dramatic hand gesture, and he replied with a soapy look of yearning as he gazed into eyes and pretending to caress my cheek from a distance. Schmaltzy pop lyrics and campy choreography—they were the only way we could express our affection for each other publicly. It felt both insufficient and totally right.

The cheers were raucous. The crowd rose, offering us the same ovation as “Endless Love” had received. Even the bouncer was clapping. I pushed our chairs back, and Sunil raised his eyebrows in an expression that looked something like relief. I wanted to hug him but offered a wink instead. It was enough.

A string of people approached our table as we sat down, offering high fives and handshakes and a couple of rounds of beer. Sunil ran his foot up my leg throughout the receiving line. I saw the Arab man next to us look at our nearly intertwined legs, and he leaned over. “You guys were so funny,” he said, smiling.

His Filipino girlfriend winked. “Very cute.”

I could tell they both knew about us. We had both skirted the law that kept amateur singers off the stage and captured their attention with a visual performance. Even more, we had performed a kind of public queerness. Sure, we had couched it in ambiguity—were we making light of the idea that two men could sing this song to each other or was our presentation authentic?—but we had also devised a performance that allowed us to outwardly express raw, forbidden emotion while keeping ourselves safe. We had both worked within the limits and pushed against them.

This was the balance of assimilation and subversion I saw in Reggie. It was a calculation: a careful algorithm of pushing and relenting, honed and fine-tuned over years of performance that both acknowledged the reality of and flew in the face of respectability politics. Some might immediately recognize it, but everyone would at least be witness to it. Maybe performing this kind of queerness in front of this diverse audience was enough of a political act.

I got a ping on my phone. It was a message from Reggie; he was in the next room rehearsing a new Rihanna song. “I could not see you,” he said. “But you sounded very good. And who was that other boy?” Maybe just being in proximity was enough, too.

I looked at my watch. I didn’t want to leave, but I knew James was waiting; he had his repatriation flight scheduled for the next day. He had tried for weeks to get me to agree to a long-distance relationship. I couldn’t imagine what it would look like. It felt like a poor imitation, a bad mimic of some straight ideal. I felt so much more potentiality for a different kind of queerness here.

Sunil grabbed the binder and asked if I wanted to put in another song. We flipped through the sticky pages, and I let my hand linger on his. It wasn’t for long, but it felt like just long enough. I noticed a few conspicuous absences I wished were in the book, but there were surely enough songs to keep coming back week after week and do something new, I reckoned.

I sent James a message. I told him I’d see him in the morning before his taxi. I felt like I had just arrived for my own kind of residency, and I wasn’t going to waste it.

__________________________________

From Guest Privileges: Queer Lives and Finding Home in the Middle East by Gaar Adams. Copyright © 2025. Available from Dzanc Books.