DSE: For gay Egyptians, life online is the only choice

For gay Egyptians, life online is the only choice

By Liam Stack

First Published 5/18/2007

Growing up in a small delta city, Gamal Alaa always knew that he wasn’t like his school mates. He and his friends were all from good, educated middle class families, but at the end of the day there was something that did not add up. He excelled at school, and got top honors at the prestigious Faculty of Engineering at a nearby university. But he still felt out of place.

“I knew that I was different, even when I was a little kid,” he says. “Even before I knew about sex or any of those adult terms, a long time before that I knew any of that, I knew I was different in a way. But I didn’t know what to call it.”

In his first year of university, Gamal began using the internet and making friends in chat rooms. Online, he discovered a whole new world. Women and men chatted and flirted through coy profiles and messenger services in a way that would be impossible in public.

Even more taboo, there were chat rooms just for gay Egyptians to meet, make friends, and flirt. It was in this parallel e-world that Gamal found a name for his feelings. Gamal, he realized, was gay.

“I could go online and read about people’s lives, and see that they had lives and relationships and they dated,” he says. “That was when I knew what to call it, that it existed in the world and it wasn’t just me. I wasn’t the only one.”

Adam Aboul Naga, a twenty-something media professional also raised in the delta, felt the same way the first time he found a gay Egyptian website during his university days.

“I went to this site www.gayegypt.com because I heard people at school talking about it, making fun of it and saying how bad it was that it was there,” he says. “I didn’t have any gay friends, or know anyone who was gay. Before I went on that site, I had no idea about being gay in Egypt.”

In the last decade, the Internet has opened up whole new worlds of information for those tech-savvy enough to turn on a PC and give their mouse a few clicks.
While market research indicates that internet penetration in Egypt is a low 8%, these forces of free-flowing information are nonetheless showing the wired, largely urbanized few a whole new set of sexual possibilities and lifestyle options that were unheard of a generation ago.

After reading the message boards at gayegypt.com for several weeks, Adam moved on to gay dating websites based in foreign countries, like www.gaydar.co.uk . On these sites, members can create profile pages, send messages, make friends and arrange dates.

“I’ve met a lot of guys over the internet. With very few exceptions, everybody I met was online, through Gaydar,” he says. “I have met maybe 50 people over the internet. Some of them turned into friends – 2 of my best friends I met through Gaydar. One of them actually was my school friend at university. We didn’t know that each other were gay, we just knew each other from school.”

Gamal, who is almost 30, also opened an account on a dating website. Soon he was browsing profiles, making new friends through chat services and trying to decide which men were safe to meet.

Both men say they have a number of guidelines they follow before they decide to meet one of their online buddies. They have to have things in common and get along well in their chats; they must both be interested in being friends and not in just meeting for a quickie; and they must agree to meet in a public place for coffee or lunch, just like two friends.

If someone meets those criteria, and they have fun in their real-life meeting, then they might become friends or even start dating. But more often than not, both men say, such meetings lead to neither long-term friendship or serious dating.

Sometimes they end up as one night stands, says Adam, especially if one or both men are feeling depressed about other things happening in their lives.

“A few months ago I was really feeling down one day and I was online and I saw this Dutch guy,” he says. “He was kind of old, in his 40s, and was staying here in a hotel. I asked him when he was leaving and he said that night. So I went to his hotel and we had sex like one hour before his flight.”

Afterwards, Adam says, the tryst made him feel bad, and he realized that it was just a way of coping with his unhappiness.

“After we had sex, I felt cheap. I felt like an unpaid prostitute,” he adds. “I don’t even know his name. Maybe he said it, but I don’t remember his name now. I think I only did it because I was feeling down.”

Other times, the meetings get off on the right foot but end very badly. Both men say that stories of homophobic violence and petty mugging are common. Gamal has experienced it first hand.

“Back in a time when I was less careful, years ago, I met someone after chatting just one time,” says Gamal. “He seemed to be a good guy - cultured, educated, a university graduate, he had a job, he was good looking. It should have worked fine.”

“I met him, and he robbed me, even though I met him in a public place – we met in a shopping mall in Nasser City, in one of the coffee shops on the first floor. It scared the hell out of me – I never expected it to happen.”

Working with a partner who made a distraction inside the shop, Gamal’s date took off with his expensive new mobile. When Gamal called the man to confront him and ask why he had stolen the phone, the man threatened to tell everyone on his SIM card that he was gay.

“You’re a fag,” he said, “and you deserve what happens to you.”

Still, Gamal says he was lucky that nothing worse happened.

“I have heard of worse stories, horrible stories of people being mugged and robbed, or tranquilized, drugged and thrown out of cars while driving on the highway,” he says. “There are horrible risks you take with gay chatting and dating here.”

Years of online dating have taught both men a lot about gay life in Egypt, and the perils and possible happiness of a life lived with a little help from the internet world.

Adam met his current boyfriend, Sherif, over the internet. The two are in a happy, committed relationship and so are predictably not as pessimistic as some about the possibility of gay romance in Cairo. But Adam says that he is acutely aware of the challenges, both personal and professional, of living a gay life in Egypt.

“I am involved in a lot of different things,” he says. “In university I was involved in a lot of student activities. I was a leader of a big organization at my university, so State Security knew who I was. Now I am a journalist, so State Security knows who I am. I think the government has it on my file that I am gay, and my biggest fear is that someday they will black-mail me.”

“Its hard to think about the future because right now its easy for Sherif and I, we’re young,” he says. “But people talk to me about marriage a lot. And what about ten years from now - two 35 year olds living together? And they’re not dating? What’s the story with that?”

Gamal, who is currently single, says that his years of online dating have made him pessimistic about gay life in Egypt.

There is too much hostility to homosexuality, he says, too little respect for people’s private lives, and too much pressure to follow the acceptable path of sexual chastity until heterosexual marriage. Egyptian society does not leave any space for people like he and Adam to live their own lives, he says.

“Since I started dating through the internet, I’ve had 3 serious relationships,” says Gamal. “Two were with Egyptians and one was with an American. But they were all failures, of course. None of them worked. I don’t think it is possible for two guys in Egypt to stay together for the long term. Everything is against it here – it’s taboo, it’s illegal, it’s forbidden.”

“You have to be discrete, and discretion is one major element that makes everything fall apart, that makes it break up,” he adds, his voice more resigned than sad. “If you’re going to share a life together people have to know about it. But you can’t do that here, so everything always falls apart.”

DSE: Mansoura workers attack factory sale, sit-in reaches day 20

Mansoura workers attack factory sale, sit-in reaches day 20

By Liam Stack

First Published 5/10/2007

MANSOURA: Since April 21, the Mansoura Spanish Garment Factory in the Nile delta has been occupied by almost 300 mainly female workers, who are staging a sit-in on the plant’s shop floor after a dispute with management over missed pay and the controversial sale of the company.

Workers say they are too poorly paid to meet many of their basic needs, a problem made worse by the failure of the company to pay them their last 17 bonuses since 1999. Additionally, they are concerned that the factory may close after a recent announcement that it was sold through a process they condemn as lacking transparency.

The protestors, many of whom recently spoke with foreign visitors while wearing dark niqabs, say they remain committed to the factory occupation despite a deal offered by Aisha Abdel Hady, the Minister of Manpower and Labor, on Tuesday May 8. According to sources on the factory union committee, which negotiated the offer, Abdel Hady agreed to pay the workers one month salary out of the Ministry budget in exchange for an immediate end to the protest.

The local union committee, which is supposed to represent the employees of Mansoura Spanish, accepted the deal without consulting them. Upon learning the details of the offer, workers rejected it.

Initial media reports claimed that 70 percent of the protestors had accepted the offer and ended the sit-in, but those reports were not consistent with the scene on the shop floor.

“The union is not there for us,” said Gamal Ramadan, a middle aged production worker who has been employed by Mansoura Spanish for 19 years. “The union is not effective. Ideally it should work for both the employer and the workers, but in reality it doesn’t take our side in anything. We don’t know anyone on the local committee who is on our side, they all side with the management.”

“The vice president of the local factory committee was just here a few minutes ago to negotiate with us, to convince us to accept the deal,” Ramadan added. “But he left the moment he heard there were journalists around. The local union doesn’t want any confrontation.”

For years, workers complain that wages in Egypt’s textile sector have been stagnant. At the Mansoura plant, many of the protesting workers said that they were not even paid enough to meet their basic needs and provide for their families.

“I just got married and my father still pays everything for me,” said Mohamed Sayyed Mahmoud, 24, who works at the plant with his younger brother Ahmed. “Electricity, water, food — he pays for everything. I only make LE 150 a month and I just don’t have the money to support myself. Without my father’s support I wouldn’t be able to survive.”

Mansoura Spanish was founded in 1985 by a consortium of Spanish investors, who sold it shortly thereafter to the Cairo-based United Exchange Bank. According to Mohsen El Shaer, a member of the local factory union committee, on April 19 workers were told by the company CEO, Magdy El Magharby, that the bank was selling the firm. El Magharby would not tell the workers who the new management would be and could give them no indication of their future job security.

After learning about the sale, workers began to fear the worst. In the months leading up to the announcement, rumors swirled around the shop floor that the plant would be closed. Over the last year the company has been racked with massive lay-offs, and the work force has shrunk from almost 1,200 to just 284.

Now, mostly disused sewing machines line the inside of the plant in long rows. Only a few women continue their work on the ever-dwindling number of orders, sewing brightly colored t-shirts for sale in the local market. They say that in the last several months leading up to the sale, the management stopped taking new commissions. Of the 11 production lines that were once active, only two are now in use.

All of these signs, they fear, point to the company’s shut down.

“We want the money we are owed, we want to keep the factory open so we can keep making a living,” said one woman, who asked not to be named. “We want to know the truth about what is going on with the sale. We are not asking for much, but we want our rights.”

“We don’t want the factory to close,” said another woman. “There are a lot of people here who depend on it. It’s their work, it’s how they live. We just want to be well-paid and have a good job, that’s the most important thing.”

“The management won’t tell us anything about the sale,” she added. “They come in here and look around and take pictures of the inside, but then they don’t tell us what is going on.”

The workers have occupied the factory floor for the last 20 days, and on average 200 people sleep there each night on sheets of cardboard arranged on the floor in-between the sewing machines. Many women have brought their children, some as young as four months old, inside the plant to spend the night with them. They say they will not go home until the factory management meets their demands.

“I only make LE 136 a month. That’s been my salary for six years and I have never gotten a raise,” said one woman, handing her pay stub to a foreign visitor.

“I have two children, and now the exam weeks are coming up in school and there are all these problems with the factory too. If the factory closes, how am I supposed to support my family? How are we supposed to live?”